The Demise of TSOF

I have sat quietly since the demise of TSOF, unsure due to the political nature of this issue how it would effect me. I now blog on this topic, being encouraged to by our states Computers in Education Group (CEGSA).

TSOF was a pillar of light for our state, providing educational research and fantastic facilities for meetings and trainings.

Over the years the funding has been cut and the center has had to cut back on features and begin charging schools to visit. In effect the government has been cutting th service for years to reduce the impact of shutting the service.

The model is to be replaced with one teacher in each district to support all teachers in that area. This will be supplemented by video conferencing.

The two problems with this model are that the teachers in districts tend to be primary teachers. This is fine and offers excellent support for primary teachers, however fails to address the more complex and varying needs of the secondary teacher.

Secondly is that video conferencing only works in conjunction with other support. Face-to-face and a form of communication for afterwards are critical to the success of learning via distance. This will be no different for professionals.

Being a part of a local delivery hub we haven't even used the "talking head" component of the software we have been given. Finding that once you are aware of who you are speaking too it tends to be a pointless feature that hogs bandwidth. We use the voice and whiteboard features extensively in conjunction with Moodle and other technologies.

Don't get me wrong I believe their is a place for elearning, but this model does not support it.

Further TSOF undertook research and provided the results of this to schools and professionals to dissect and use as fit. Who will do this now?

Should we even mention that the infrastructure that the video conferencing is to be used on has had issues since its conception (nearly two years ago) with it recently being in an extremely un-useful state for nearly two weeks. Not to mention its frequent outages, and poorly timed down-time that seems to always coincide with the holidays prior to year 12's finishing or when organised training requires it.

I have always been a strong believe in using Centra and other such services to support the country teacher. Anything to reduce our need to travel to the city for training is fantastic but face-to-face is important and sometimes meeting centrally is important. Will we get any ideas from up North or Central now that we will be provided with only face-to-face meetings within our district?

I guess we will now be relying on the good-will of Adelaide schools to ensure that state-wide events have a venue. Hope these schools will be able to support the wide range of software that people are experimenting with/using promoting across the state.

South Australia was once the leading State in learning technologies, we were a leader in our field having excellent training, research and state of the art facilities for teachers... Now we have no centralised centre, nor a workable state network for which to collaborate.Our Internet is near useless and any Web 2.0 tools or collaborative tools are banned, ensuring teachers can not be innovative. We are moving very quickly into the dark ages. What happened?