By Kay Ansell
It was a domino effect. When Lucas Walsh attended a conference on the global classroom in 1998, he heard a country teacher enthusiastically describing how the Internet was connecting his high school classroom to the world.
Listening to the teacher from sleepy Margaret River in Western Australia, Mr Walsh was struck by two things: the speed with which educators were embracing the Internet, and the real opportunity offered for creating IT partnerships between corporations and institutions.
The seeds had been sown for a new idea, and now one year down the track, Lucas Walsh, project manager and research fellow at the Monash Centre for Research in International Education, has found a sponsor for his project and defined its parameters - a challenge in itself.
Mr Walsh has named his Telstra-funded project FTP, which stands for New Frontiers New Technologies New Pedagogies and plays on the IT jargon 'File Transfer Protocol', referring to a fast way of downloading large amounts of data from the Internet. The project name FTP alludes to the enormous capacity of information and communications technology to move knowledge and ideas across borders.
The project's central plank is cross-cultural learning - how education IT can be applied usefully in culturally sensitive ways, for students from different countries, of different ages and backgrounds and with varying educational needs.
Mr Walsh believes the FTP project is unique: "While there was a great deal of disparate knowledge about the infrastructure of information technology, the use of IT in teaching and the issue of cross-cultural learning, these themes rarely intersected in the planning and delivery of IT-based education," he said. "FTP examines how new technologies, new teaching strategies and new markets in education overlap."
The relevance of such a project, he says, has grown with the internationalisation of edu-cation, which has created a market worth $3 billion to Australia. At the same time, IT is creating new educational directions, such as the development of web-based learning.
Mr Walsh says FTP is focusing on the use of education IT in Malaysia and Vietnam. Malaysia was chosen because IT use in education is strongly supported by government policy. In contrast, Vietnam connected to the Internet relatively recently and has limited experience in other media.
The first year of the project has been devoted to a wide-ranging literature review, which came up with some surprising information. Mr Walsh says amazing work is being done in Canada in the area of flexible delivery, but that there has been little cross-fertilisation between different areas of IT use. Education software in general lacks sophistication, he says. And the review also found an increasing number of generic education software programs that made it easier to develop cross-border education.
Mr Walsh does not see IT as a cure-all for education at a time of increasing pressure from funding cutbacks, and he is aware that the use of IT in education can be abused in the name of economic efficiency. The project he says, is about finding a middle ground.
While the first phase was an overview, the next will use Malaysia and Vietnam to profile the key technical, cultural and strategic issues facing developers and users of educational IT. The third stage will expand the profile with a thorough international study of education information technology.
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The project's central theme is how IT can be applied usefully in culturally sensitive ways. |
Researcher Mr Lucas Walsh says his project brings together some important themes - IT in teaching and cross-cultural learning. |
