Here is a video which makes, in my view, a similar argument to Derek Muller's in an earlier post (This Will Revolutionize Education). If you remember, Muller's ultimate conclusion was that, with or without the use of technology, what is most important in the learning process is what goes on inside the mind of the learner. This video is from Paul Anderson's website "Boseman Science". He is a former Teacher of the Year in Montana. On this site, he publishes video lessons on quite a few science topics. He also publishes videos with his take on different educational topics. This particular video is titled One Word: Questions. The title is taken from a scene from the movie The Graduate in which Dustin Hoffman is given some sage career advice. Anyway, in Anderson's view, the commonly held idea that electronic textbooks will replace physical texts (through the dissemination of IPads, for example) will not necessarily occur in the near future. However, his main point is that electronic versus physical books is not the main issue. The more important issue relates to the types of questions that students will ultimately have to wrestle with. Poor questions on a computer are just as useless as poor questions in a physical book. (Anderson is also on the same page as Muller in pointing out that the social dimension of education is critical, and stuffing computers/Ipads into classrooms alone is not enough). In other words, once again, the technology is not the issue per se. The main issue is, as Muller pointed out previously, is what ultimately goes on in the mind of the learner.
Kev,
ReplyDeleteMaybe the question to be asked is what can technology provide that can't be had any other way. Much of the technology now goes to a duplication of what students already have, perhaps in a more convenient form. An electronic textbook doesn't provide anything new, just the same thing more conveniently and perhaps more cheaply. A calculator merely relieves a student of the need to perform elementary arithmetic, and a word processor makes it easier to type papers. The access to information over the internet is again merely a matter of convenience, making the school library redundant.
One example of a genuinely innovative use of technology was in Ethan's AP Physics C class, where he had to perform experiments with digital simulations. The simulations were often very clever and involved situations that would have been very difficult to setup physically, and I thought were very good at bringing out the physical principles involved. Here we had something that wasn't merely a recapitulation of something already there but brought in something you could only get through technology.
Dave,
DeleteI totally agree and hope to have some posts in which I discuss some tech "innovations" that are truly advancements as well as ones that are just (expensive) replacements of things already being done.
Kev