Week 3 Blog: Article "Shifting Ground"

The article, "Shifting Ground" by Chris Lehmann, was an echo of what has been on any educator's mind these days.  Whether you are a near-retirement teacher who hasn't caught on with the electronic age ("I can't keep up with these kids anymore and don't understand their world") or a teacher wondering how to keep up with the technology, with the kids and their attention and interests.  It is a time of great reflection for our country and, I suspect, for other countries as well.  In the article Lehmann cites N. Postman, author of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology," who "wrote that certain technologies are transformative,
not additive, and used the Guttenberg printing press as his example: when the printing press was
invented, the outcome wasn’t Europe plus some books, but a whole new Europe. Despite
investing billions of dollars in hardware, wiring, and professional development, too many
schools are the same as ever, only with some computers, when they should be whole new schools
where kids are accomplishing things that no one ever dreamed possible."

I have to agree with Postman.  I think that the world is exploding with change right now and, with the advancements in technology, we are going beyond a world where technology is invented to serve us and moving into a social culture where we are defined by technology.  As it is stated so often lately, I don't even know what jobs I am preparing my kids for anymore!


I think Lehmann's article gets to the heart of the matter when he begins to discuss the current way that schools integrate technology into the standard curriculum (as functional tools to aid in the same old learning that has been happening for years and years) as opposed to the way that we could be using technology; to go beyond the boundaries of what our limited imaginations have proposed and really redefine what it means to be educated.

The Web 2.0 tools available give teachers and students different ways of doing things and looking at the world that transform the definition of learning.  It isn't the same old reading, writing and arithmetic anymore.  It is all of those things, interchangeably mixed together.  We no longer have to memorize things or refer to text books.  We have so much information at our fingertips that it is less necessary now to teach them what to know as it is how to filter through the information available to them.  It is also true that our students need to know how to work collaboratively (their ability to do so is a thousand times easier now that they are able to reach out to the entire universe through the internet!  And.. they must learn to sift through all the information and integrate it into their thoughts... "think critically" (wow, I have been hearing that a lot lately!)

We have to embrace technology like our students have embraced it.  I think the only difficult part is that we will never be as fluent in it as our native speakers (our kids) but we can sure make a good try!