Teachers warned to accept computers or redundancy

Academic staff need to embrace teaching using computers and the internet or be redundant in five years, according to an Australian professor.

Dr Dale Spender, a specialist on information technology and learning and professional development for women, is employed by the University of Queensland to help staff come to terms with on-line teaching.

She is in Nelson this week for the opening of Nelson Polytechnic's Library Learning Centre.

While here, Dr Spender will give a seminar on the transition from a print and industrial-based culture to the digital age, a transition she said tertiary institutions were trying to avoid.

She said academics, mostly in their late 40s and early 50s, were putting up "a great deal of resistance" to adjusting to computers and on-line teaching.

"Most realise there's very little in it for them, and that they'll never be computer-competent like today's 20-year-olds."

However, if they did not provide the information customers were interested in buying, they would not have a job in five years, she said.

"Basically, if tertiary institutions are not a business or an industry, they won't survive."

Every other marketplace was going through the technology revolution which was globalising information, and tertiary institutions needed to keep up, Dr Spender said.

On-line learning appealed to young people because it was challenging and egalitarian, rather than the authority-based university system, and encouraged independence and creativity rather than dependence on a teacher. It also cost students less time and money.

New Zealand and Australia were capable of producing their own information, Dr Spender said. If they did not, they would become Third World information receivers. They had already proven themselves "disproportionately successful" in print, films, television, art and literature.

"The raw material of the future is intellectuality and intelligence. Ideas have to be nurtured. At the moment, so much energy is going into resistance."

Schools also needed to update their teaching, she said. Those that taught "back to basics" approaches to learning core skills like reading were training students for a lifetime of unemployment, she said.

Instead, interactive, computer-based learning with images and sounds was the direction of the future, with memory becoming less important than knowing how to find information quickly.-NZPA.