You say you want a revolution?
Ed. Policy, Ed. Tech. April 16th, 2008
After presenting a paper about a study of an ed. tech. integration support program, the discussant mentioned that he drew very similar conclusions from a simlar study he did…20 years prior. In other words, the role of the technology support personnel in schools is no different today than it was 20 years ago.
That got me wondering and looking back at some other seminal writings about ed. tech. from a decade or so ago. I stumbled upon this article written by friend/colleague/mentor Dale Mann in 1999. My favorite part is this:
| Whether or not schools help, telecommunication has and will move learning to the learner. In the earliest times, boys went with their fathers to learn to hunt. The artists of the cave walls moved learning inside. The creation of the common school still required learners to go to the site of learning and to be dependent on the knowledge masters. As long as learners have to go to the learning site and the learning master, they will be dependent and that dependency makes them vulnerable to the politics (and ethnic and class and gender) and prejudices of the masters. |
Mann also writes, “With the Internet, learning goes to the learner…The democratizing impacts of that reversal are only dimly perceived. And the consequences for bricks-and-mortar knowledge citadels have not begun to be imagined, although they are probably captured by the observation of technology as train–you will be either on it or under it.”
Many of us lament how the institution of public schooling has missed the train, and I personally have postulated that one of many reasons for missing the train has been fear (from and of many things). I wonder if there is some unorganized resistance to technology within the institution of public schooling out of fear of losing control of the learning enterprise. In other words, perhaps the learning revolution threatens the entire bricks-and-mortar enterprise.
Whenever I have my students read Roger Schank and Kemi Jona’s vision of education in the 21st Century, they are almost all shocked and horrified. Without articulating it explicitly, they are incredibly fearful of giving up the sort of control that Schank suggests.
I encourage you to read Mann’s article and the Schank/Jona white paper and let me know what you think. Do you want a learning revolution?
Tags: education, learning, Mann, revolution, Schank, technology
Both are great, but I really love the Schank/Jona paper because it actually outlines what is an obvious and beneficial progression.
We’re lucky that some major universities have taken the lead when it comes to making open course materials available online. The same provincial attitude of local school boards causes an attitude among local schools of “why should we make things and share them online for people who don’t pay our local school taxes?”
I love that the transformation, while seemingly impersonal, would actually let students have a more individualized educational career by giving flexibility of choosing courses and working at their own pace. It’s infuriating that this isn’t available now when there is no technological barrier…it just hasn’t happened yet. Is it possible to convince educators with 30 years of experience that this is the right solution? Will it have to wait for a changing of the guard?
Which guard would we have to wait to change, Dave. If, as the great sociologist Dan Lortie is correct, and teachers ultimately resort to what was modeled for them for thousands of hours, which generations of teachers will have had their own K-12 experience characterized by modern, technology-infused teaching and learning?