Happy Chinese New Year! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
As the pilot phase of smart schools in Malaysia come to an end, we have not seen a post -mortem on the implementation or any success stories so far. I bet the public would wished to know how this smart school concept benefited the students. Naturally, we cannot wait for a multiyear study that follow these students into their adulthood and compare them against a control group of, ehm, non-smart (not stupid!!) school students to be carried out, but that doesn’t mean we cannot look from hindsight the direct effects of the current style of implementation and fix the low hanging fruit before<\/span> this gets rolled out nationally. You’ve gotta thank Pak Lah for putting a comma to the next phase of this project to give us a chance to catch our breath.<\/p>\n Here’s one of my own pet peeves – technology as an accelerator of the smart school project<\/span>. Some background about myself first – I’m a software engineer, child of the Internet age, always awed at the interconnectivity of the world and the highly distributed fashion of content distribution, ex-son of the e-commerce poster company<\/a>, etc. Bleh – bottomline, democratization of education<\/span> is high on my agenda – to let the teachers who can teach teach, to let the students who want to learn learn, to empower everyone – teachers, students, school boards, MOE, and everyone who’s interested in upgrading the quality education as well as further penetrate the parts of the country that lacks this information.<\/p>\n Cliches cliches… But take my word, if you read this from a technology point of view, it feels very different. I have seen first hand how B2C e-commerce companies leveled the playing field for retailers, how small time authors can write books and sell them big time because they are excellent without the marketing machine, how information have moved from the retailers to the consumers. These are exciting times my friend, it is just the beginning! There is still much to do in education, in some sense glue the entire country’s schools together into one big learning environment, so you won’t have student comlaining that their teachers are no good anymore (because they simply go for another teacher), or the lack of study materials (get ready for a totally new media in “reference books”), and at the same time liberalizing the teachers – technology can help with the chores of marking and tracking student’s performance, automatically suggest new learning materials based on learning behavior, help share, debate, and communicate with other educators around the country instead of seeing budding young techers trapped in the rut of the current education clout. This is huge!<\/p>\n I like how some teachers stand up and say that sekolah bestari (smart schools) are not about technology – now that I agree! The problem is that embracing smart schools requires a huge shift in the education culture, and it can only be achieved with what economists like to call disruptive technology. Technology has to play a part in this, otherwise we’re merely rebranding good education that already exists in certain enclave in the country. Once we find the right model, we need as much technology to accelerate it as we can possibly afford.<\/p>\n
\nto let the students who want to learn learn<\/div>\n