Cracks in the School-Walls

By Fred Daly, Walworth Barbour American International School in Israel.

Where are we now? Last year, after working in same cramped and cozy campus for a quarter of a century, I moved to our new purpose-built information age campus. We began implementing a one-to-one laptop program to take advantage of our campus-wide wireless internet. This program will encompass all students 6-12 by next year. This seems to me a kind of milestone. All students can now be online anytime almost anywhere. Everyone is connected. This connectivity enables productivity, communication, collaboration, and creativity.

This milestone marks the terminal phase of many of the characteristic artifacts of the industrial age school. The end of the textbook is in sight. Students will longer need to lug several kilos of learning materials back and forth between home and school. The elevated status of text will be undermined by the more immediate media of sound and image. Handwriting will become an esoteric craft.

We have become dependent on connectivity to function as a learning community. Class materials are online. All communication is online. Attendance is taken on line. Becoming disconnected will be as disabling as losing electricity. During the second Gulf War, the school made a major commitment to move online. The motivation was to provide for continuity for evacuated students. The school lives on, online. Now the backup has become the model. Learning would continue seamlessly during a war, but would grind to a halt if we became disconnected.

A recent survey of our grade nine students, showed that the average student spent 3.5 hours online on a typical school night. The interface between home and school has become blurred as connected-kids continue conversations remotely, gossiping, playing, working on projects.

Many students now report that they study more effectively at home. At home they have a comfortable room with a music system and other entertainment devices. They can manage their own time taking a bathroom break, a stroll or a snack as they please. They say that at school it is hard to focus, there are too many distractions, they can't work at their own pace. They say that they are better connected at home that they are at school. Connectivity is more reliable and faster, and they have access to more and better devices.

Our new campus is a fine facility but at the core there are classrooms designed in the industrial paradigm to accommodate an adult, the one with the big desk, with twenty students seated on identical chairs with identical desks. The infrastructure of institutional learning remains the same. Yet the revolution is upon us. The liberating nature of the technology is causing cracks to appear.

Fred Daly is a teacher at the Walworth Barbour American International School in Israel.
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