Classroom del futuro?
Some very large changes happening in Spain for those interested in the classroom of the future and ebooks for elearning. Yes, there is lots of investment going into classrooms with Interactive Whiteboards figuring large. There real news, though, is the government seems to be promoting a national version of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and is corralling the publishers into facilitating ebooks across the curriculum in the very near future.
According to this article in El Pais (Google translation here) Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero announced plans to digitise education in March but negotiations with the major educational publishers and infrastructure companies had been going on for a while. This more recent article, again from El Pais (Google translation here), talks about a common ebook platform which publishers were signing up to. If it were only ebooks and and digital classrooms, I would be applauding another worthy step in the direction of modern schooling etc. The catalyst for potentially momentous change is the provision of netbooks to all students.
Enter, stage left, the netbook (the rise of las maquinitas)
I don’t know about the spec or the hardware – will these be multimedia machines or souped up ereaders. Possibly not the original OLPC as there is no mention of it here and realistically the OLPC spec is probably too low. Neither is it clear if this is a subsidised or free initiative but the committment to provide them is there. That changes a lot.
Dream on
Everything from utopias of kids with only a netbook instead of a bag of books to the realisation that there will be a platform, and therefore a market, for educational e-books for a very large number of people. Much more so than Spain potentially as there are 400 million Spanish speaking students in the world according to the first El Pais article.
Pedagogy
From a pedagogy point of view, it opens up a whole range of possibilities where the students are linking up from home with their classroom material in some shape or form.
Realistically
Although events seem to be moving fast, there are huge, huge obstacles here. It appears very technology and content-led with the would be implementers i.e. teachers lagging quite a long way behind. The UK is 10 years into something which is well funded and much less ambitious and nobody would claim it was job done. So expect the crash and burn stories but don’t doubt its significance in the long run.
