ETEC 522 – Sept. 2011

OECD – filling in the gaps

The OECD report on Trends in Education 2010 focuses on a few specific areas of global change with technology included as the last chapter of five. Much of the report is written with a social lens as opposed to a business or technological lens that some of the other reports are written from. The report presents the challenges to education created by five interconnected spheres; globalization, social challenges, change in the working world, transformation of childhood and ICT. It then becomes the job of educational technologists to extrapolate from these problems or gaps posed by OECD and provide innovative technological solutions or ideas to fill the gaps. By supplying statistics on global trends in regards to access to and computer use at home and in school the report provides insight into potentially new markets, specifically in the K-12 market focus. As developing countries invest further in education and technology in schools market opportunities widen in these countries. Statistics from the report showed that while the OECD average percentage of 15 year-olds using computers in school rose only 10% from 2003-2006 (45-55), a country such as Japan saw a 25% increase. Though Japan is not a developing country, the point is that this report provides a window into markets emerging internationally or new “global targets”, using face four of the cube framework.

Below is a brief summary of how three of the six dimensions of the cube framework can be used to understand the relationship between the information in OECD report and potential for educational technology:

1. Type of Market/Market Focus
• Discussion around computer access and use in school, change in working world (earlier retirement –> more learning time), increased migration/mobility display opportunity for ed. Tech. in public schools, organizations that promote non-formal learning to lifelong learners and training needs or program deliverance in other agencies such as ISA (immigrant serving agencies).

2. Who’s the buyer
• As internet access and use at home and in schools, buyers may range from individual learners, to local/regional levels or corporations looking for new training systems.

3. Global Target
• While internet use does not imply that learning technologies exist, it does greatly increase their likelihood and ability. Internet use increased more that five times in Brazil, China, India and Turkey since 2001.

The OECD are careful not to equate presence of technology with use and claims correctly that ‘access’, ‘use’ and ‘productive use’ are not synonymous. They raise an important question to educators as to whether or not teacher education and professional development are meeting the challenges created by a digital age and the changing needs of learners.

Weaknesses:

Best-before date:

This reports greatest weakness is that being released in 2010 with the newest data from only as recent as 2008 means that it is already outdated. The rapid and unpredictability of change in the technology world require technology venturists to have the most recent data. Collecting global data from so many countries obviously takes a significant amount of time for an organization such as the OECD but outdated data is of no value to venturists trying to keep up with the times.

Technologies are backdrop only:

The report provides only a brief discussion on educational technologies themselves with a brief mention of content management systems, specifically Wikipedia and user-generated content with the brief mention of blogs. There is very little mention implications for education these and other edTech may have.

The community of educators are most likely to benefit from this report in that it poses a set of questions at the end of each section for educators to consider about how these trends may change the face of education and its deliverance. For myself the section on immigration is of particular interest. Shifting to a Canadian context as the number of immigrants continues to increase immigrant serving NGOs may find technologies increasingly useful in the deliverance of settlement and integration programs: active community engagement and civic participation, access to information surrounding healthcare services, and navigating the healthcare system, language instruction/courses and job-skilling and employment programs of new immigrants.