Foreshadowing an Attack on The Blu(e) Fairy

The Blue Fairy: Now, remember, Pinocchio, be a good boy. And always let your conscience be  your guide.

The Blu(e) Fairy and I “go back a long way” in teaching and (e)learning. We have “a special  understanding”, "a long history", he's my "left hand man", but today it seems that we are only “fair weather friends”.

I have spent time today preparing teaching resources to betray The Blu(e) Fairy.

Next week I will be pulling off both his blurry blue wings and snapping his blittery blue  wand when I follow a directive to train teachers in the use of MS PowerPoint, MS Publisher, Audacity and Photostory3 software.

I cannot even feign ignorance or indecision as I pin him and pluck off his wings.  I will be removing the wings of Fairy Blu(e) whilst knowing full well that

“… by and large, teacher education programmes worldwide have not been very successful in  providing teachers with knowledge, attitudes and confidence in using technologies in  classes.”  Kwok-Wing Lai (2005 p13)

And that a critical factor in this failure is identified as

“Far too often the acquisition of technical skills, rather than the pedagogy of ICT use, has  been emphasised in teacher education programmes.” Kwok-Wing Lai  (2005 p13)

The Ofsted report (2004) describes this as  “the need for competence with the technology drove the training rather than implications of  the use of ICT for learning’ (p8)

A trivial concern perhaps, given some of my conversations with the other Blue Fairy, but I find it  interesting nonetheless to think about what we accommodate in our “day to day” work in the  fairyscapes of education, and how much of what we do each day betrays what we believe.

I suspect that Lunaboca will talk about Hollis’s “recovery of personal authority” – the  importance of finding “what is true for oneself and live it in the world” regardless of the  "pigment identity" of the fairy.

It is fortunate perhaps that my relationship with The Blu(e) Fairy “has a long history” – for by the time he re-grows his fractured blurry blue wing buds and whittles another  blittery blue wand, I might have done something in teaching and (e) learning to redeem  myself.   

Kwok-Wing Lai 2005 Teachers using ICT: Myths and Realities p 9 -22 in eLearning Communities Teaching and Learning with the Web. University of Otago Press.