lmo-image

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working with my Full Sail EMDT students teaching and learning more about online learning management systems. I’ve been using online tools for teaching and learning for over nine years and tech in my classrooms for over 15-years, so I generally don’t think twice about the role of tech in education. But what got me thinking was the depth and complexity of the tools we’ve been studying and the largely unrewarded efforts it will take for our students to get some of these systems rolling. It can be such an uphill battle just to get meaningful online access in the classroom. So I started thinking that some very basic questions needed to be considered in order for my students to be fully prepared to translate what we’re studying into something that they can use in the classroom. The following thoughts and videos were posted for my students to read before our weekly online meeting.

The Role of Technology in Education

pcburningAs you work through this course’s reading assignments and create your Udutu project you might notice that you might be the only one among your peers working at such a high level of expectation as far as the integration and useage of technology in the day-to-day functioning of a classroom. Why is that? The normal excuse on the part of educators tends to be the lack of time and on the part of administration the lack of funds. And even when technology is brought into the classroom the purchasing process tends to be such a top-down “what do we need now” event, lacking any long-term vision or implementation plan that it’s no suprise that thirty-years after the arrival of the first small computers into the classroom, we’re still having this discussion.

One of the voices of dissent is astronomer Clifford Stoll, who feels that the last thing we need is to have students equate staring at a picture of the Louvre on a computer screen with anything remotely similar to experiencing the real thing. When Dr. Stoll wrote Silicon Snake Oil (1996) the Internet was in just in its commercial infancy, NetDay had 20,000 volunteers wiring local schools to the Internet and there was great buzz about improving education by improving access to the Information SuperHighway. At the time his concern was whether this investment in infrastructure could be better spent on teachers instead of tools. Over a dozen years later, with institutions flying to “online learning” as a way to cheaply expand programs without having to invest in more facilities or faculty, the question still remains whether sound pedagogy is even entering into these decisions.

The following videos look at the role of technology in education, but not in such a “either/or” point of view. The first video harkens from the dawn of the small computer era when Seymore Papert developed something called Logo to teach programming to children:

This next video is one man’s crazy idea to enable third world children to completely skip industrialization and move from agrarian culture to the information age. Another alumni from the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte talks about the deployment of the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) program:

In this last video the protagonist looked outside his office window, to a wall that separated his nice surroundings from a slum and thought, I wonder what would happen if… Thus began Sugata Mitra‘s “Hole in the Wall/Digital Divide“ studies:

Please review these videos and come to our Wimba session ready to talk about the Role of Technology in Education.

Sources: