This really good article written by Kentaro Toyama and published via The Chronicle of Higher Education. In his article Toyama, traces his own journey into his experience with the integration of technology for learning.This has been a conundrum which many policy makers have been faced with ever since technology started making its ways in education. The author clearly points out that the success of the use of technology, especially in education, doesn’t really depend on the technology or on the device, or any other tool. It really depends on the user – the teacher, the student, the parent. Education then starts to be perceived as a mesh of responsibility that needs to be carried by everyone who is involved. What we have instead is this… the policy maker decides on the use of a particular technology, the technology is implemented (fully or maybe not) in the classrooms, the teacher has to make use of it (even if he or she has to create makeshift activities to fit it in an existing structure. The end result seems to indicate that teachers become unhappy as they speak of technology that is foisted on them, the students are still pretty much disengaged, and lifelong learning becomes just rhetoric.
Last week I overheard a conversation between two teachers, as it inevitably turned to technology and how it’s affecting them. One teacher told the other that she doesn’t really use the Interactive Whiteboard because after all she sees no point in using it. The other told her that she’s lucky to have an Interactive Whiteboard “at least” because she had to move the portable projector around to be able to project something in her class. They were muttering that they couldn’t keep up with all the changes they were supposed to be doing in their classroom. They mentioned that the next upcoming change is a learning management system and after that – who knows? They just gave up because in the end, they said, the people who decide on all of these changes, leave them to cope with them. And without the right supporting structures, who would monitor them to see what they are doing?
Maybe I shouldn’t generalise from just one conversation, and maybe there are teachers who really are struggling to fix education as best as they can. However I think the educational structures in general are not helping at all. In education there is more lacking than just tools and devices. How long will we keep teaching that ICT is all about devices, or all about how to use office applications? How long will we take to realise that that the digital era we live in is so much more than the technology?
Seriously Virtual 