Reviving free-tablet project urged as education must adapt to digital age

Adobe’s senior director of education and government, Trevor Bailey, has made this recommendation to Prime Minister General Prayut Chan-o-cha. While understanding that the government has to be prudent with taxpayers’ money, Bailey said investing in the future of education would be money well spent.

He was speaking on the sidelines of a seminar titled “Adobe Education Leadership Forum” in Bali late last month. 

In a survey held by the company, Wayne Weisse, Adobe Asia-Pacific business manager for education, was quoted as saying: “The ability to visualise or integrate interactive learning experiences in the classroom via mobile devices can make a huge difference in learning outcomes. 

“Educators should ensure that students are empowered not only to consume digital content but also to be the creators of that content.” 

The survey found that 77 per cent of educators in the Asia-Pacific region felt there was a positive overall net effect from having mobile devices strategically integrated into the teaching process.

However, Dr Manuela Taboada of Queensland University of Technology appeared not to agree totally with the survey, saying the “physical object used in teaching is not important” as long as children are being inspired and made curious and understand what they are studying.

“Lighting the fire is important, sparking curiosity and creativity is important. It does not matter what tool we use, it can be sand or a stick. Tablets are one of the tools but not the only tool to learning,” she said.

Although Taboada does not believe that technology is always the answer, she does not underestimate the power of technology. “Technology is a tool to help show creativity to the world,” she said.

The project to provide free tablets to students, the brainchild of the elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra, was scrapped not long after Prayut seized power in a coup. 

Associate Professor Bundit Thipakorn of King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi said the free-tablet project was a good initiative but failed because it was poorly planned, as teachers were not properly trained on how they could integrate the devices into students’ learning.

Most of all, there wasn’t adequate digital content available when the tablets were handed to the young students. 

Bundit said the failure of the project was living testimony of the utter failure of the education system, as it reflected that too many Thais are unable to see the small details relevant to the big picture – a key quality that will help students become a success later in life. 

He said students at his university were taught the ability to “connect the dots” or envision the forest from the trees – the ability to “come up with something they have not seen”, in other words “creative thinking” and solving complex tasks.

“With these qualities, they will survive because it will take a long time before technology can do these tasks and replace them,’’ he said.

 

Sparking creativity

Adobe’s survey also showed that although mobile devices are used by millions around the world, their integration into the formal learning process has not yet been extensively adopted. The survey found a lack of structured strategies designed to impart “high-impact” as well as practical programmes in institutional methods, even though most developed countries have access to both expertise and resources.

It has been forecast that as this digital age progresses, many jobs as we know them now will not exist in the next decades as they will be wiped out by computing and robotics technologies. The success of students at Sripatum University’s School of Digital Media, who sometimes bag jobs even before graduating, may have other schools doing their homework.

Dean Dr Kamon Jirapong’s “getting real” principle may take credit for that. Instead of burying themselves in textbooks, his students get actual assignments or jobs from companies that give them real problems to solve.

One of the most thought-provoking questions raised at the seminar was whether education should create jobs or people like Steve Jobs. 

Great innovators like Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Jobs or even Bill Gates were school dropouts, and yet their technology companies have provided jobs for millions.

But why do children hate school? Educational thinker Dan Haesler asked: “Would children go to school even if they didn’t have to? Children would go to school if schools instilled in them a sense of living a life high on interest, curiosity and absorption.” 

For instance, Haesler, who supports learning through digital devices, called the computer game Minecraft a game changer because it is a game with no rules and children learn to “survive” by playing the game.

Haesler said teachers complained that students do not read enough, but the fact is they are reading what they are interested in, not what the teachers want them to read. 

Wattpad chief executive officer and co-founder Allen Lau noted: “Penguin published 5,000 books in the last 12 months, while Wattpad users uploaded 10,000 stories in just the last 12 hours.” 

One of the late Steve Jobs’s most memorable quotes on education is: “School was pretty hard for me at the beginning … I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

Curiosity is a fundamental basis of creativity, and art fosters it. Bailey stressed the significance of fostering art in science. He cited the great physicist Albert Einstein, whose famous relativity theory is the result of musical perception. Music was the driving force behind his discovery. 

Bailey pointed out that in this digital revolution, the world was being bombarded with masses of information that lead to noise pollution, and that was why innovative solutions and creativity are key to solving the problem.

Dr Stanley Frielic of Auckland University of Technology asked why did Apple, and not Sony, invented the iPod? Apple products are indeed products of creativity that claim to have changed the world. 

Haesler summed up the Adobe education seminar with the question: What is the ultimate objective of education? The answer, he said, is to change the world so it becomes a better place, to give and to help others.

Taboada has told her students: “I am here because I want you to be better than me, because you are the future and I am the past.”