The making of policies...

Just back from the National Instructional Design conference organized by USAID, EDC, Azim Premji Foundation.
The conference brought together a bunch of people from government, non government and commercial e-learning content development to think about how instructional design can improve the quality of education, and what policies are required to support this improvement.

Some recurring themes at the conference:

• The learning comes before the 'e'. Technology is only a tool. (Hmm. Good. Nobody can disagree with that. But as APF head Dileep Ranjekar pointed out, we need to think too about how to actually use this tool to improve the quality of education. There is potentially much at stake)
• Train the teachers and the teachers' teachers! Why aren't we using technology to educate teachers and teacher trainers? (Not teachign them how to use technology but to improve their own perceptions of teaching-learning anf what value they can add to the process)
• Learner centered design!! (Yes. Right. So what exactly are we going to do about it? how do we make our lessons learner centered? And where are the people who will do this?!)
• Technology is not computers alone. Yup. Got that. There's plenty of other great stuff to use. How about radio? Video? But just what economic and operational models do we have to make it happen?
• Let's make judicious use of resources. Let's evaluate, continuously improve and all that. Sure, let's. No one's disagreeing.

I see a pattern here. There really isn't much disagreement on the broad picture. This itself was a little surprising to me. I was under the impression people were vastly divided on the issue of technology use in the teaching learning process.

So, what's missing? I think a "middle level specificity" of what could be done, and how. Not the usual 50,000 foot view that most policies provide, but something more concrete. Not ground level specifications and prescriptions, but something at a higher level of abstraction that can be interpreted for different contexts. Something to enable practical actions in a large scale.

If stuff is articulated at this "middle level" is that a policy or is it called something else? I don't think it's important what we call it. I think it's important to be done.