Op de website van de Volkskrant schrijft BON bestuurder Gerard Verhoef een reactie op het OECD onderzoek over het nut van ICT gebruik op school en de reactie van Maurice de Hond daarop.
BON meent dat de keuze voor het gebruik van ICT gemaakt moet worden door de hoog opgeleide docent. Helaas wordt de stem van die docent in het geweld van besturen, onderwijsvernieuwers, sectorraden, OCW, de EU en de internationale ICT bedrijven niet meer gehoord. In de praktijk beslist niet de docent of de sectie, maar het schoolbestuur over het gebruik van ICT voor het onderwijs. En dat schoolbestuur wordt door alle bovenliggende gremia voorzien van vele prikkels om volluit op ICT in te zetten.
Dat het OECD nu met harde feiten komt die er op wijzen dat veel ICT op school nadelig is, is een goede zaak, maar daarmee verandert de mega-tanker voor meer ICT niet van koers. De vele artikelen (bv the guardian 2013) die twijfelen aan het nut van ICT en de boeken en artikelen die er zelfs voor waarschuwen zijn tenslotte eerder ook nooit werkelijk serieus genomen.
We kunnen niet anders dan concluderen dat er kennelijk andere dan onderwijskundige overwegingen een rol spelen bij de massale invoer van ICT in het onderwijs.
Een gesneuvelde slotzin van het artikel van Gerard Verhoef luidde: “ICT-gebruik in de klas is soms goed, soms onverantwoord, maar altijd ook een verdienmodel”. Misschien had die toch ook in het VK artikel moeten staan.
Het verdienmodel laat zich
Het verdienmodel laat zich bijvoorbeeld zien in het beleid van het College voor Toetsen en Examens met betrekking tot de grafische rekenmachine. Leerling wordt gedwongen voor examen een nieuw apparaat te hebben.
Dank zei ICT zit het
Dank zei ICT zit het onderwijs nu opgescheept met een diarree aan "(profiel)werkstukken" die eerst door de plagiaat-scanner moeten worden gehaald om te ontdekken of ergens nog een kern aan eigen inzicht en eigen werk aanwezig is.
Onderwijs & ICT, Privacy en
Onderwijs & ICT, Privacy en Big Data. Ondertussen het verdienmodel in de VS (straks via TiSA ook hier; concept TiSA-tekst 'annex on electronic commerce' controverse over data-export en wens negeren o.m. EU-privacy regels door voornamelijk ICT-ondernemingen uit VS. 'US Trade Representative' verwoordt bij TiSA-hearings wensen ICT-industrie).
Artikel over zorgen vanuit onderwijs:
"As legislators consider updating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, school advocates argued Thursday during a hearing that software companies must be held accountable for the trove of student information they collect."
"Other legislators were still trying to understand the scope of the data that is collected, from birthdays to test scores to disciplinary records. Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., asked the panel to provide a summary of all the information collected by the time a student reaches graduate school.
"Just think George Orwell, and take it the nth degree," Reidenberg said. "We're in an environment of surveillance, essentially. It will be an extraordinarily rich data set of your life."
[Corinne Lestch, Fedscoop, 'Advocates urge lawmakers to update student privacy bill', February 12, 2015. Fedscoop: 'government IT community's platform for education and collaboration']
****
Commentaar van lezer bij TiSA-artikel:
"EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] is rightfully worried about backdoors in commercial software by the NSA and GCHQ.
Allyson Knox, director of education policy and programs for Microsoft explains commercial applicability:
“If students are using certain cloud infrastructures, and it’s held by a third party, it is possible for [the vendors] to trend through the data. When [information] is flowing through a data center, it’s possible to take a peek at it and find trends and put it on the market to other businesses who want to advertise to those students.”
"How much easier this would be if data flows cross-border into data centers that have little to no security." (via)
Binnenkort ook in ons theater
Binnenkort ook in ons theater.
"I wrote about TiSA after Wikileaks released a bunch of negotiating drafts of it, which showed it to be bigger and badder than any other trade agreement currently under negotiation. The services it covers encompasses 4 out of every 5 U.S. jobs, from health care to private education, financial services to telecommunications, and plenty more. TiSA would create an effective regulatory cap on all these services, with “standstill” clauses to freeze regulations in place and a “ratchet” clause to make any broken trade barrier irreversible.
An excerpt:
It may make sense to some to open service sectors up to competition. But under the agreement, governments may not be able to regulate staff to patient ratios in hospitals, or ban fracking, or tighten safety controls on airlines, or refuse accreditation to schools and universities. Foreign corporations must receive the same “national treatment” as domestic ones, and could argue that such regulations violate their ability to provide the service. Allowable regulations could not be “more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service,” according to TiSA’s domestic regulation annex. No restrictions could be placed on foreign investment—corporations could control entire sectors.
