The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

So, if the ICT world is being turned upside down with the demise of Becta and mass local authority redundancies in the area of ICT support, then where does this leave us? Stephen Heppell has spoken of a new, bottom-up world where innovation and change will increase at a local level. This may be just an evolutionary reflection of the digital technological world itself. We are seeing the demise of over-inflated, top-down, bloated operating systems and applications and instead an increasing appetite for connectivity, bandwidth, browser-based applications, mobility, personalisation and multimedia. So, if we are moving towards a more democratised, chaotic, imperfect, connected and edgy world of ICT in education, then who will be the gatekeepers? The local authorities? Teachers? Heads? The ICT industry? The children?

The genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. The gatekeepers have gone. It is now all down to educating the children, the teachers and the parents. But isn’t that what schools are all about? And this time, we are all going to have to learn together. It could be the worst of times and the best of times.