I agree. I presented to a Board of Trustees meeting here in NZ last night about this. The BOT wanted to buy IWBs for each classroom - high-end ones at up to $7000 NZ a piece. I showed them some of the research and white papers and then showed them what they could buy as an alternative - being a lot of netbooks giving individual kids a load more power - be interesting to see what they do.
One BOT member asked me if schools are now obsolete. My response was that schools are not obsolete but their walls are.
Andrew Williamson on 16 Sep 12Lately I have been thinking a lot about thinking. More specifically, I have been thinking hard about the absence of thought in education. The absence of thought in students, teachers, administrators and policy-makers. This year's political discourse is a wider-world reminder of the ubiquitous lack of thought on the part of otherwise educated adults. We know more but are oddly - increasingly? - thoughtless. Why? Thinking, in the sense in which I am interested, is not mere mental work (or idle mental noodling). There is certainly lots of that going on everywhere. Thinking in the educational sense is not about doing one's work. Little thought need go into a typical course pacing guide or by a student in filling in a Venn diagram. Those are mental tasks. Such work cannot by itself yield a truly thinking person.
