WINDING DOWN, OR GEARING UP?

I’ve learned a tremendous amount through this class, about the very challenging and complex issues surrounding the technology revolution. As educators, parents, and human beings, we shoulder enormous responsibilities, many of which we had no role in choosing. For students, my greatest concerns are:

-how multi-tasking is affecting their brain development, their thinking, and the balance of physical activity, face-to-face engagement, and social manners

-how capitalists and makers of games which promote aggression and violence, are preying on educators and students to make us think that education should be designed like an online game and if it isn’t, that’s the explanation for every educational failure

-that technology is exacerbating, rather than helping to find solutions to, the rich-poor divide.

As a teacher, I have seen that carefully planned introduction of laptops, technology, inservice for teachers, and guided instruction can help lead to improved school results, such as the school highlighted in the movie Digital Nation. However, we don’t know what other variables led to this success (my guess is that many of the students in this school didn’t have laptop or perhaps even Internet access at home). And other schools with the same endeavors and intent, such as the one mentioned in the most recent issue of The International Educator, haven’t fared nearly as well.

On a personal level, my greatest concern is the environmental impact of electronic waste.
Producers of devices – from laptops to kindle to iPad to whatever will be on the market next week – all compete fiercely to get schools to buy their product. In affluent settings, a college might adopt kindle for its freshmen, and a year later decide it wasn’t the best idea. In poorer countries such as Romania, a government might provide families with computers to improve education, but without Internet access and home training and moderation, the computer ends up being a gaming tool and ends up detracting from schoolwork, lowering grades, and defeating the whole purpose of the project. There’s lots of good intent out there, but I would guess hundreds of thousands of these toxic tools end up in the dump within a year. Is all this worth the human and environmental cost, and better than sticking with books, the electronic tools we already have, and face-to-face conversations with the humans who have to figure out how to save this planet?

I think Korea, perhaps moreso than other nations, tried to adopt technology in a very planned way. Yet look at the tremendous social problems they are having now, as illustrated in Digital Nation. I don’t think their social problems related to technology are greater than other places; I think they are just acknowledging them sooner, and trying to address them faster and more openly. Is this the kind of global society we want to live in?

Finally, many of the scenarios in the Horizon report and some of the statistics Jeff shared in class just don’t check out when I try to verify them. I’ve talked to 3 recent US college graduates who told me that they didn’t need to multitask in college classes, and when they did, it distracted them and decreased learning. I know 4 Americans who don’t have Internet access at home because they can’t afford it. I polled 4 of my Grade 8 classes at ISB and only 15% of the students had iPhones or Blackberries. And in ALL of the informal class discussion we’ve had, students say they want a BALANCE of online activity and other types of classroom learning.

Pegagogically, the best thing I learned about was the power of connectivity, and I can vastly improve the Family Heritage Project to improve the communication aspects on several levels. All in all, a thoughtful and powerful learning experience!