Blog Response

Q:

1. Respond by describing your technology background. How tech savvy are you? How does technology impact your daily life? What are your feelings about technology?

In addition, describe what your expectations are for this course.

2. Share you reflections about the article and the video. Think in terms of the implications on teaching and learning.

A:

1. Like anyone, my relationship to technology has been partially determined by when I grew up. I will spare you a fuddy-duddy nostalgia tour, but I do remember 8-tracks, rotary dial phones, and early computers whose memory capacity could be easily outmatched by a modern digital watch. My attitude toward watching the world I grew up in change by ever more powerful, ever smaller, ever faster innovations is skeptically open-minded.

I've never been especially fearful of learning to dive in and find the benefits of software, filesharing sites, discussion boards, digital cameras, music players, podcasts, and the like. Although I'm over thirty-five, I don't fit the portrait painted by the person in our first class who would see me as a hesitant and stubborn tech adopter. When SAP was introduced at work for managing our purchasing and budgeting, for instance, I readily transitioned to using it. So, as far as my own tech savviness goes, put me down as a six, ten being computer hackers, software developers, and code writers and one being a landline, snailmail, and typewriter luddite. My daily life has been greatly and forever changed by technology, particularly computers. I've never been an organized or systematic paper filer, so the incredible storage and retrieval functions of computers have made my life much easier. (I gasp in horror at stories like the one about Hemingway's first wife losing a draft of what would have been his debut novel on a train. Today, he'd have it on his PC and backed up somewhere else.) Besides the marvels of storage and retrieval, I interact daily with a bunch of friends dispersed all over the country on a discussion board and keep in touch with friends and family online, too. Anyone looking to counter the charge that computers have isolated us could use me as their case in point. I also am an amazed and grateful user of digital media (especially MP3s and digital photography) and satellite navigation (I don't recall the last time I had to ask someone for directions). Things like this very blog and being able to drop in multimedia (see destructive robot illustration at top) into plain text are just astounding and easily taken for granted. I could wax on about the revolutionary aspects of technology and yet I am not completely won over.

You don't need to look to hard to see actual and potential darksides of technology: the GPS hiker in the wilderness whose batteries fail (he probably never learned to use a map and compass); the water and power grid, our military, your identity--all capable of being compromised because all are stored or controlled by computers; overwhelming deluges of information (Chevrolet key word search in Google nets 78,400,000 Web pages in 0.25 seconds!!) but little guidance; the vapidity of the blogosphere, the tweet, the facebook update, the ad hominem discussion board attacks (how much of this will be worthy of being read, remembered, discussed in 25 years? 100?); the "underwear bomber" radicalized by Jihadi Web sites, and on and on. I think being an intelligent and careful user of technology is the key. Like any tool, technology is not inherently good or evil but can become so if you don't think before you use it and weigh the pros and cons.

Regarding my expectations for this course, I want to learn how to harness applications like blogging, filesharing, wikis, podcasts, hypertext, etc. to engage students and make lessons more fun and productive. Ultimately, I'd like to leave the class with a lot of practical tech knowledge and a grasp of the pedagogical theory behind using it well, not irresponsibly or indiscriminately.

2.

Article

Unconnected. Unrelated. Unappealing. These are the words describing how students see what they are being taught. Not that it is all our fault. Littky and Grabelle point out that ever since an NEA 1892 meeting in which a somewhat sinister-sounding Committee of Ten created the artificial divisions known as "subjects," we've fractured the preexisting unity of knowledge as it exists in the real world for the sake of convenience--just to give things a handle, put them in a prelabeled slot. The authors talk about how their big picture schools let students pick one question that interests them (which neatly avoids the boredom issue) and investigate it fully in the course of an internship. The student interns quickly learn that the real world doesn't have neat distinctions and they need to be adept communicators, social scientist and historians, mathematicians, and scientists all at the same time, not to mention being able to set a calendar alarm to make it to meetings or remember To Do items. I found it particularly important that the authors gave implementation ideas for teachers who don't have the luxury of working at a big picture school. It gave me hope that no matter where I wind up teaching, I can work with other teachers or strike out on my own to teach to the real world not to a subject.

Video

In just a few minutes, this video opened my eyes to how poorly educators have taken advantage of what technology can do and how hollow the political lip-service about creating the high-tech workers of tomorrow is when confronted by reality. For instance, how can anyone take stump speech rhetoric about the value of technology in our schools seriously when education is 55th out of 55 industries in IT intensiveness? Also a shocking condemnation of the status quo was the claim that kids are more engaged and challenged outside of school (where they are expressing themselves online and in text messages, encountering all sorts of new media and vast troves of information, and interacting with peers) than in it.

Much of what was stressed was not about technology itself as much as it was about reforming education to prepare students for the "new jobs". According to many we should celebrate the "death of education" (and No Child Left Behind, at least in one commentor's mind) and herald the "dawn of learning" by dropping the emphasis on teaching to standards and the "vending machine, right answer" approach. Instead of drilling rote facts into bored heads, the emphasis should be on developing twenty-first century literacies in our students, teaching them "how to find information, validate it, synthesize it, leverage it, communicate it, collaborate with it, and problem-solve with it."

Just as important as investing in technology and revamping how we are preparing students for "team-based, mulicultural, multidisciplinary, multilingual jobs," according to the video, was the need to get teachers connected so they can share their ideas and experiences and form a real community.

Going back to my expectations for this class that you asked about in question one, I think if I can be trained as part of the generation of teachers who better adapts students for a demanding new world then I'd regard the experience as a big success.