Seminaring in Jakarta

It’s been ten years since my last trip to Jakarta. I can’t say that the last trip was filled with pleasant memories. The city seemed too large, unmanageable, dirty and one big traffic jam. I do remember the Borobudur Hotel and the Mandarin fondly, but that’s about all.

I’ve just returned from a short trip to Jakarta where I attended a technology seminar. The traffic seems to be as horrible as I remember it – 2 hours from the airport to my hotel with the taxi driver complaining the whole way. The city seems even larger than 10 years ago. The construction that has occurred is amazing. Jakarta seems much more like Bangkok now than it did before. Overall the trip was a very pleasant one.

The tech seminar was well worth the trip from Sumbawa. The speakers were generally quite good; the presentations were interesting; I met some friendly teachers from Bogor; and I got a look at what’s going on with technology and education in Indonesia.

It’s always good to talk to tech people from anywhere, but even better to talk to tech people from Indonesia. We generally have the same issues – money, connectivity, hardware and software problems – and one of the main benefits of seminars of this type is to see how other folks approach their problems.

As far as specifics go, I have another piece of hardware that I can lust after – Tablet PCs. They seem to have all the benefits of laptops with the cool added function of being able to write on the screen. What a great tool for students and teachers.

Microsoft Learning Gateway is another cool thing that I learned about. It seems to be an excellent platform for interactivity between teachers, students, and parents. Virtual Learning also appears to have these features. For large classes these platforms could make a huge difference. For a small school, the benefits might not be so great. Obviously the ability to work on assignments from school or home is one major benefit. Classroom collaboration would be another.

Blogs, wikis, websites, podcasts, IM are all tech tools that were mentioned, but I’ve already used all of them. I started playing with podcasts last spring and found them interesting, but they involve a lot of work without the cooperation of the classroom teacher. I also started working with blogs and they were very popular with students, but I didn’t have much of a plan on how to use them other than try to see how they would work. The interactivity is good, but there has to be more than that.

If we look at all of these platforms as being part of the constructivist approach, then it follow that they are relatively interchangeable with the exception that each platform and application has special features that make it more suitable for specific educational tasks than others.

During the early years of the educational use of the WWW, teachers were hungry for contact with other teachers who were using the Web. I’m at a loss right now to remember what the group was, but I believe that it still exists. I tried several joint projects and because of the connectivity problems during those early days of the Web the projects were never quite successful although we did end up collaborating with a zoo in St. Louis to make a video on the rainforest.

Now, despite the great advances in the infrastructure of the Internet as well as more advanced software, it seems that internet based projects are not quite the thing that they were years ago. But, maybe I’m just out of the loop on these sorts of projects.

I remain convinced that tech coordinators need to be relieved of most of their teaching duties so that they have time to work with teachers on setting up cooperative programs as well as working on professional development. They also need time to set up and maintain platforms like blogs, wikis, websites, and podcasts. Some schools have realized this, but, unfortunately, most have not yet.