Hoda Baraka – Education and the Wiki paradigm; a tug of war? [Wikimania 2008 notes]

Image by H. Kosin via Flickr

As a country of Egypt, more than 50% of people are young generation. As we think about wiki’s and ICT, we feel that we often don’t know if we can lead the technology or does the technology lead us.

When we think about education, we don’t know if better educations lead to innovation which leads to better technology or is it the other way around?

As an development country, is technology in classrooms, a luxury or a fundamental tool?

 

Education frameworks has lots of components – Environment, Administration, Tools, Curricula & Content, Assessment, Certification, Actors, Guardians, Recipients.

 

Education evolution:

 

• Pre-industry age; We had One to One tutoring. Teacher is the sole service provider. There is a small group of students. The education at that time it’s based on Memorizing – reciting and dictating.
• Industry age; 

1. Small group of different ages. Single teach that knows everything. Blackboard and chalk with eventual books. We had different issues – Teacher to student ratio, etc.
2. New tools: Radio & TV. Broadcasting techniques. We can now reach great number of people and it opens up recipient area. Different types of certification emerges.
3. Egypt – 40k schools with 16M students and 1.2M Teachers. Ministry of Education for central management.

• Internet age – Smart Schools Network. Introducing ICT in preparatory schools.

1. Computer labs
2. Teachers room
3. Modern Classroom
4. Teachers training
5. E-books
6. Other: Multiplicity of sources of knowldege; Breaking the monopoly of the teachers; Virtual hands-on experience; Connecting Community; Partners: MoE, MCIT, Education Service Providers

• Web 2.0 age

1. Egypt 2008 – 38 million Mobile users. 2200 IT-Clubs. 9.5 Million broadband users. Pc for All initiative. Arabic eContent Initiative.
2. Lots of partners for Education, from international corporations to different NGO’s and government services to help.
3. Wiki paradigm: peering, sharing, mass collaboration, innovation, User generated content, Co-creation, Prosumers, Acting globally, Openness.

 

But the questions is – are Teachers, Institution, Business, Children, even Parents – Ready? And of course, what’s happening and what’s coming ahead for us?

 

Egyptian proverb – Teacher is like a prophet. But what happens now with the Internet generation?

 

Challenges:

 

• End of unified national curricula?
• New model for student assessment?
• What is the profile of the teacher under education 2.0, and 3.0?
• [..two more]

 

There are also issues of Internet Safety and Internet Security.