WordyTumble

Yes. I know the headline is terrible. It’s something I really struggle with on occasion. Shut up.

This piece was written as an assessment for a subject named CMNS1280 (Introduction to Journalism), part of the Bachelor of Communication which I’m currently undertaking.

The premise was to write a story about your “community” where community meant pretty much whatever the hell you decided – the assessment criteria was quite broad. I decided I was going to discuss the emerging digital communities in Newcastle, focussing on education and business.

We were also required to interview at least two different people who weren’t family, fellow students or employees of the university.

Although I have received comments from my lecturer about it (mostly fixing grammar related things and a few sections where I strayed from the prescribed style guide), I’ve decided to publish it as I submitted it.  I’d also tell you the mark I got, but it seems the University of Newcastle has upgraded their version of Blackboard to one that, amazingly, is less user friendly than the previous version.

If, for some reason, you’re interested in seeing a couple of truly terrible websites I had to make for another subject (CMNS1000 – Introduction to Digital Communication) you can see them HERE and HERE.  But be warned, I am not a web designer or a visual arts-type person in the least.

Meh.  Anyway, enjoy.

“Has digital technology fundamentally changed the way we approach education?”

“In a word, no.”

Wait. What? I was not expecting to hear that. Honestly.

Because when you think about how digital technology has changed the way that we, as consumers and ordinary people, go about our lives then the changes afforded to us by this new age are really quite fundamental.

Instead of waiting for our favourite TV show to appear on our airwaves we can acquire it within an hour or so of it airing in the United States.  Instead of filling our house with piles of CDs we now store more music that we could ever listen do on a device roughly the size of a stack of playing cards.  Instead of writing heart-felt, lengthy prose to family overseas that took weeks to arrive we now tweet them with 140 characters of truly horrible, borderline illiterate, bastardised English.

Even now, as I sit here and write this, I am doing it on a computer.  I recorded the interviews with my smart phone and everything to do with this piece is saved onto the Internet so I can access it anywhere in the world on pretty much any device that has an Internet connection,

So you would be forgiven for thinking that when you applied the same level of thinking to the education and business communities you would get more of the same; something completely world changing and revolutionary.

So, I was surprised to find out that was not really the case.

It turns out that the changes brought about by digital technology and much more evolutionary than the revolution than what we have seen in the consumer space.

But that does not mean that no one is angling to see that same level of change brought to the business community.  In Newcastle, the Lunaticks Society has sought to create a community forum the conversations that need to be started in order for businesses, especially local ones, to take advantage of what digital technologies and the Internet are making possible.

When it comes to education, a lot of the drive to adopt digital technology within the learning environment is driven by the attitudes of parents and teachers within each school, according to Roger Pryor from the NSW Department of Education and Training when I sat down with him at his office in Adamstown to discuss the digital age and the effect it has had on the education community.

From his perspective, the shift towards digital technology is not so much about throwing away everything about education that we know and starting over, but instead looking at ways we can merge these new technologies into existing practices.

“Schools are still basically a rite of passage from being a young person to being an adult person in the minds of lots of people in the community,” he explains.

“They are still also the place that, in the minds of a lot of the community, that deliver the content and skills that little people to get jobs in the way that people always knew them.”

It would seem that the purpose and expectations of the education system have no changed, to spite the massive changes happening in the world in which it resides.

So what has changed, in anything?

Well, digital technology has essentially changed the tools in which schools go about meeting those expectations.

In New South Wales, that saw the introduction of the Digital Education Revolution program, which gave all Year 9 school children with a government provided laptop and some assorted software to enable this new technology to be incorporated into the teaching environment.

The money allocated to this program (around $2300 per laptop issued) not only allowed the purchase of the technology, but also an investment in infrastructure and training in order to give students a nurturing environment in which to use it.

“That could be put toward a whole range of support services, employing a Technology Support Officer in every high school, but also to be able to put some money into professional learning and look at how we can actually encourage people to use it differently,” Roger says.

But as with any change, the roll out has received a mixed response from school communities.

“There have been early adopters, as there always are,” he tells me. “There are people that have got on board begrudgingly and there have been some rocks that aren’t worth watering.  That’s just how it is.”

Even for teachers, there are opportunities to embrace digital technology within their classrooms and how they manage their students learning.  Teachers now have the ability to explore different pieces of software to learn and expand their own understanding of this new technology.

There is one particular technology called Moodle (similar to the Blackboard software that is used by many universities already) that is getting used by many teachers in Newcastle and the Hunter.

“For the last few years, where there’s been a teacher who’s said ‘I’d like to have a go at using Moodle as a learning management system at my school to support what we’re doing’. They just send me an email and I set them up a site and off they go.”

The teachers are then free to use the software in whatever way they choose. Free to explore what it is capable of and then apply anything that they think may be useful to what they do in the classroom.

It really is quite the departure from what I remember when the curriculum was set out, you worked through it and the chances to properly explore what other things were available were very limited.

Unsurprisingly, I guess, things have progressed a little further in the business community when you compared to education.  But still, perhaps, not has far as we have seen from a consumer’s standpoint.

“The main thing for businesses is that the global market has just opened up,” notes Gordon Whitehead, a marketer from Newcastle based digital agency Sticky.

“Global connectivity means basically I can do business from anywhere, with anyone in the world.”

But this embracement of the fantastic possibilities for expansion and development afforded by the advancements of technology have not been completely jumped upon in Newcastle.

“It’s a mix,” Gordon reckons, “we see, in some respects, people are doing things here that are amazing and should be recognised and rewarded.  But we still see that there is a resistance to technology; the opportunities and the basic risks associated with that.”

The biggest resistance, and hindrance, is coming from the cities main stakeholders and institutions.

“The business chambers, [Newcastle City] Council, the politicians, government agencies. They’re slow; their knowledge is not fully there.  For example, they want the NBN (National Broadband Network) but they wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

But there is a plan to change this attitude.

The Lunaticks Society of Newcastle, founded in 2010 by Gordon and a number of other digital savvy people and named after a society formed by a group of industrialists in Birmingham, England during the Industrial Revolution, has the mission of creating “fresh thinking, new ideas and conversation”.

It aims to create a forum in Newcastle where ideas about the digital age can be discussed and ideas thrown around.

“We created the Lunaticks to talk about the changes that are happening in the digital age. What does it mean? To look at ideas, throw new ideas into the pot and generally discuss them.”

Their plan is to hopefully sow the seeds of good ideas that can be achieved through the creation of a nurturing community and then help to provide a platform to showcase their creations to the world.

So it would seem that for Newcastle, in spite of the myriad of problems we have in other areas, we seem to be slowly, but steadily, getting on board with all the advancements in technology and making sure that we are in a position where we will be best place to take advantage of them.

The future, it would seem, in our little community here, is looking good.