Bad news, so much so that, according to the text, the documents were supposed to remain classified for five years after being signed."
[David Dayen, 'IBM Lobbyist Planted Question From USTR Official at a 2013 Public Hearing', Naked Capitalism, September 22, 2015]
***
"Corporations would get to comment on any new regulatory attempts, and enforce this regulatory straitjacket through a dispute mechanism similar to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) process in other trade agreements, where they could win money equal to “expected future profits” lost through violations of the regulatory cap."
"The only reason to re-write the rules is to replace GATS, which the European Union readily admits (“if enough WTO members join in, TiSA could be turned into a broader WTO agreement”).
That’s perhaps TiSA’s real goal—to pry open markets, deregulate and privatize services worldwide, even among emerging nations with no input into the agreement."
[David Dayen, 'The scariest trade deal nobody's talking about just suffered a big leak', New Republic, June 4, 2015]
Omdat de grote media niet of nauwelijks over dit verdrag in onderhandeling schrijven, haal ik, naast de officiële EU-informatie en de gelekte teksten, informatie bij een klein aantal activistische media (waar soms weer naar de andere kant wordt overgeheld). Het wordt tijd dat meer mensen van de inhoud van het concept-verdrag kennis nemen, en gaan nadenken over de gevolgen van ervan voor vh 51 (minus Uruguay, Paraguay eruit gestapt), nu 49 landen, óók voor het onderwijs. Wat wordt met 'publiek onderwijs' ('publicly-funded education', EU) bedoeld? Met de huidige ontwikkelingen beland je snel in de private hoek, waar TiSA op van toepassing is.
De laatste zin van mijn
De laatste zin van mijn voorlaatste reactie omtrent grensoverschrijdende datacentra komt niet van Microsoft, maar van een lezer bij het genoemde TiSA-artikel.
“An explicit goal of the TiSA
"An explicit goal of the TiSA negotiations is to overcome the exceptions in GATS that protect certain non-tariff trade barriers, such as data protection. For example, the draft Financial Services Annex of TiSA, published by Wikileaks in June 2014, would allow financial institutions, such as banks, the free transfer of data, including personal data, from one country to another." [zie ook: het concept van de 'Electronic Commerce and Telecommunications Services Annex']
As regards national security, the Council of Europe ministers responsible for media and information society stated in November 2013 that:
Any data collection or surveillance for the purpose of protection of national security must be done in compliance with existing human rights and rule of law requirements, including Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Given the growing technological capabilities for electronic mass surveillance and the resulting concerns, we emphasise that there must be adequate and effective guarantees against abuse which may undermine or even destroy democracy.
In private, however, EU trade negotiators – that is, the people with real power – are coming under intense U.S. pressure to sign away virtually all European data protection rights. As Bendrath notes, U.S. lobbying efforts, through groups such as the Orwellian-named “Coalition for Privacy and Free Trade”, have been pushing for “interoperability” between European and American rules on both sides of the Atlantic. That basically means a mutual recognition on the respective rules on both sides of the Atlantic. The only catch: in the United States there are currently no comprehensive data protection laws in place."
[Don Quijones, ‘LEAKED: secret negotiations to let big brother go global. The ugly ramifications of the Trade in Services Act (TiSA)’, Wolf Street, December 25, 2014]
Hoe loopt dit af? De Europese Commissie dient de EU-gegevensbescherming en privacyregels bij de geheime TiSA-onderhandelingen te handhaven. Anders zal het tandeloze Europese Parlement in een later (te laat?) stadium moeten ingrijpen. Het blijft een wedstrijd touwtrekken met de VS. Wat zal de EU moeten offeren? Let wel: over onze hoofden heen. Ons parlement komt pas in het laatste stadium in actie als de zaak definitief beklonken moet worden. Echt te laat. Het begrip democratie is een lege huls. Het (publieke en private) onderwijs zal als 'collateral damage' met de open datastroom mee moeten, als er niet op tijd wordt ingegrepen. Oops, deze informatie is natuurlijk geheim. Wij behoren dit helemaal niet te weten, pas vijf jaar na het tekenen van het verdrag had er openheid over de inhoud moeten komen. Foei, burgers.
