cteachr's thinking space

As I come to the end of my MET journey, I thought I’d leave with an excerpt from my essay. The title is: Are computers making us stupid? The deskilling of Canadian students.

The concluding paragraph: In Technological Literacy and the Curriculum Apple states that technological changes are really changes in relationships. Is this not the crux of the question that I posed in the title of this article? Is the reason we perceive today’s students as being less intelligent since the introduction of technology in the classroom not as simple as acknowledging that there has been a change in our relationship to technology? Micheal Wesch explained it so eloquently in his video The Machine is us/ing us. Once we accept that this shift has occurred, we can start to understand its implications in education today. Teachers must evolve their methods to include digital literacy, critical thinking skills and a return to distributed learning and constructivism. Traditional methods of assessment must evolve to consider the many literacies and new skill set needed to function in a technologically charged environment. Without these shifts, students are no further ahead than if they were to sit in a room with every bit of information known to man and be expected to come out years later fully equipped to take their place as functional and productive citizens, only to find the world has changed immeasurably while they were in their learning incubator. This is the stuff of experiments, not real life.

I know many of you have watched some of Wesch’s videos in your MET courses and you may have been impacted by them as I have. As I drew up my bibliography last night, I was sitting beside my 20 yr old daughter so I decided to ask her to watch another Wesch video “A vision of students today”. Her response was to upload the link to FB and share it with her (377) “friends”. These are the comments that were posted on her page:

T – This video never even mentioned drinking… what’s school without drinking?
A – it’s not about drinking. it’s about how technology has taken over class rooms and using chalkboards is obsolete
K – what it should be about is how everything we learn from a proff we can learn from a book … all you need is a library…
AB – Maybe professors should be allowed to set off EMPs before class.
P – our sad reality –
A – is it sad for reality and society to evolve? why stay in the past with chalk and books when literally every resource we need is now online. we write more e-mails than we do essays. c’mon. it would be sad for us to not utilize our tools from our generation

I’ll let you guess which comments were made by my daughter (the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree). Why do I bring this up at this point in my journey? Because we must never lose sight that we are studying, implementing, integrating, using technology in our teaching for the benefit of the students. We have a duty to understand their needs as well as the tools that are available to fill those needs. The difficult issue with technology is that we are no longer sure if it has not artificially created those needs or whether we are witnessing the natural evolution that occurs whenever a new tool is introduced and becomes widely accepted,  no more radical than the shift from orality to writing (said tongue in cheek). I can only assert that technology is not neutral.

Lastly, thank you to all of my colleagues for their valuable contribution to my education.  These discussions have been my classroom and library, my soapbox and almost constant companion since September 2009.  I wish you all the best in your learning journey.

As a culminating activity for etec 511, we asked the class to write a reflection about Spirituality and ET or just about their experiences with this course.  It seems fitting that I should be writing this as I am at the end of my MET journey.

Many students know that I am leaving for Australia to teach for a year starting in the new year.  That is the main reason I have chosen not to continue beyond my Grad certificate at this time.  My husband is encouraging me to continue when we return.  I am undecided.  Being an online student is very distracting, if nothing else.  Since Sept 2009, I’ve spent most of my free time at the computer, reading countless discussion posts and learning a lot about my approach to teaching using technology.  In the process, I discovered I am a social learner, preferring to read others’ understanding of our assigned readings and enjoying the opportunity to discuss, even if asynchronously, my ideas, reflections and experiences.

Educational technology has changed tremendously since I started teaching in the late 80s.  Back then, the prof at the faculty of Ed was thrilled to show us the Olivetti wordprocessor she had purchased for us to use and learn to teach.  Computers in the classroom consisted of networked Icons or Mac Classics, nothing that resembled the corporate world I had just come out of.  Later on, when I took my first online university course (a Godsend for a single mother), the course consisted mostly of questions to answer and research to post.  Very little discussion was possible as we spent more time researching than reading each other’s posts.  Not really discussion, even though they called it that.

Eventually, I was part of some interesting projects such as creating a webquest for the school board and writing their first online courses.  I also got to review online courses from around the province – a very enlightening experience.  The Ministry of Education wanted to create a resource repository and a series of online courses to allow students from even the most remote areas to access quality (and diverse) education.  I thought I was very well equipped to participate in this initiative and felt it would be a perfect evolution of my career.  Which is the path that lead me to MET.

