CRN: You're talking about a philosophical change that is very different to how a lot of corporations work, which is a block and stop type of approach. In teaching this type of a method are you changing the culture 10 years down the track in businesses?
Field: It will have to change. Ask the business guys. If people are being blocked they'll get around it. They will jump through firewalls or they'll bring their own technologies that will connect to their own networks.
And those technologies are becoming more invisible. Kids are now text messaging answers in exams beneath their sleeves. I can imagine soon you'll be able to click a button on your glasses and all the test answers will be up in luminous lights and the teacher will be walking through those answers saying, "Are you cheating?" That's coming at a rapid pace.
It will be the same with businesses. If businesses block everything, people will get to what they want to get to anyway.
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| Westley Field, director of online learning and IT, MLC Girls School |
CRN: So what does this mean for the Federal internet filter?
Field: It's a waste of money. Last time they brought out a filter it took 10 minutes to hack it.
Quinn: It's a rabbit warren, you're continually going down holes that you will never win. It's a no-win situation. It just sounds good for the mums and dads.
Inside the school community, it's not just the kids and teachers that need to be on board [with an acceptable use policy] but the parents and the community. They need to understand why you're doing those things because if it's a new roll out of one-to-one computers the parents will often say, "Hold on - we don't want them accessing this, this and this", because they've heard the press and the press does tend to blow things out of proportion sometimes.
Nigel Quinn, managing director, Infinite Loop Solutions
Paxton: The other issue that demonstrates the difference between business and schools is the range of readiness and expertise for staff. Whereas in a business you might want to set particular benchmarks which have to be met around professional learning. But in a school it's much more difficult to have the resources to do that. We can't say to a staff member, if you can't reach this level of competency, off you go.
Quinn: You'd like to.
Paxton: You may or may not like to but we're there to work with our staff, no matter what level their readiness, and that's a key issue in keeping a particular direction moving with IT. I see that as a key difference and our biggest challenge.
Field: Education is responding [by encouraging] teachers to become partners in learning with the students, so the students take responsibility for their own learning. To me technology is a critical friend to developing that responsibility and self-direction in students. So teachers need to be experts in how to learn and how to push that student through learning, whereas the student can be expert in whatever tool they choose to achieve that learning.
Quinn: We used to be server-based with lots of labs and all the data used to live on the servers. Now we're going to laptops where all the data lives on the laptops.
If we go to iPads that shifts again. And we are - the reality is that's where it's going to head. A lot of educational institutions have said to me, "We're going to get rid of labs and go to laptops so therefore we can change our storage capacities". Well you can't if not too far down the track you're going to move that data back into the cloud somewhere rather than local on a device. So we're in a transitional stage again in education - but we're always in a transitional stage in education when it comes to IT.
That's the challenge, being able to look far enough down the track and see the technologies that are coming, not the technologies that are here now. Schools can't change every day as far as a big rollout is concerned. Schools need to be flexible so that they can change what they want to do within that environment every day - that's the goal of any educational institution, they want to be flexible and dynamic and change all the time.
So you need to have a system that's quite robust. I think that's where a lot of resellers get that wrong, because they don't understand how dynamic and how diverse the need of one department from the next department is, and then again in six months time.
You've got to look at the worst case scenario of [storage] demand and assume that that is normal.
Maurice Famularo (marketing director, D-Link Australia): It's almost a common denominator with technology in schools, that you need some sort of infrastructure in place to support what you currently need in the immediate time frame and understand how that infrastructure could work in two or three years time.
So if you can build something and have that projection for the future, it doesn't have to be a replacement; it can be a redeployment of equipment. For example a core switch, after a period of time when you're ready to take it to the next level, you can deploy those core switches to the edge so you're maintaining that infrastructure and adding to it. It's scalability.
Pace: We've been to a lot of schools where they've had competing vendor equipment we've had to rip out and put it in the bin because there was no scalability. We couldn't put it to the edge because it was in a certain chassis you couldn't physically mount where they wanted to put the equipment. One of the biggest advantages and ROIs schools are facing is putting in equipment that in five or six years time when they need to upgrade they can scale it up or move it to the edge.
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