Users make connections.

They seek out the prompts which set them

thinking and

connecting and

coming up with new ways

of putting the information together - of making it meaningful.

Online likes a lot of graphic or white space

By the way - disruption of the text doesn't mean - cluttered!

So

when you 'write' for the screen

you need to break up the text into bits or bytes.

It is a starting point for the way you need to think about

delivering things online.

"It's got a lot in common with poetry really"

Users also have to have something to DO.

Which is why I am focusing on this;

you should be testing the 'theory' in practice.

(Is this how I read - is this how I use? Do I make use of the bytes to think and connect to other things - what would happen if read a book like this?)

There would not be much point in me preparing all this, if I knew from the outset, that it is not going to be read. I wouldn't put the words of a novel on a cinema screen, and expect people to watch it as a film. It would be a complete waste of resources. And everyone making the shift to online communication - which is fundamental to school management in the 21st century - should be seriously studying this revolution in communication.

If I had more time and more resources, I would make this more of a multimedia presentation; more graphics, more movement, more sound. And then, of course, I would have to take into account the type of delivery at the other end - the computer capacity of the user.

These are basic management considerations if the school of the 21st century is to ensure comparable outcomes for students.

1. New Technologies

None of this discussion about the knowledge revolution would be taking place if it weren't for the new technologies. The education system in which most teachers have been reared had its origins in print culture, and the demands of the industrial revolution. And it was an adequate system in that context. But now that we have computers and the dotcom society, the old education system is 'out of synch'. It is not preparing students for life and work - and ongoing learning - in the 21st century.



Not Just Computers in Classrooms

You can't put computers in classrooms and go on doing what you have been doing - even though some teachers are trying to do this. They are even using the Internet for 'look up' purposes. But if all you want to do is to look something up - you may as well use an encyclopedia - for you are not making full use of the new medium.

For school management there is the daunting task of developing an equitable computer policy, of transforming the learning culture, and of obtaining the skilled people who can operate in this dotcom context.

Changes in the Relationship Between Teacher and Student

One of the first things that computers (and Internet connections) do is to alter the relationship between teacher and student. Students are no longer dependent on teachers for their information. The world's resources are at their fingertips (and they are generally better at getting to them, than are their teachers).

Many of these resources are mind-bogglingly superior to anything that the teacher can produce. (This will be even more obvious as major communication companies, like Disney for example, start to produce professional materials - Learning Online Option Packages [LOOPS] which are the online equivalent to the old text book.)

Teachers will find themselves less as the font of information - the teacher of a subject - and will spend more time supporting student learning; they will be helping students to find information, to evaluate it and synthesise it; they will be helping them to solve problems, and to generate new information.

The changes in the education industry can be likened to the restructuring and changes in the banking industry. The shift has been from looking after people's money - to developing financial products and services. School managers will want to do a better job than some bank mangers in managing this transition.

Changes in Relationship Between School and Community

There will also be significant shifts in the relationship between the school and the community. The Internet and online delivery is taking the learning process outside the school; when schooling can be delivered online from anywhere in the world, why would you need a classroom? Why not be located in a shopping centre, an Internet café, or at a workplace - why not put the school into the community?

The role of the school in the community is being re-evaluated at this moment; there are many who are saying that the school doesn't even need to be a building. This is almost a nightmare for school managers.

The Nature of 'Classroom'

Since the end of the 19th century we have regimented students into classes. One teacher to a class - or a lecture theatre. And the classes have been organised hierarchically - so that Year 11 students are supposed to know more than Year 7. But we have long been aware of the limitations of such a system. And dividing students up by their date of birth could even be a less accurate predictor of their learning pace - than dividing them up on the basis of height.

People do not learn in the same way or at the same rate and the 'one-size-fits-all' delivery model of the old classroom may have produced its successes, but there have also been huge numbers of educational failures.

