|
SAIDE's Director, Jenny Glennie,
was most honoured to have been invited by UNESCO to join a small
group of 'visionaries' to develop a statement on the future of knowledge
acquistion and sharing. The group assembled in June 2007 in the
picturesque surroundings of the Kronberg Palace near Frankfurt,
Germany for a one-day workshop.
The group of 20 included educators from across the globe, including
Raj Dhanarajan (former President of COL), Ahmed Ansary (President
of the Asia e-University), Yu Wei (former Vice- minister of Education
of China, director of the Research Centre for Learning Sciences),
Brenda Gourley (VC UKOU), Henry Chasia from the e-Africa Commission,
Robert Carneiro ( former Portuguese Minister of Education) as well
as the Chairperson of Wikimedia, Anoop Gupta from Microsoft, and
Martina Roth from Intel. The exercise was led by Abdul Khan, an
assistant DG at UNESCO. Abdul was a frequent visitor to SA in the
nineties, assisting in formulating our early approach to the use
of technology in education.
The discussions were intense, and far too short. In essence, we
had time to ‘brainstorm’ (in café-style interaction),
to share some of the initial brain-storming with another group and
begin the refinement and argument. By which stage it was time to
draft the statement. So the statement is long and all-encompassing,
and some clauses are, at the very least, in tension with others!
Click here to view the final statement.
Of interest was that the workshop started with hyperbolic statements
on how the use of technology would solve the world’s educational
problems, but settled on a more measured response: the use of technology
will change many of the ways we educate, but the importance of the
teacher and the structured learning environment would remain.
It was a great privilege to have been given the opportunity to interact
with leaders in the field. More-over, the food and wine was superlative! |
