What do you get when you combine education with understanding change, iTunes, Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, XM satellite radio, telephones, horses, and scribes? Let's put them in the Education Innovation blender and take a look.
Do we recognize changes when we see them? And by change I am talking deep and lasting change. Do you see it when it happens?
I found this quote from Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody very interesting.
“When I was a teenager, I remember reading letters to the editor in my local paper, where the grown-ups were arguing about whether to allow students to use calculators. The unspoken worry was that since calculators had appeared so suddenly, the might disappear just as suddenly. What none of the grown-ups in that conversation understood was that there would never be a day when we needed to divide two seven-digit numbers on paper. What seemed to them like a provisional new capability was actually a deep and permanent shift, one we students recognized immediately.”
We humans have a strange propensity to see change in light of what we have known before and not what that change means, or could mean for us in the future.
Think of the scribes. They were the few who knew how to read and write and were responsible for copying the great works of their times. When the printing press and movable type were invented, it was just a new way to preserve the works of the past; it was a way for new works to be spread to people and places that never had access to written work. Eventually, the printing press allowed for the production of all sorts of books, fiction and non-fiction. The end result of this was that more people became literate and more people ended being to read and write, not less. Movable type and the printing press was not just a new way of doing the work of the scribes, it was a complete change of society and far reaching effects.
Many people saw the invention of the automobile as just a fancy, expensive, complicated horse. Why buy an automobile when a horse could get you from one location to another cheaply, as it had been doing for hundreds of years. They viewed the automobile as a different way of doing the same thing. What they couldn’t see was that the automobile was a transforming technology. The automobile made it easy to get from one place to another place that was far away and back again in the same day with passengers. It change they very definition of the word “far.” An entire infrastructure developed to accommodate the automobile because of its transforming nature of the society. It changed who we were as a culture and a country.
Think to of the phone. A phone to me was a way to communicate with someone. It could be in the same city, or, using “long distance”, across the country or even in another country. But that is not what the phone is anymore. It is a link to our friends and family. It carries our information, pictures, music, and even connects us to the network of networks, the Internet. People can’t imagine not having a cell phone and being able to contact someone anywhere at anytime from anywhere. It’s not just a phone call, it has transformed from phone call to connection and information.
Technology certainly changes things. I just had a conversation about Blue Ray vs. HD-DVD. I told my friend that I didn’t pick either because DVD’s are a dead technology to me. He couldn’t understand. He explained that the HD DVD battle had just been one by Blue Ray and that I should get a Blue Ray DVD player. I explained to him that digital bytes of information had won, that physical space was a dead technology. Why buy a DVD when I can order or buy a movie on iTunes and have it digitally delivered to my computer. No postage, no space, no wait. I noticed that even NetFlix has figured this out and now offers a digital option. The nature of digital information has changed the way the technology can and will be used.
Idea: Why not link you iTunes account to you Sirius or XM satellite radio account. When you here a song you like you simply press a button and buy the song through the satellite and have it billed to you iTunes account. Digital makes that possible.
So, what in education are we thinking about as a way to do the same thing, just different? The use of technology and on-line learning stand out in my mind. Too many teachers are still thinking that technology is just another way to do the same thing they have always done. Technology is still viewed as a fancy white board, overhead projector, and poster board all rolled in one. Those people are missing the transforming nature of technology. It is not a new way to do the same thing; it is a new way to do something different. To bring learning, (note, I said learning, not teaching) to students in a way that is meaningful and engaging to them at their specific individualized level; and do it anytime, anywhere, and at any pace.
Technology is going to transform and change our current understanding of who, what, when, where, who, and how. Like the scribes before us, education may not see it coming, or may worried about what that means, but the change will happen. Are you ready?
Recent Comments