Via Will’s blog and my NYTimes email subscription came this editorial, which sums up exactly what our new MFLE languages project aims to do here in Scotland. Content is no longer king, it’s what we do with content as teachers that matters.

In the week where the Singapore education authorities launched their weblog competition for schools (what is a weblog?), the New York Times editorial today reckons it’s time for a change in the way US education is handled, to mirror the changes made in Singapore:

‘”We have shifted the emphasis from content alone to making use of the content” on the principle that “knowledge can be created in the classroom and doesn’t just have to come from the teacher.”‘

Interestingly, the point about Singapore’s size is made:

“Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen.”

Are we doing enough in Scotland to use new (and increasingly less new) technologies to get our students collaborating with each other and the wider world? The journalist here has a bias to Maths and Science, but his point is valid enough:

“Why am I writing about this? Because math and science are the keys to innovation and power in today’s world, and American parents had better understand that the people who are eating their kids’ lunch in math are not resting on their laurels.”

But Singapore’s economy is based on links with other countries and Scotland’s is, too, although our students still don’t see this in an age where some teachers and parents dissuade them from taking a Modern Foreign Language. To make export of knowledge in any subject - Maths, Science, anything - communication in a language other than your own is essential.

Languages aside, how many of us see collaborative learning as applicable in our own classrooms, let alone with the wider world? Apart from exchanges of letters that follow the topic-based learning of a textbook, is there something else we can do to challenge our pupils and get some real-world collaboration taking place?

If we don’t do something, and do something soon, do we run the risk of losing out to other small nations who have worked out the link between what’s happening in the world of business and media and what’s got to happen in education?

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