Voor een ouder die graag
Voor een ouder die graag meer over het onderwijs aan zijn kinderen te vertellen wil hebben lijkt het kiezen of je door de hond gebeten of door de kat gekrabt zal worden. Waar ben je erger mee af, met een overheid die in het onderwijs de grondwet als quantité négligable ziet of een TiSA die de staat wel ter verantwoording kan roepen als die geen feitelijke monopolies afbreekt of met maatregelen komt die de winst van een bij onderwijs betrokken organisatie reduceert?
Jolles tweets over een
Jolles tweets over een artikel in Newscientist dat meer onderzoeken dan het OESO-rapport aanhaalt over de negatieve effecten van ICT-gebruik:
www.newscientist.com/article/dn28201-is-the-digital-learning-revolution-a-waste-of-money
Nog een goed overzicht:
Nog een goed overzicht:
LOST IN THE INFORMATION JUNGLE
Paul A. Kirschner & Mirjam Neelen
Unfortunately, there are many myths in the teaching and learning space that are as ill-founded as they are stubborn. In the context of the so-called iPad schools, one of these myths is that learners can identify their own learning needs and regulate their own learning processes. This “meta-myth” myth consists of several sub myths.
The first sub myth is: Because all information is available on the internet, there is no need to teach it. This is what Sugata Mitra[1] states in his TED talks and what the Dutch social geographer and opinion pollster turned ‘crime fighter’ and self-styled ‘educational expert / innovator and school reformer’ whose expertise seems to be based on seeing his 3-year old daughter playing with an iPad Maurice de Hond would argue when explaining why his iPad schools are the answer to the just as mythical undocumented problem in the current education system. They support their statements with remarks such as: “Nowadays, knowledge is as perishable as fresh fish” and therefore the memorising of facts is useless. Or “We are experiencing a revolution of little children” while the “classic chalk-and-blackboard teachers are preparing children for a world that no longer exists.” Makes sense? Not really. With this type of statements, it becomes clear that people confuse knowledge obsolescence with the information increase and self-determination for play with self-regulation for learning.
It’s not true that so much of our knowledge is quickly outdated and that the half-life of our knowledge is ever decreasing to a lever that some feel makes the learning and acquisition of concepts and facts superfluous. What is completely true, however, is that there is an incredible, possibly exponential increase in the amount of information available to us; information that’s either correct, dubious, or just downright plain nonsense. And also, the rate of this increase is itself increasing. Unfortunately, a lot of the information available on the web is pure rubbish; everybody and their uncle can publish whatever they want or believe in online. This is exactly the reason why a strong knowledge base is required as this base help us judge the information published. It allows us to identify whether what is put up on the web is reliable, useful, and usable. Without basic knowledge, (1) what is posted is taken as true on face value[2], (2) you cannot discern whether what you have found is relevant[3], and (3) no knowledge deepening or broadening can take place.
The second sub myth is that children can direct and regulate their own learning. This is a real paradox. Self-directedness means that you choose what you would like to learn; that is, you set your own learning objectives. Then, you identify for yourself which learning tasks would be best to use to achieve your learning objectives and in which sequence you should select and complete these tasks. Self-regulation means that you are able to plan the actual performance within a learning task, monitor progress and evaluate learning outcomes. However, in the real world only experts (i.e., people who are knowledgeable in the area that they wish to gain new knowledge in) are able to direct and monitor their learning because they (1) know what they themselves know and don’t know and therefore can identify their own learning objectives, (2) can then determine which knowledge and skills they miss, and thus need, to achieve a certain learning objective, complete the learning task correctly or solve the problem the right way and (3) can find the missing links and judge their usability. A novice, which is what most learners per definition are, cannot do this.
A third reason why self-directedness of learners is a myth comes down to the fact that learners (1) usually choose something to learn that they like or a way of learning that they prefer; something they can complete easily and (2) often times choose to learn something that they feel confident about in order to prevent themselves from making errors.
Way back in 1987 Richard Clark highlighted all these problems when he warned for learning activities that were prone to kill actual learning. He called these debilitating activitiesmathemathantic (activities which kill learning) analogous to the positive learning activities which what Ernst Rothkopf in 1965 dubbed mathemagenic (activities which give birth to learning).
Based on all of this you can probably very easily see the possible consequences of, for example, iPad schools. In their Dutch manifesto, they promise, among other things, that children are allowed to decide what and when they want to learn and that teachers are there to help children to get even better in what they are already good at. Shouldn’t it be the case that education helps children learn what they need to learn and to grow in areas in which they are not so good yet? They also promise to always use the latest techniques to prepare children for the world of tomorrow, as if every new gadget is beneficial to learning (Kirschner just published an article in Computers in Human Behavior about Facebook® as new learning tool) and/or that each teacher knows how to implement such tools so as to be effective, efficient, and/or enjoyable. Research shows, in any event, that even Net-generation teachers can’t! And how does this ‘choose yourself’ approach align with the school’s promise to “prepare you for your next school”?
