As a follow up to the last post on Education Departments in Australia and their response to ICT developments - I thought I would follow up with an example. In Australia slow moving systems that have clockwise wind circular rotation and destructive winds are called Cyclones - more information on what Cyclones are can be found here. And these are 2 that I have experienced firsthand: Thelma and Ingrid.
One question I have discussed with people recently is around what would be required to change our Education Departments so that they could become more adaptive, supportive and understanding of the requirements of the educational process. The first thing that stands out for me is the core task of teachers and schools - that is to educate and empower our students. Do the ICT departments have a fundamental understanding of this concept?
In my experiences the answer would be NO - a case in point is the recent refresh of laptops in the NT. Whilst working with a number of schools in the NT I discovered that the new DELL laptops provided do not have built in FireWire ports or Bluetooth. In the case of the schools I was working with this meant that accessing footage from their digital cameras was not possible due to the lack of the firewire port. I know that there has been discussion on various forums around this issue and the response from the IT services branch on their website - is that:
"We acknowledge that these are valuable features for some teachers however when we are purchasing 2700 devices in a single configuration we need to try and optimise the features and performance to suit the needs of most users. ... we believe these provide teachers
with the best mix of price and performance for the available budget."
Now if we look at the above statement the questions I would be asking is:
- Who established the configuration of the laptops?
- What was the process to determine the best mix and performance?
- What was the available budget?
- What feedback and testing did you do prior to committing to purchase?
- What process will be established for the future to avoid this situation again?
In regards to the budget, if you do your sums it would look something like the following:
- 2700 teacher laptops at bulk purchase price of $1500 each = $4,050,000
- The cost of a firewire port built in - conservatively $30 by 2700 laptops = $81,000
- This item as a percentage of the total cost would have been 2%
Surely the budget was not key decision. The bigger issue is the process and understanding of what teachers do with their laptops - yes give them more memory and better graphics cards to do video editing but do not take away the firewire port that allows that technology to connect to the laptop at reasonable speeds - no educator would have made that decision.
Schools and teachers have wasted valuable time and effort in trying to work out a solution, and the solution put forward by the ITSD branch is to post up sites where schools can purchase a PCMCIA card to plug in the side of the laptop, this means teachers will need to learn how to use and care for PCMCIA cards. I wonder what the total human and time cost is for the schools that were frustrated by this issue.
What should have happened was a recognition that a mistake was made and that ITSD should have provisioned 2 PCMCIA cards per school just to show they understood and were trying to help. This would have cost around $25,000 but would have procured a better relationship between schools that provide the core services and those that are meant to support them.
