The Whalesong Project

 

Boston, K Modern Times and Australian Curriculum (99.12)

A once head of Department and tutor of mine during study, Ken Boston elegantly focusses on the challenge facing Australia;

"Let me nail my colours to the mast: we now need a strategy for sharing curriculum materials and delivery by means of a national grid, based on a partnership between the Commonwealth, States and Territories to provide a national and globally competitive digital curriculum platform for all Australian schools."

In this paper, Boston elegantly and quite succinctly articulates the "digital challenge":

In the Australian school education sector, no single State or Territory has by itself the cultural, technical or economic power to trade in the global environment of digital technology, and at the same time maintain an Australian identity to its educational products (including curriculum knowledge and delivery).

Even my casual conversations with the Australian representatives of publishing multinationals confirm that the upfront costs of digital and online content design and delivery make global-I repeat, not state, not national but global-economies of scale inevitable. In the words of one Australian-based editor, the Australian contribution to the global international digital nervous system presently is to substitute wombats for chipmunks. Now, we don't seem able to get our act together on all this. We are thrashing about, obsessed with the complexities and the scope of the opportunities, but not seeing our way through strategically or structurally. Confusion, uncertainty and obfuscation characterise our use of the language of digital and online futures.

Good on you Ken.

 

http://www.curriculum.edu.au/mceetya/nationalgoals/boston.htm

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