Recently, I attended an awards ceremony and among others, it featured a young lady singing the song, “Have a Nice Day” by Bon Jovi. The young singer got the melody right but something was very much missing from her performance. It wasn’t done from the heart. It was like lip-synching. There was no edge to the performance. It didn’t have the spirit of the song. At the end of the performance, I wasn’t sure how to respond to the performance. Should I clap out of just sheer politeness since I didn’t enjoy it?

In Singapore, something similar to this insipid performance is happening in the junior colleges (JCs). The Ministry of Education (MOE) has introduced project work to the junior colleges (equivalent to high schools). It has become  a major part of a junior college student’s summative assessment. It has become part of the high stakes assessment performance for entry to the universities.

As a critic of the high stakes examinations system in Singapore, I am wondering whether I should applaud this move to get our JC students to do project work. While it seems to be a positive step away from the “hgh stakes examinations only” approach Singapore is (in?)famous for, I am uncertain about the spirit behind its introduction. Why was it introduced only at that level? Should the undertaking of any personal learning project work by students be done only at high school level and be a one-off affair? Is this what learning through project work supposed to be about?

If this mode of learning is so important why is it introduced seriously only at that level. At the secondary school level, the MOE has only recently introduced alternative modes of assessment (makes you wonder where all these other modes of assessment were prior to this). But it is not anything similar to the project work that JC students have to do. Is it fair to expect such students to be suddenly faced with such a mode of assessment (yes, it is seen mainly as a mode of assessment and not quite an accepted and generally practised form of learning) only after they have been in school for at least 10 years. Why are such modes of learning rare at the other levels?

The nett effect of this approach means that almost all students and teachers involved in it see it as only another form of high stakes assessment to determine the students’ educational pathway. It doesn’t reduce the importance of the traditional high stakes examinations. It only becomes another adjunct of it.

The spirit of project work which should be done in the spirit of inquiry-based learning is lost. It is not remembered as a learning approach but as an assessment approach. While learning and assessment goes hand-in-hand, it becomes very different when the assessment is seen mainly from the summative angle only and not the formative assessment point of view. The spirit of such learning is lost when the summative angle is the only thing that is remembered by both students and teachers.

The MOE’s introduction of project work is therefore not done with the right spirit. The signal they have sent by introducing project as another high stakes assessment means that few will enter into it, to seriously deepen their understanding of something that is dear to their hearts. It is not about passion for learning. It is about just putting up another performance. Like the singer that I have described at the start, this “heart-less” approach will only at best resemble a lip-synching of the real performance. Should we applaud?

In my last post, “ICT: FutureSchools@Singapore, the MOE and the Amish”, I wondered about our tendency to “unleash” technology on society, and schools in particular. Marshall McLuhan was talking about this way back then in the 1960s.

McLuhan theorized that technology can have an effect on us because technology has that ability to “extend” or “amputate” our abilities. When McLuhan said that the “medium is the message (or massage)” he meant controversially that the medium in which we function will determine what we learn and not the content. One wonders if McLuhan is still around what he would say to the immersive virtual environments that students in Singapore will be experiencing in school soon. What abilities of ours will be extended in such environments? What abilities would be amputated?

McLuhan’s views was somewhat preceded by John Dewey. But it seems that this view is preceded by the Amish. Mcluhan espoused his views in the groovy, colourful era of the 1960s but the far from colourful Amish seems to have been asking this question as a basis for their community’s development far longer.

Several years ago, I found this article, “Look Who’s Talking”, on WIRED, by the web visionary, Howard Rheingold. Recently I revisited the article and I still think it makes for fascinating reading. What strikes me most about the article is that here is a web visionary, perhaps the first man to coin the term “web communities”, talking about a group of people who are often seen to be modern-day Luddites (which they are not). Rheingold is fascinated with how the Amish leaders’ approach to deciding what technology is to be used by the community.

What Rheingold discovered then was that the Amish were not anti-technology but they were very mindful of the impact of technology on their community especially with regards to their “togetherness”. According to Rheingold, the primary question that the Amish leaders ask when discussing the use of a new technology in the Amish communities is “Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?” To the Amish community, nothing must damage this principle. So in the Amish communities you see brand new state-of-the-art gas-fired barbecue pits but no cars or internet. Barbecue pits goes down well with the Amish because it encourages family and community togetherness while cars will lead members further away.

When Rheingold started to find out about the Amish use of technology he had a few questions in mind. He wanted to know:

What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance (of new technology), as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?

I think the questions above are valid for most modern societies, like Singapore too, that have been enthralled by science. Rheingold’s questions has me taking another look at how Singapore has been approaching the issue of ICT use for education. I would be the first to admit that I am an unabash proponent of the use of ICT for education. Of course, Rheingold’s questions goes beyond schools only. But after reading about the new ICT initiative, FutureSchool@Singapore, by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore, about using new technologies to help students learn, I wonder often if we are moving “ahead” without deep thought about how these technologies are going to affect us, more specifically, the students in Singapore schools. Technology is often “unleashed” upon us. We are expected to be technology-conversant but we seldom seriously conduct conversations about our use of technologies. As Rheingold puts it:

I never expected the Amish to provide precise philosophical yardsticks that could guide the use of technological power. What drew me in was their long conversation with their tools. We technology-enmeshed “English” (the Amish description of the non-Amish American world) don’t have much of this sort of discussion. And yet we’ll need many such conversations, because a modern heterogeneous society is going to have different values, different trade-offs, and different discourses. It’s time we start talking about the most important influence on our lives today.

I came away from my journey with a question to contribute to these conversations: If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?

Today, we just hurry to get enmeshed. Are we behaving Borg-like and just assimilate everything that we come across? Are we also in too much in a hurry with adopting technologies for education without considering their real impact? What do we become if we continue with this Borg-like behavior?