For instance, a Glow Group could be used for real collaborative learning giving all pupils concerned a sense of ownership and self-worth. The same is true of a blog or podcast, but it could also be achieved with paper and pencil in a classroom. The newer tools are just motivators, however powerful.

Your own thinking has led me to another connection in all of this – and it’s a connection with one of Ivan Illich’s statements. Thanks for reminding me of it, and I’ll explain when I have time tomorrow (possibly).

Bob – I think we just have to be realistic about the little that has been achieved to date, but we also have to ‘keep the faith’ and struggle on until it really does start to make a difference. I know it’s been said a million times before, but I think we’re reaching a genuine turning point in the use of technology in education. It just feels different from anything that has come before. Again, I’ll expand when I have a little more time.

I too am depressed at how little ICT and all the exciting new tools have actually changed the classroom methodology. The Blackboard is still the centre piece however high tech it might appear to be.

I look forward to reading what Greg Whitby has to say.

I have made some earlier posts to my own blog about this subject, so if it’s Ok with you, I will add the new tag to them.

I guess I would be equally surprised, Chris, should there “… come a time when expert knowledge is deemed unnecessary.” The heart of the question for me, though, is in the nature of knowledge itself and the extent to which that is changing, if at all.

I’ve been trying to work up my own thoughts on Greg’s question, and I think my focus might be on the extent to which the very concept of the subject discipline as we have known it for so long is still useful as a means of organising the curriculum, or of organising our perspective on knowledge. Is the ambiguity you identify to be found in the question itself, or is it somehow in our changing understanding of the nature of knowledge (or our understanding of the changing nature of knowledge, a quite different thing altogether)?

As a primary teacher, I was always relatively comfortable with some vagueness around how I might have tried to define a ’subject’, and I think I’ve always accepted that, in any case, the notion of the subject that we have lived with for so long has always been, to an extent, an artificial construct – but also one that has developed and shifted continuously over time. ‘English’ as a subject discipline, for instance, has certainly never stood still.

I appreciate too that we run the risk of obfuscation through the use of jargon – but jargon can have its uses too. While we are in this period of change, the language we use is necessarily vague because we simply have not yet come to a position of general agreement on definitions. Maybe we never will.

I’ll post some more extensive thoughts on this soon.