As well as Hwb, one of the recommendations from the ‘Digital Classrooms’ task and finish group to the Welsh Government in the ‘Find it, Make it, Use it, Share it’ report was for a National Digital Learning Event, which is now timetabled in for June next year. It was mentioned again last week at the Hwb briefing meeting, and I started wondering is that was one thing the group might have got a little bit wrong.
If you’ve read much of my stuff, you’ll know that I’m a firm believer in only using digital ‘stuff’ when it adds value, and it struck me that perhaps this is one of those occasions when we might be better off without it.
I’d rather see a Wales Learning Festival (in the model of the Scottish Learning Festival) where digital technology is there, being used and taken for granted as just another tool that can be used for learning. Calling it a ‘digital learning’ event run the risks of putting ‘digtial learning’ on a pedestal that it doesn’t need and may actually be counter productive if people focus on the ‘digital’ rather than the ‘learning’
After all, as Clay Shirky points out in ‘Here Comes Everybody’:
Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring… It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.
Is it too late to change the name?