Technology+and+education

=Technology and education=

The contents of this site reflect work I have done over the past three years in the National Louis University Technology in Education Masters program. As I write this, I am also a few months into my third year as a "lead technology teacher" at a Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Pre-K through 8th grade elementary school. The school is part of a CPS project to create model technology magnet schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. The artifacts included in this portfolio represent, by and large, a sincere attempt to take advantage of the possibilities of new technologies in education. At the same time, the construction of this portfolio provides an opportunity to reflect on my personal thinking about the role of new technologies in education.

I believe that all personal action expresses an underlying philosophy, an understanding of what constitutes reality, how we know what we know, how the world works. One's philosophy likewise will extend to attitudes about technology in general, and new technologies in particular, in education. George Knight (1998) urges educators to make conscious their philosophy of education in order to rise above the "mindlessness" of American education. This extends as well to educational technologists, who should also struggle to rise about the mindlessness of much of the thinking about technology in education.

As a very brief metaphysical statement of where I stand, I understand the world/universe as an interconnected whole, a unity. There are deep structures in the universe, laws or organization or form or archetypes that express themselves through phenomena. The universe is law-governed. These laws describe the necessary connections between things. The world is dynamic, active, in flux, and as such, unfinished, always becoming and evolving. The universe has a material "outside," which is experienced sensuously; but it also has an immaterial "inside," that is experienced intuitively or imaginatively. The English philosopher Owen Barfield (1898 - 1997) has been an important influence on my personal philosophy; he equates the inside, the "inner being," with "meaning" and consciousness (Barfield, 1977, 1979). The world is incomplete and meaning-less without the experience of its inner being. I recognize the world as both matter //and// spirit, or rather these are terms for different ways of experiencing reality. Both the "outside" and the "inside" of the world evolves. There is an evolution of consciousness correlative to the evolution of nature. The arc of this evolution is from relative un-consciousness and original unity, through division and separation, to a new, fuller self-consciousness capable of "direct participation in Whole" (Barfield, 2006, p. 4).

I include the above brief statement because in the general arc of the evolution of consciousness, we are mired in the stage of separation. The world is understood, by and large, as solely outside of us, we generally understand it solely as //mechanism//. The understanding of the world as machine is reflected in the understanding of the mind as a machine. Computer processing is confused with thinking, and brains become confused with computers. If the world is only a machine, then it can be replicated in a machine. So virtual environments then can be pretended to be as rich and full of meaning as natural ones. Mechanical and mediated interactions can be pretended to be as rewarding as unmediated, face-to-face interactions. I think a responsible educator must combat this mechanization of the world, and promote the student's engagement with the //whole// world, both through interactions with nature and through deep thinking and imagination. In this way the arc of evolution of consciousness can be completed, as well as the historic arc towards a just, equitable, free and humane society.

My personal philosophy then suggests that the primary function of education is the cultivation of the student's ability to think. From this fundamental capacity all else follows. "Thinking" means many things. It means the capacity to reason, to critique, to problem-solve. Bloom's taxonomy begins to get to this, with his "higher order thinking skills" (see, e.g., Krathwohl, 2002). I think though that "thinking" also means the capacity to penetrate into the interior of the world, through imagination, to directly apprehend the inner being of things. As Rudolf Steiner (2006) put it, "In thinking I experience myself united with the stream of cosmic existence." Since thinking is the means by which one realizes his or her completeness (or spiritual destiny or humanity or potential or historic role -- these signify the same thing to me), the education of every child is a moral imperative. It also follows, I think, from the above, that I am incomplete if I fail to work towards bringing such an understanding into the world. Teaching is a calling by which this task is accomplished. The school is the social institution within which this capacity is formally developed.

Educational technologists, I think, must be mindful of the danger of reducing the student to a machine, or robbing the world of its inner meaning through the unmindful use of the tools of education. I should note here a personal debt to Todd Oppenheimer's book //The Flickering Mind// (2004). Oppenheimer's book articulates the many "e-lusions" about technology in education and encourages educators to approach new classroom technologies with a healthy skepticism. As part of that healthy skepticism, there are four ideas I think educational technologists should keep in mind as they consider integrating new tools into the classroom.

First, technology is a tool, but, after Marshall and Eric McLuhan's //Four Laws of Media// (1988), all technology not only enhances some faculty, but also obsolesces something (as well as retrieves and reverses). Always, teachers must be mindful of what is lost when a new technology is introduced into the classroom, and judge the relative gain against that. The TPCK model (Koehler and Mishra, 2010) points teachers in that direction, indicating an interaction between technology and the domains of content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, but that interaction also needs to be viewed critically.

Second, the concept of "appropriate technology" is very important. "Appropriate" in this context has several meanings: technology must be appropriate to the task, appropriate to the skills of the user, and appropriate to the learner. Technology in the classroom should be assessed in terms of its appropriate-ness in those three dimensions. Of special interest to me is the concept of "developmentally appropriate technology" -- is the technology appropriate to the physical and cognitive development of the learner? I think schools force computers on children at too early of an age. Jane Healy (1998) has written about this; the Alliance for Childhood (2010) has done some compelling work; and the Waldorf approach embodies this -- it restrains the use of computers until later grades (see, e.g., Sloan, 2001), focusing on developing artistic and social sensibilities.

Third, children's lives today are saturated with electronic media (see e.g., Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010). Schools should provide an unmediated space for children, where they can detox from electronic media. This is probably not enough, but I am convinced that the amount of media consumed by children is destructive.

Fourth, we need an expanded understanding of literacy, a media-independent understanding that goes beyond mere facility with tools. I suggest an understanding of literacy as the ability to construct (or maybe discover) meaning of the world. "Reading" becomes a generic term for this process -- reading clouds, reading printed text, reading symbols, reading faces, reading film, reading math proofs, reading music, and so on. Literacy should also be extended in Freirean terms as not just reading the //word//, but reading the //world//. And in Freirean terms of active engagement, not just //reading// the world, but //writing// the world as well, moving from "functional" literacy to "critical" literacy (Gutstein, 2006). Literacy becomes a general ability to be in the world in a meaning-ful way -- of getting to the interior of the world, to its meaning. "Technology literacy" then expands tremendously -- not just using the tools, but reading the meanings in the media artifacts of others, and intentionally making meanings with new technology tools. To its credit, the National Educational Technology Standards for Students (ISTE, 2007) emphasize creativity, innovation, collaboration and critical thinking. They fall short in the lack of emphasis on understanding the relationship of technology and society.

I am completely aware that the personal philosophy outlined above collides with the demands (often conflicting) of real world schools. But schools are contested spaces, and the Great Work is unfinished.

//November, 2010//

//For references, see Resources and Readings for Technology Facilitators//