Masterplan

Qn: In your opinion, why do you think it is important for MOE to develop the three Masterplans for ICT in education?

Has any of the Masterplans impacted you as a student? Share your experience of how ICT had been used in the classes you attended as a student (if applicable).

Based on your enhanced school experience, how do you think the current Masterplan 3 may affect your role(s) as a beginning teacher?

This may be one of the most rehashed statements of the age, but still – we live in a time of connectivity, and the human-technology relationship underlying all this will only get tighter in the years to come. The virtual real is no longer a contradiction but a commentary on the duality of lives now, that lives are lived and negotiated both in the physical and in the virtual realms. Hence, the ICT call.

As stated on the ICT site, the underlying philosophy of the Masterplans is that education should continually anticipate the needs of the future and prepare pupils to meet those needs. One of the needs identified is that people of the present (and even more so in the future) must be competent users of technology because more and more previously corporeal activities are being taken into the virtual world or augmented with technological tools. It is as though we are no longer just nurturing the human, but assembling the human-machine symbiosis supposedly needed by the world today.

But I digress. To the point, then. In line with MP1, my secondary school arranged weekly IT lessons for us, during which we learnt the use of Flash, Dreamweaver, and the like. The skills for other programmes like Powerpoint and Excel were picked up in the course of school presentations and CCA duties.

There were also signs of “integration of ICT into the curriculum”. In 2003, we had an e-learning week, whereby teachers uploaded a week’s worth of work onto the school portal and students learnt from home for that week by downloading the assignments and doing the various online tasks. Though it was interesting to be able to work on one’s own, it was actually quite difficult to read large chunks of words from the computer screen for long periods of time. The online activities were also a bit stilted and banal. Perhaps better programmes have been written by now, but I still hold to the opinion that there is more potential for interaction, discussion and learning in the classroom, with humans beside you, than anything that programmes on a computer screen can offer.

What I find most valuable about MP3 is its recognition of the importance of cyber wellness. Youths have been actively engaging in online interactions for years actually, and technology has long been a part of their emotional, social and academic lives. However, the SEL/CME/PC syllabus may not have developed fast enough to address these virtual-real issues they are struggling with. That slot in the timetable is too frequently sacrificed to other “core” subjects, and even if they were to keep the session, many teachers are not comfortable with moving beyond the old syllabus to discuss the issues of the now. Equipping our students to be tech-savvy and independent learners and all that are good aims, but the human is still the basis of everything, and the qualities that make that human sound and stable must be acknowledged above all else. We need greater focus on socio-emotional development, on teaching good morals and values, giving a nod to the zeitgeist by paying some attention to how these play out in the sphere of cyber interactions and the perennial issue of identity-management. Technology has moved beyond purely work functions; it is now social, and the social issues must be addressed.