The battle between proponents of proprietary software (like Microsoft) and those of open source software has been raging for quite some time. Good, irrefutable arguments have been put forward in support of both sides.
Unfortunately this argument has spilled over into the realm of education. Should schools be locked into proprietary products? On the other hand, if the whole world is going for proprietary brands, should schools not be exposing learners to such platforms?
While this point is argued, are we perhaps missing something? Consider a piece of ancient wisdom:
A traveller hired a donkey to convey him to a distant place. The day being intensely hot, and the sun shining in full strength, the traveller stopped to rest, and sought shelter from the heat under the shadow of the donkey. As this afforded only protection for one, and as the traveller and the owner of the donkey both claimed it, a violent dispute arose between them as to which of them had the right to the shadow. The owner maintained that he had let the donkey only, and not his shadow. The traveller asserted that he had, with the hire of the donkey, hired his shadow also. The quarrel proceeded from words to blows, and while the men fought, the donkey galloped off.
The moral of the story: in quarreling about the shadow we often lose the substance.
The substance of education is teaching and learning. If ICT can make a contribution in education, why confuse the issue by fighting about an ever-changing shadow?
With regard to different software products, there must be a place in the sun (or the shade) for both.
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In the previous posting it was suggested that Pareto's Principle could guide us while introducing ICT as a curriculum delivery tool in schools. To Khanya the value of this principle lies in the fact that it reminds us to focus on achieving our goals.
First of all, we must provide a safe and secure environment, as well as basic hardware and software. This, I believe, we are doing very well and through the collective contributions of our implementation project managers, we have managed to get the provisioning part of the project down to a fine art. Incidentally, less than twenty percent of our project team members are involved in this aspect.
The bulk of the work of our project has to do with training educators to use the facilities for curriculum delivery. The first step is to teach them basic ICT skills. Here we need to identify the most important eighty per cent of what is required, which could be taught with minimal effort. Teaching the additional bells and whistles may require resources that are disproportional to the results that we hope to attain. Lesson: focus on the essentials.
The majority of teachers can be trained with minimal effort. But facilitators have to return to schools again, and again, and again to move the few unwilling stragglers along. Pareto's Principle suggests that we leave them alone; let the responsive eighty percent take care of the ones that are left behind. Does this sound uncaring? Not at all; we must still lend a helping hand, but we cannot afford to use eighty percent of our time on the unresponsive twenty percent. This simply does not make economic sense. If we settle to use only twenty percent of our time on trying to persuade the unwilling ones to come into the fold, it feels like a more reasonable arrangement.
Of course, we could be tempted to use eighty percent of our time to help the most excellent teachers to become experts. This would also not be a balanced way of handling matters. Helping the good become better is better use of your time than helping the great to become terrific. The likelihood is that they will accomplish that on their own, once they know the way.
Remember, the Pareto Principle is just a principle; it is not a law. We must allow it to guide our thinking and help us to be balanced in the use of our limited resources.
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Vilfredo Pareto observed that twenty percent of the people in Italy owned eighty percent of the wealth of the country and so, in 1906, he created a mathematical formula to describe this unequal distribution of wealth in his country. This came to be known as Pareto's Principle, or the 80-20 Rule.
Soon people noticed that in many other areas of life the same principle applied. Shopkeepers discovered that eighty percent of their stock came from only twenty percent of their suppliers; eighty percent of their sales came from only twenty percent of their clients; twenty percent of their stock took up eighty percent of the space in their warehouses. Managers of large organizations noticed that eighty percent of their personnel problems were caused by only twenty percent of their staff; and so the list goes on.
The figures may not always be strictly eighty or twenty (it could be nineteen and eighty-one), but it is generally true that in any sphere of activity a few (twenty) are vital and many (eighty) are trivial. It was further discovered that often the effort to achieve the bulk of a task is inversely proportional to the effort required to finish the job. Project managers, for example, know that it takes twenty percent of the total effort to complete the bulk (eighty percent) of a project; it is the last bit that usually requires the lion's share of the effort.
Pareto's Principle also applies when ICT is introduced as a curriculum delivery tool in schools. Twenty percent of the total training and facilitation effort goes into assisting the greatest mass of teachers; many teachers are willing to learn, and are eager to acquire new skills. There are, however, a minority who are refusing to accept our efforts to change. It is highly labor intensive and time consuming to try and change these teachers around: it talks eighty percent of the effort to try and convert the resisting twenty percent. This clearly slows the task.
Since there are millions of teachers on the continent of Africa to be helped … how could Pareto's Principle help us to get on with the job?
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Today I am taking a page from the book from another blogger, Alice Mercer, from whom I have learned a lot over the past months. A while ago she had a link to a delightful web story, which I am using today with a slightly different angle. It goes like this:
How to place new employees.
1. Put 400 bricks in a closed room.
2. Put your new employees in the room and close the door.
3. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours.
4. Then analyze the situation:
a. If they are counting the bricks, put them in the Accounting Department.
b. If they are recounting them, put them in Auditing.
c. If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in Engineering.
d. If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in Planning.
e. If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in Operations.
f. If they are sleeping, put them in Security.
g. If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology.
h. If they are sitting idle, put them in Human Resources.
i. If they say they have tried different combinations, they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales.
j. If they have already left for the day, put them in Marketing.
k. If they are staring out of the window, put them in Strategic Planning.
l. If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Senior Management.
The question that I have been pondering is: how would you recognize teachers?
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The expression “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” has become a cliché but it still contains a simple truth: in getting rid of waste, don’t also discard what is worth keeping.
When we try to improve education through technology a number of changes are proposed. For example, it is reasoned that one of the worse things a teacher can do is to stand in front of the class in talk-and-chalk mode for the duration of an entire lesson. And so we propose the use of technology. One of the easiest technology innovations available to a teacher is PowerPoint.
But the use of PowerPoint brings problems of its own. Have you noticed how some people, when they use this tool in a presentation, constantly look back or sideways to the projection area instead of looking at the audience? This is where the baby is thrown out with the bathwater. One of the strengths of the traditional way of teaching is that good audience contact is maintained; unfortunately this baby is thrown out of the window when we want to get rid of the boredom of old-fashioned teaching.
Interesting terms have been coined to caution one in the use of PowerPoint – though the same principle applies to other technology innovations as well. Some talk about “death by PowerPoint”. And then there is the word powerpointlessness: yes, sometimes one wonders what the point is in using PowerPoint.
Use technology. Use it profusely. But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Teaching is one of the oldest professions; respect the good aspects that have withstood the test of time.
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