OK. I follow Ray Kurzweil and Marc Prensky, and think Alvin Toffler may have been talking more about education than other disciplines without knowing. As educators we have aresponsibility to meet our students where they live. Some of this can be started in K12, but that is dependent upon the technology that the district has available, the willingness of those teaching, and the technosavvy of the administration.
I'm sorry, but the 'if we build it they will come' mentality won't work if we are using the wrong materials and blueprints.
Who is our target audience and what is their comfort level not only with technology, but with change in general?
Another article acknowledges the importance of dealing with modern material. Closing the Gap Between Education and Technology by Chris Riedel in THE Journal discusses some of the revelations (or is it proselytizing) of Mark Benno. You can find the article here.
An interesting point related was the lack of watches in classrooms. This got me thinking about my digital immigrant self and how I have come to use technology.
I have not worn a watch since I bought my first PDA in 2002. No reason. Two months ago I bought an old tech Nokia 9300 to replace another Nokia that was terribly difficult to text using. Hey, I've been involved with computers since the TRS-80 days, so QWERTY is very natural to me.
Now it starts to blend. I have a PDA that is also in many ways a mini-laptop, I have Internet access (though the original browser on this Symbian Series 80 phone is truly dismal), and the only piece of regularly used technologies missing are a decent camera, a PC emulator like Virtual Box, and a higher resolution screen, or a miniaturized pullout adjunct screen like that on the new Thinkpad W700ds, and a decent MP3 player. My understanding is that the E90 addresses much of the shortcoming.
Add some voice recognition software tied to a decent browser and you have a combo for online discussion groups that would be useful indeed. Or even better something that would allow you to video blog to your course management system, the N95 with its dual cameras comes to mind. So the use of video clips or video blogging on the fly and easily creating posts in threaded discussions from the car (with phone or perhaps even enhanced GPS *????* ) becomes not only possible but almost easy.
Of course the article takes a little different tack. I'm married to a QUERTY keyboard for comfort, which in and of itself dates me. The article talks about multitasking that takes on a different flavor, actually taking in information from different sources literally at the same time. In my life the only equivalent I can come up with is when I am on the elliptical. I'll frequently listen to music (I recently discovered Dave Matthews and am exhausting that catalog now) while watching the news with the SAP program on to read the dialog. That is in some sense the spirit, if not the actual application, that is mentioned in the article. Now if I am listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour while watching the news on the elliptical, and actively participating in both then I might be closer.
I know, I know. Some will say that multitasking is not a good thing, that it decreases efficiency. All you need to do is plug the terms multitasking and efficient into Google to see the debate. But the fact remains people do it. Serial or Parallel? True multitasking or merely task switching (think GEM vs. Windows NT ). You be the judge.
But I digress. :-)
"Kids use technology in ways many of us would never think of, he said. " That's a good start.
This article is worth reading and the ACOT2 programis worth following.
