The most important elements of IBM's $1 million partnership investment with the Government in three schools in Blakestown are not what can be seen in the short term. Rather, the real impact will be felt down the line, when a single project with a narrow initial test base of three clusters of schools can be expected to grow into something much broader and more significant. This is not a test-tube programme which lets a handful of schools bask in high technology advantages, but a model which, in its four-year development in US schools, quickly spread throughout entire regions, creating innovative prototypes which could be actively utilised by other schools.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, IBM launched the programme in two schools. Today, 110 are involved. In Florida, three schools decided to submit proposals to get themselves included in the project. Now, 210 schools are linked into the network.
The three Blakestown schools are an initial important step in the first large-scale project Ireland has undertaken to use information technology actively within schools not just as a convenient tool for a number of smaller projects, but to link students, parents, teachers and the wider community into a knowledge network.
It is a project which recognises that information technology is a tool, not a panacea. "We're certainly not here just to drop some computers into classrooms and hope for the best," noted IBM chief executive officer, Mr Louis Gerstner Jnr, in Dublin yesterday. "Otherwise, we end up with technology and not progress."
The Wired for Learning project, part of the Reinventing Education initiative, brings students, teachers, parents, community mentors, and others into a secure school network. Using the Web, parents can hold private online conferences with teachers, teachers can share syllabi and course lessons, students can ask questions of mentors, post Web pages or create online projects. What it stresses is not technology, but communication. The technology is simply a tool for sharing information. That's how technology should be seen and used it needs that sort of demystification. On the other hand, as the cost of this programme indicates, incorporating technology into schools isn't simple or straightforward. It requires the proper skills and abilities to design the programme and get the hardware and software set up in the classroom, using what Mr Gerstner called "some of the best brains in IBM".
The concern, of course, will be that those brains might not always be there. What happens when the programme finishes its initial three-year run? Education Minister, Mr Martin, stressed that the Government intends to train people who can continue to manage the project's technical infrastructure. That is crucial to the overall success of this important programme. Ireland needs to view such projects not as one-off novelties, but as core elements of longterm national educational policy.
