Question 3

I reckon on what would be cool is if lets say the teacher said you had to be at school 30 hours a week. You could go to school when ever you wanted for however long you wanted as long as it was as long as 30 hours… so you could go for 8 hours on Monday but only 4 hours on Tuesday.

So why do we physically need to be at school?

You don’t physically need to but it would help because you have the teachers that are trained.

Response Suggestions:

• Webcams
• 3 G networks
• Person to person calling real time
• Remote accessing and sign-on on a computer
• Recording a lesson in video and audio to play back those classes after the fact

Response: What would happen though, because it is on tv, if you don’t understand something, how are you going to get the teachers in the uk to know you don’t understand something?

Response: Surely with for example video conferencing that wouldn’t be an issue. Because you could all ask questions, and also if you are doing it over the internet you could have a hyper chat or some messenger client window up there for the same purpose so you can all communicate under the class in text with the teacher or whatever. And surely if the lesson was recorded then if you had a question you could jot it down and ask the teacher at sometime that was convenient.

Response: Hi, I’d just like to ask all the students… do they think that all this remote learning which I think is fabulous, and certainly the opportunities for the technology that is changing so quickly that there is absolutely no reason why many of these things can’t be implemented very soon. But what about the little ones? What about remembering when they were tiny? Do they think there is any difference in the ages of people that need to have these things, should the 5-10 years do something different or should the 3-5 year olds do something different? I’m just really intrigued to hear what people would think of little kids being involved in this kind of work.

Response: I think along with that, there’s also the whole social networking thing, as an adult doing my masters my masters degree by distance, the thing I looked forward to most was going in, and even though there were only 8 of us and we were teleconferencing with people in Wellington, the fact that we got together with other students and we could bounce ideas of each other and that kind of thing, and the technology were talking about was great for the times we couldn’t make it to the lecture so we could teleconference from home if we wanted to. But it was that social networking that was really important.

Response: I think that there are a couple of issues there; first of all I think that technology is a great tool, but it’s only one of the tools that we have, and that social is really important and at all ages it doesn’t matter how old you are. Technology

(Well when you’re over five) can be fantastic for a lot of different things, but it’s never going to be the whole picture and if it is there is something very wrong. Social interaction for a 5 year old is really important, as it is for a 15 year old, as it is for a 45 year old or a 90 year old.

Response: I think whatever you try and do for one age group of students you have to try and do something as close to that as possible for all age groups, and the reason I say that is, all this distance learning, you know super-technology type thing, it’s great and it has it’s place but I think it would only work for those who are super-motivated I’m not sure about everyone else in this room, but I know I ‘m not. I once did a year of a subject by correspondence, and to put it quite bluntly it sucked, because it was too easy to say “I’ll do it tomorrow” “nah, I can’t be bothered doing it today I’ll read a book instead” or “this is more important” and tomorrow never comes and then suddenly it’s the end of the year and you haven’t dine any of it.

Response: I think with internet and doing school on the internet you need to do it kind of like you do it at school, first you have to rely on the teacher to give you your work and then you get to college and you’re more independent. I think that internet learning should be the same thing, like maybe do internet but in the classroom, everyone hocked into the same internet in the classroom, and then maybe after they’re a bit older then do it at home, and also the good thing about that is you can get the teacher so they can look and see how much you’ve done, so then if your not motivated the teacher can get you to get motivated or talk to your parents or stuff like that. And one other thing I’d like to add is the internet schooling is happening in New Zealand in a very small category, some people who are home schooled access the internet like a classroom and a teacher looks at their work and they’re all interactive and linked together.

Response: It’s going to have to be the same level right the way through, because otherwise its just advancing the education system we have now. If you started at a young level from year 1 and take it right up to year 13 people get into a routine and it won’t become a problem of people slacking off, because they would’ve after about 3 years got it in their head that you do this amount of work and you do it in this sort of way.

Response: One thing we were joking about here was the fact that school actually provides cheep child care and while that was a joke, it is actually a really valid point that you are saying should we have 5, 6, 7 year olds at home? Well no, not if mum’s not working and I don’t know about you guys but I don’t really want my teenagers at home either while I’m at work all day, sorry guys. (to youth present).

Response: I think the whole internet learning idea strikes me as pretty unhealthy, not just because of the social distance, because you know technology is developed in such a way that it’s so easy now to not make the effort to socially interact with someone on your level, you can text them or email them, which is wonderful but it doesn’t reflect the human tone of the interaction, and I think that’s an extremely important thing in school, just as important as what you learn, you know, being in the classroom because it teaches you how to interact with kids, it gives you opportunities to break rules, and opportunities to see the consequences of those rules that you break. So I think the school environment is vital. I think that some internet learning, once you’re getting older is ok but the whole internet learning experience is pretty unhealthy to be honest.

Response: I think that VOIP can bridge some of those concerns. I love being on Skype for instance or on Ventrillo with a whole group of people, and you can have really quite robust discussions. You’ve also go that wonderful hyper messaging facility that (Response) was mentioning, the text chat going on in the background as well, adding comments, that kind of stuff. The a whole gamet of communication is actually there but we’re all in different parts of the world, and that’s quite something to get your head around, for me it really does bridge a lot of those gaps.

Response (again): I think that is certainly largely the case but I think that there is still a certain value to being able to be in the same place as someone.

Response: I think with the technology it would be great if you could continue with learning the same as you would be doing in school, so if you are in hospital for two or three weeks you could keep up with your same class at college, or if you’re away a lot for sports trips, if you are away for two weeks you can actually carry on with the work that was done in your own class.