These are the words of Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, Vice-Chair of Ayala Foundation.

And there is already a wide gap between the present public school system and the students.  While public school teachers still use traditional methods of teaching, the students no longer appreciate these methods.

Diane and James Oblinger (2005) present some characteristics of Net Gen students which may be true of our present crop of high school students.  Net Gen students are comfortable with using technology; they are capable of multi-tasking; they put more value on speed than on accuracy; and they would rather discover things on their own or with peers instead of being told what to do.

With the apparent disconnect between old-schooled teachers and the Net Gen students, the teachers need to step up to the pace of their students.  That is why the third part of the GILAS program is on teacher training which is provided by training partners.

The training partners provide basic training on Internet/information literacy based on the theoretical concepts done in a study in India.  Some of the training partners include Microsoft, who is also inviting other software companies to train the teachers and students, and NGOs like Bato Balani and FitEd.

At the moment, teachers undergo two days of training with no fixed outline and every thing depends on what the training partner will provide the teachers with.  Students spend as much as 2-3 hours per week using the computer and are closely supervised by their teachers.  The topics discussed in the Internet classes are as diverse as the teachers teaching the subject.  Luigi and I had a lengthy discussion on this particular issue of teacher and student training because the learning objectives and outcomes have to be defined, be integrated into the curriculum as part of a course or a stand-alone subject, and should not be a matter left to the teacher alone.  According to him, a student who was taking lessons in web site design wished that their teachers could help them in using search engines and choosing from the results.  These lamentations resonate with the results of the study I conducted for my graduate research.  There is more to information/Internet literacy than learning to design web sites. 

Apart from problems in assessment, he also pointed out some key issues that will arise after connecting the schools and for which they need a helping hand.  These are the development of strategies and alliances for training and sustainability; maintaining a network of local organizations and schools that would maintain a helpdesk; and selling the idea to stakeholders.  Clearly, GILAS is still undergoing birth pains but I’m positive they can overcome it.

Local government units interested to take on the project should look closely at how Lapu-Lapu City will progress at the end of the school year.  Results, however, are expected to vary owing to the inconsistencies in the curriculum as mentioned earlier.  Already, the honorable representatives of Batangas and Cavite have expressed their interest to take part in the project.  Congressman Mandanas wants Batangas to be the first wired province in the country and has gone to great lengths convincing the businessmen in the province to raise the counterpart funds.  Congressman Abaya of Cavite on the other hand has agreed to donate half-a-million pesos as counterpart fund for his district likewise with Senator Magsaysay who pledged P500M from his pork barrel to support the program.

Because as former DTI Secretary Mar Roxas puts it, “We are building basic infrastructure that has positive effects well beyond education.  In the end, our corporate community will also benefit from an improved and better equipped human resource pool.”  And that, my friends, is what lifelong learning is all about.

000  000  000  000  000

PDA-phone users will have something to look forward to at the end of the month.  I had a brief chat with O2’s country manager, Lawrence Lee on a new model they are set to launch soon.  Lawrence sees a huge potential for the PDA-phone in the country that he sees not the small market of PDA-phone users but the big chunk of non-users.  With a country of mobile phone users, he is up to the challenge of converting them to embrace the PDA-phone.  He doesn’t need to convince me in that area.

And of course, I am still appealing for sponsors willing to print and mount the winning digital works of art on the environment that will be exhibited around the schools in Metro Manila and eventually around the country.  The works of art published in this page last week were kind of small to be appreciated so I will be posting some samples in my blog. 

(For comments, feedback, suggestions email me at openingpagemb@yahoo.com and for behind the scene stories, visit my blog at http://techiepeachy.blogspot.com)