No. This blog is NOT a plea for giving the teacher total control of all learning. However, we do think it’s important to create awareness for the paradox of choice: Yes, human beings appreciate freedom of choice[4], however the more options they have (1) the more chances there are of making the wrong one and (2) the more frustrating it is to actually make a good choice. This is known as the paradox of choice[5]. People appreciate having the opportunity to make some choices, but the more options that they have to choose from, the more frustrating it is to make the choice (Schwartz, 2004). It is, thus, important to give learners limited rather than unlimited control, because having to choose from too many options is perceived as frustrating. For learning it’s critical to allow a certain amount of freedom to learners, however, the range within they can choose must be limited and must be aligned to what they need to learn and what they can handle.
This is why we advocate for a model of ‘shared control’ in which teachers thoughtfully limit choices, learners make choices, and teachers gradually release control until learners are able to navigate the world on their own’. Hence, also for self-directedness, we must think about theZone of Proximal Development!
[1] If you want to read a poignant critique of this research, go toxyofeinstein.wordpress.com/2015/08/01/mitra-doet-terug-straffe-uitspraak-maar-de-basis-is-flinterdun/ and if you’re a Chrome user right click “translate to English”.
[2] The followers of Vani Hari, alias the “Food Babe” and “Anti-Vaxxers” are perfect examples of this.
[3] Take, for example, the journalist who wrote an article on the 16th century natural philosopher (what we call a physicist today) Sir Francis Bacon based on what he found via Google on the 20th century artist with the same name since he had no idea what a natural philosopher was! or
The American Republican nominee hopeful in 2012 Michelle Bachman who announced her run for the nomination “in the birthplace of that great American patriot John Wayne” only to be told that where she made the statement was the birthplace of John Wayne Gacy, an American serial killer and rapist who sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men.
[4] Unfortunately, people often don’t choose wisely or well. The obesity crisis in the US is primarily the result of American’s free choice of supersized portions of things that are fatty, sugary, and salty.
[5] Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. New York, NY: Ecco
Als aanvulling op ICT en
Als aanvulling op ICT en privacy:
Reporter Radio, 'De lobby in Brussel', 4 oktober 2015
"De lobby in Brussel is een schimmige wereld waar u en ik weinig over komen te weten, maar die veel invloed heeft op de besluiten die politici nemen. En daar wringt de schoen. Want hoe ver gaan lobbyisten om hun zin te krijgen? Heel ver."
Vanaf 23 minuten: Microsoft heeft met o.m. Yahoo de European Privacy Association (EPA) opgericht die zich voordoet als NGO dan wel denktank, terwijl het een lobby-organisatie betreft. Nadat prominente academici die bij deze 'denktank' waren aangetrokken hoorden hoe de vork in de steel zat trokken zij zich terug. Microsoft betaalt per jaar 5 miljoen euro aan lobby-activiteiten. Europarlementariers hebben in 2013 bij de behandeling van de Databeschermingswet duizenden amendementen ingediend die gekopieerd waren van lobbyisten. Veel van deze voorstellen waren niet privacy-vriendelijk. In expertgroepen die periodiek fysiek bij elkaar komen wordt het merendeel van de expertstoelen door (lobbyisten uit) het bedrijfsleven ingenomen. De lijnen naar de Europese Commissie zijn (bellen, ontmoeten) kort. Maatschappelijke organisaties hebben veelal niet de middelen intensief aan dit voorkoken van wetsvoorstellen deel te nemen. Wim van de Camp is een europarlementarier van wie, tezamen met zijn EVP-fractie, bekend is dat hij voor zo'n karretje laat spannen. Hij zal niet de enige zijn. Ik weet niet of hiervoor betaald wordt. Ter verdediging wordt aangevoerd dat het europarlement over te weinig middelen beschikt om tot objectieve kennis te komen. Vandaag de auto-industrie, morgen de ICT, dan de geneesmiddelenindustrie. Ik begin steeds beter te begrijpen hoe de adviezen omtrent ICT-onderwijs tot stand komen. Er is te weinig transparantie omtrent de lobby-activiteiten. De dienstdoende politici rapporteren nauwelijks hierover. Sterker nog, een aantal van hen weet binnen korte tijd na einde termijn zelf lobbyist binnen het vh politieke aandachtsveld te worden: 'revolving doors'. Waren de contacten daarvoor al gelegd? Democratie…