Alien Invasion
Posted by simonsays on October 18, 2007
On Tuesday night I had quite a night. I sat down for a “fireside” chat with around one hundred teachers and education technology guru David Warlick to have a conversation about what it means to be an educator of today’s “info savvy students” in the “new information landscape” and the changing boundaries that we are experiencing due to technological developments. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my classroom practice and the limitations that I face due to restricted access to technology. 
As one of my colleagues likes to say “our classrooms look the same they did when we were in school” twenty years ago. We still have the same old set up of rows of desks facing the front that creates this sense of education as a system for the passive reception of knowledge from the “sage on the stage.” It kind of makes me wonder when I think about my own Catholic tradition of education that recognizes, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, that education is not mere transmission of knowledge from one who possesses it to an empty vessel. Yet there we are. David’s keynote struck a chord with me when he said, some schools are seeing the possibilities of the use of technology and they should serve as a model for all of us in education. The schools in my board have a ban on cell phones and iPods in the classroom. It is true that often times students are using them in an inappropriate manner, however, this is, perhaps, a symptom of the lack of change we have admittedly seen in the way we educate. It sent chills up my spine when David was talking about today’s students and their connection to their technology and their networks and how they are like aliens with invisible tentacles that keep them connected and “the problem is when they come into our classroom we chop those tentacles off because we want our children to be the students we want to teach rather than teaching the children that they are and this is an insult to our children.” I think we need to speed up the rate of change before we are the ones who are chopped off and become irrelevant.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
That remark of David’s about the tentacles and chopping them off, was that the one that really hit home to me too. And yes, it is an insult. As our kids come into school we say they should get rid of fthe things that matter most to them. Could we do anything else to make ourselves more irrelevant to them than to diss on their lifestyle tools of choice?