This was my first thought when Al said he’d created an EduBlogs blog for me. I already blog infrequently on two of my own blogs, and it seems every website that ever tried to be ’two point oh’ offers a free blog. I have an unused blogger account, a wordpress blog that I had to sign up for to use Akismet (an antispam plugin), and if I’d ever been suckered in to using MySpace, Facebook, or any other social site I’d be drowning in the guilt of too many unused blogs.

But I’m not going to feel guilty about this one. I recently made a vow to myself to do something creative daily, and one of the options I gave myself was to blog. Maybe it wont be here, but I should be blogging more regularly. About the same time, Al and a couple of other bloggers he linked to have been inspiring me to have a bit of a say about education. I hesitated because my perspective is not unique - there are hundreds of other IT people in the South Australian education system. I also hesitated because I fear that there is not much I can say that hasn’t been said already by people who can write betterer.

But Al’s pushed it and forced my hand, now despite your protests I will not stay silent. Forgive me.

Come back here occasionally to hear my thoughts on education from the perspective of a non-teaching tech guy. I work in two schools where technology in education is highly valued, but often not fully appreciated.

I can understand WHY teachers find it difficult to see the benefit of the latest technologies - teachers are bombarded from every direction with the promises of easier teaching, more engaging programs, wonderful new paradigms that will forever alter… you’ve heard it all before.

If you are a student you’ll have heard your teacher tell you about amazing new things that you and your friends have been doing for years already. But students are making this stuff up themselves. They’re using technology in ways that the creators never even imagined. It’s up to teachers and the tech people they work with to find ways to use the technology to engage students, rather than trying to remove it forcibly from their lives.

I don’t presume to know what the technology of tomorrow will look like or how it will be used (although I know what I want it to look like, and how I think it should be used), but I want to be there to see how it evolves.