Book learning out of date, says Greenfield

An urgent national consultation on the future of learning is needed in the face of technological advances that are creating a divide between bookish lecturers and their computer-centred students, according to Baroness Greenfield.

Lady Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University and director of the Royal Institution, argued in a lecture this week that traditional lectures, examinations, books and, perhaps, even reading and writing are on their way to becoming obsolete and irrelevant in a society that is being transformed by information technology.

Students of the not-too-distant future - who will be at home with mobile and virtual reality devices, and wear "smart" clothes that can deliver news updates and play music - will be more comfortable accessing the information they need from talking computers than they will be searching a library for a book, Lady Greenfield told further education and sixth-form college heads at their summer conference in Stratford-upon-Avon on Monday.

She said the implications for the teaching and testing of students were so significant that the Government should begin a consultation with academics, IT experts and educationists to consider how the education system should change in response. She told conference delegates: "The young people you are teaching will be living in a society where they have to evaluate these technologies and decide whether and how they are going to use them.

"Perhaps eventually we will face a world where reading and writing are almost obsolete. If all facts are accessible to everyone, what will be the need to learn?"

Lady Greenfield said that although the scenarios she described seemed futuristic, the technology needed to make them a reality was available now.

It could open a divide between academics and teachers for whom books were the usual source of information and ideas, and students who expected to do almost all their research via computers.

"These kinds of questions are not really being attended to at the moment," Lady Greenfield said. "We are still assuming that students will sit at the computer screen and use it like a book."

She told The Times Higher that she thought education should begin to focus more on developing understanding and creativity in young people rather than on learning facts.

Science students, for instance, should be given more opportunity to conduct experiments so they could "get things wrong and learn from the experience".

Such an approach could spell the end for examinations and for traditional teaching methods, she said. "There is no point spending a lot of time testing ideas and in discussions if the students are just asked to regurgitate facts.

"Already students are downloading information to cut and paste into essays.

Perhaps we should take that as a sign that we are approaching the end of an era, and we need to rethink the way we evaluate educational attainment," she added.

tony.tysome@thes.co.uk

Mix-and-match diplomas revisited

A new overarching diploma that allows sixth-form and college students to mix academic and vocational study may still be possible even though ministers have ruled out scrapping A levels, the Government has indicated.

Officials at the Department for Education and Skills said the new specialised vocational diplomas planned for 2008 could be flexible enough to include elements of academic study from GCSE or A-level courses.

Peter Lauener, the new DFES director-general for lifelong learning, told delegates at this week's summer conference of the Association of Colleges that the new framework would allow students to take a mixture of vocational and academic routes up to higher education.

Further education and sixth-form college heads, who met in Stratford-upon-Avon, said this offered a "window of opportunity" to resurrect the idea of an overarching diploma, which was recommended in the Tomlinson review of 14-to-19 education but not included in the Government's 14-to-19 White Paper in February.

John Brennan, chief executive of the AoC, told The Times Higher that he wanted to see "a vocational framework within which the academic route can be fitted in due course".

A spokeswoman for Universities UK said it welcomed the proposals because vocational study needed parity of esteem with academic courses.