I didn’t go to all of the sessions that I had hoped to go to and I found myself in the exposition area watching vendor demoes a lot more than I had intended. All this to say that I felt that a lot of what was presented was about new methods of delivering the same content from yesteryear, in other words, old wine in new wineskins. This is not to say that I’m not interested in podcasting or blogs or any of the other technologies getting all the buzz these days. It’s just that coming from my experience teaching technology over the past 11-years and especially observing the middle school world were teaching seems to be such an “us against them” adversarial battle, I’m left to believe that we have a larger problem here than whether we have enough computers or not. So, you see, just sticking the same old crap into new whiz-bang multimedia extravaganzas misses the point that we’re ignoring how it is that humans actually learn. I’ve come to believe that there are fundamental flaws in how how we teach in the public school system.
In fairness NECC isn’t about addressing such questions as whether our public school system is a bankrupt shell running on shear inertia from hundreds of years of cultural traditions. And I certainly don’t believe that the presenters and attendees are any less committed to their students or the profession. I just feel that, while technology in education is powerful and necessary, the cost and efforts needed to make it work are going to be more of a crucible about what we really believe about education more than being a panacea that’s going to fix all the flaws. I mean, technology has been invading the educational space for over 25-years and most classrooms are just as un-integrated and teacher just as reluctant to use the devices in any consistent, meaningful way as they were 25-years ago. I’m always hearing that the problem is that teachers need more training or that there is never enough technology, but I’m convinced that the problem is public education is inauthentic and soulless. It’s not that we don’t have enough trained teachers, it’s that the system is built on cultural structures and expectations that are foreign and disconnected from the lives of our communities and students. Thus, the problem is not tech, tech-implementation, or just having enough tech. The problem is that education is no longer connected to the rest of life and, especially at the middle school/high school level, has become a low-cost baby-setting service because the American public doesn’t want to deal with the responsibilities of raising it’s own young. This is decidedly out of the scope of ISTE’s NECC conference. Sorry.

One thing that a dear friend recently said that she refuses to work with public school teachers because all they can do is complain about the system (she teaches at a private school). She’s right. Everyone knows that it’s not working but no one believes that anything they do will make it better. I commented to my principal last year that the “A through F” grading is meaningless, that we need use the assessment/mastery measures on which students can build their education (a la the language arts assessments once used at the elementary level). He agreed but said that we’d never see that kind of change during his life time. I guess maybe my work at Pepperdine and really taking a hard look at what I see going on around me leads me to not accept that answer.

It scares me to think about what is going to happen to education because I know how resistant teachers and institutions are to change. But the gap right now is so gigantic, it’s not going to go away because teachers are offered a few tech seminars. The ideologs and publishers are in control and rest of us have been lulled into believing that there is nothing that we can do about it. And we pacify our need for our efforts to mean something by celebrating the successes of the one or two teachers who make the sacrifice to “be real” with their students and are smart enough to do it in a way that registers with the governmental bean-counters. Technology is not going to fix this problem. Until we figure that out a lot of the buzz is going to be little more than old wine in new wineskins. JBB