This is why online changes the unit of organisation and management from the class - to the individual. Information can be customised, tailored to the abilities and needs of each student. And, as every online tutor knows, this can lead to some amazing results. The curriculum designed for a Grade 11 student can be done readily and brilliantly by a Grade 6 girl - whose grandmother also does well in the course.

The management implications are overwhelming. This is an entirely new e-business.

The Nature of Knowledge

Before the industrial revolution, people learnt on the job from a very early age; everyone worked to bring in the harvest and even young children helped spin the cloth. But once we set up factories we decided that children should not work in them- or go down the mines - so we created a separate space for learning and established the public school system.

Such separation between learning and earning doesn't work as well in a knowledge society, where work is changing so quickly, that 'just in time' ongoing learning is necessary to keep up. Learning is returning to the workplace. Which is why more and more schools are developing work experience programs and giving their students more and more real tasks - with real problems to solve.

Learning is moving from learning what to learning know-how. This is a major challenge for school management.

The Nature of Work

Jobs as we know them didn't exist before the industrial revolution - and they won't exist afterwards. (This doesn't mean that there won't be any work - quite the contrary: we had plenty of work before we had machines and there's plenty of work to do in a knowledge society. But it's not organised along factory lines, around jobs.)

A growing number of people are now generating their own work; think of all those consultants! They understand that it is less about fitting into an existing job - and more about developing your own skills to sell to a client.

How can school management even begin to transform school to meet these demands of the dotcom society?

The Nature of Learning

With all these changes in the communication system, information delivery, and the structure of work, we have to revise drastically our ideas and understandings about learning.

In the old print system we resourced teachers, giving them knowledge (their subjects, their training) that they then passed on to the student. It was a knowledge transfer system, whereby the information in the teacher's head had to be transferred to the students' - and then the students were tested to see how much of it got there.

Online is very different. It's interactive, more like a conversation where the student is an equal partner in the process - where knowledge is generated. The emphasis now moves from the teacher to the student - the learner, the customer!

Online, if the customer doesn't like the product or the service that the teacher/school provides, they can press a key and go to another 'learning supermarket' with greater choice and better quality items.

These changes are crucial to school management. Who are your students? What courses, packages, products, services do they want from you - and what from other places? Is there any role for the old recall-testing? (It's pretty silly trying to test what people can keep in their heads when they have computers to make connections and store things for them.) And what about teaching - or 'learning' - individuals so that they can assess their own strengths and weaknesses - generate their own information and start their own businesses?

2. New Courses

Curriculum
The old curriculum - designed for a print-based system and an industrial (jobs-based) age, has to go. Along with the divisions into subjects, grades, etc. Instead, we need real tasks, problems, issues where students can develop 'know how'; ideas solutions, methodologies that are the products of the knowledge society.

And what about online delivery; there is no back list - no big reservoir of products and services that the school can readily draw on? And the rule of thumb is that for every online hour of delivery - it takes 200 hours to prepare. As many teachers are discovering. Work that once took a semester to teach - can now be done online - in a matter of hours.

Resourcing this transformation is beyond the capacity of most school management, and indicates the need for national support and a national strategy as in the UK and the USA

Choice

Online teachers will be competing with all the other online teachers in the world for all the online global students. How to train teachers in this medium (and Dale Spender has developed a package, TOPS, Teaching Online ProfessionalS); how to develop products, and services so that students choose you, is a fundamental management issue.

There are challenges here for management in relation to marketing, branding, alliances, partnerships - and the plain resources for how you can do it.

New Profession

This makes teaching a new profession. All the talents and skills that were part of the old school system have little transfer to the new profession of learning management. Where there will be a range of professional roles from researcher to presenter, from tutor to content developer, from mentor to infrastructure supporter.

Everyone needs to be retrained for the knowledge economy; and because of their influential role, teachers are the top of the list. Just as there was no place for illiterate teachers in a print-based system, there is no place for a computer incompetent teacher in a networked system.

And computer competence is only a start.

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