Recently, a news report described how Singapore’s National Institute of Education (NIE) would be collaborating with some ICT vendors on the development of a multi-million platofrm for learning. This, together with FutureSchools@Singapore, are visible examples of the Singapore government’s commitment to harnessing the power of ICT for education. They are further add-ons to the government’s MasterPlan for IT in Education (MPITE). All these initiatives have put Singapore on the map for ICT in education. However, I think all these should be contrasted with some of the experiences I have had with schools in Singapore.

For example, my experience last night with my son’s school was very educational with regards to ICT use in schools. The school had called for a meeting with parents to discuss the students’ progress in their preparation for the GCE O levels. During the course of the meeting, a parent expressed concern about not receiving official communication from the school which was supposed to be handed to the the parents through the students. I noticed the principal was avoiding my gaze at him and I suspected that he realized that I had actually strongly proposed to him some months ago that all official communication be placed on the school website and that the school uses emails to communicate with parents, as after all email lists are easy to create. I was of the view that there should be different avenues of communicating with parents and that school websites can be used to put up with very current notices in addition to email lists. The school had replied that they would be taking up my suggestion to create email lists of the parents of the students. Obviously from last night’s event, that has not been done.

I suspect that this is probably true of many schools in Singapore. It is not shocking if you find that schools in Singapore hardly use these “new” forms of communication with their stake holders. It seems that with the millions already spent on ICT in schools, a paradigm shift still needs to take place in Singapore schools.

Of course there are pockets of more enlightened ICT uses in schools in Singapore. The NIE plan mentioned above and the FutureSchools@Singapore initiative, talks about using virtual environments which costs millions of dollars. One wonders how successful these big money ventures are going to be when there is little done to work on the minds of the people who are supposed to use these “innovations”. How much thought is given to these ICT projects ability to be consumed by the teachers and students out there in the other schools in SIngapore? Are these projects easy to replicate elsewhere? Or are they just the play things of a few researchers, ICT vendors and teachers of a few schools?

While the research may benefit what we know about how ICT is used for education, shouldn’t one also be concerned especially whether they can be easily replicated? Is it realistic to test drive such expensive platforms if in order to duplicate them, it will cost millions more which are not likely to be readily available? While agreeing that we should not expect all schools to be at the same level of ICT use, shouldn’t the Ministry of Education (MOE) seriously look at how much of the ICT infrastructure that has been given to schools is used adequately and consistent with the changes happening outside the school environment before pushing for more exotic ICT hardware use? I am aware that MOE has always claimed that hardware is not the goal but just the means, of its iCT plans. However, in practice it does not seem to be consistent with what MOE is saying.

Students today, and perhaps even parents today, are using more than just emails. Among others, they use, text messaging both on phones and on the Net, Twitter, blogs and social platforms like Facebook to communicate. yet schools have not even got past the adequate use of even emails. How do schools then propose to lead the wave of change in the way their students are going to do their work in the 21st century workplace when they have not even mastered the use of emails? Yet we see millions spent on virtual reality environments which promise much, but may not be cost effective or even easy to replicate for effective use in an educational environment like schools.