Over the past few months, the Economist magazine has conducted two “Oxford-style” debates on topics related to education. The third begins today.
This one, like the first, is about how technology relates to education and offers this proposition for discussion:
Social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom.
Supporting the proposition is Ewen McIntosh, an educational consultant and edublogger from Scotland. On the con side is Michael Bugeja, the director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University.
While the discussion on both sides will be interesting to follow, I think Ewen already has the upper hand.
His opening statement was a collaborative effort, “effectively co-written in a 25 minute Twitter conversation across the web and mobile phones”.
If you want to register your email address with the magazine, you can vote on the issue, post comments, and sign up for email alerts (what, no Twitter?) when additional arguments and rebuttals are posted.
Thanks for covering this. If you checked the arguments out this morning, may I point out that due to a technical glitch at The Economist, two-thirds of my opening argument was omitted. That was unfortunate as I focused on the importance of assessment of technology as learning platform and provided some guidelines.
I should say that the editors at the Economist have been proactive and understanding and have reposted my entire opening argument.