Sir John Daniel (expert). opening Statement. The Economist Debate Series: Education. October 14, 2007 – “The tragedy, and why you must vote for the motion, is that these successes are rare. Most attempts to introduce media into education do not take advantage of technology’s strengths. Instead, they continue in the tradition of education as a cottage industry, hoping to make it more effective by providing the individual artisan, the classroom teacher, with fancier tools.
This approach is doomed to failure. It increases costs because the technology is simply an add-on. The number of learners remains essentially unchanged. Quality goes down because few teachers know how to use the new tools effectively and the students, who often do know how to use them, would rather apply them to other tasks.”
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