In these months I have come to realize I had a lot of rich experience to offer but I had little theoretical background to ensure my course design was pedagogically sound.  What I had done by intuition has been validated by much of the learning theory I have acquired in this program, and hopefully, my skills have grown and deepened as a result of this experience.

As I end this journey, I continue to believe that we have so much to offer each other, either as a community of practice or just to validate each other’s ideas.  And again, I am reminded that it’s the process that teaches us, not the product of our work.  It’s a lesson that I have to internalize and ensure it colours my own teaching activities.

I wish you all a wonderful and fruitful journey.

It’s a difficult balancing act, knowing what ET will maximize learning while remaining relevant for some time.  Administrators might see ET as an expenditure they would rather avoid.  Parent council might think its use need to be justified before they buy in.  Even teachers are resistant to change.  And change for the sake of change is not optimal.  Here’s my take on it:

Based on Feng & Patrina’s new book:

I created it for my DLG 11 presentation.

Here’s a link to my xtra normal movie where I become another persona.

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7576479/

I used Pixton as Toondo would not let me into my account. Sheesh! I’ve used Toondo with my classes before and they enjoy the creativity too.

Here’s my toon: http://www.pixton.com/ca/comic/syqqnlas

The inspiration is my son’s visit this weekend. College kids! Humph!

Having read some of the comments in the previous discussions, especially on the role of TV in changing the way we live and learn, I cannot see technology as neutral.  Clearly our society has changed (not sure it’s evolved) in the years most of us can remember.  I might be tempted to say we have changed more especially in recent years with web 2.0, but then I think of watching the first lunar landing, or seeing a videophone prototype at Expo 67.  I could not have imagined my life would be so interconnected to the tools I use.  Did my mother define her daily life by the stainless steel oven my dad installed in the 1960s?  Was her free time improved by the latest Electrolux vacuum cleaner?  It seems silly when I put it in those terms, yet I cannot deny that my lifestyle, my learning practices, my entertainment choices and of course, my teaching practices are all affected by the technological advances that have occurred in my time.

What disturbs me is whether we are questioning the effects of technology on our society or whether we are living at the pace that technology seems to now be dictating for us.  Shades of Heidegger??

I read about Plato’s concerns regarding the use of technology (writing) in Etec 540 and thought they seemed a little ridiculous.  Of course, it is difficult to us to imagine a fully oral society as existed then.  I am now ready to reconsider, having looked at Moody’s perspective.  What I think is affected is not the role of books but how we approach education and entertainment in general.  TV, when first introduced, was used as a gathering point for families to watch a show in the evening.  Later on, parents started to use this technology to entertain their children while they attended to other tasks.  This whole evolution seems to have isolated us more and more.  So although we might continue to find ways to communicate more easily, rapidly and globally through our new technologies, we seem to be doing this in an isolated fashion where each person pursues their own interests at their own pace.

These are considerations we must look into when designing curriculum, whether it be f2f or distance.  Technology has truly changed our society in terms of roles, communication and even values.  Therefore we must respond to this shift in our educational practices.

I was very interested to read the first resources for this module.  I’ve taught computer history to my students before but it was from a business perspective.  One very interesting resources that outlines the competition between Apple and Microsoft is PBS’s Triumph of the Nerds video set.  I was also one of the many business educators that tried to reach and prepare students for the work world by teaching some of the most common applications.  I really saw computers as having that role in education, primarily.  Of course we have evolved along with the technology and now use computers in all our subjects (except English, where they seem to only see computers as word processors… a little sarcasm there).

Are major companies still trying to get a share of the education market?  Yes, but my Business teacher background tells me that more often the world outside education drives technological innovation and we just happen to stumble upon its possible uses in education.  But perhaps I am naive and old fashioned.  Let’s see what the rest of the module brings.

One final remark – I am sitting at my laptop, earphones on, looking and listening to the resources that are provided.  How different my learning experience is from when I was an undergrad student in the late 1970s.

Here is the link to my toon for Etec 511.  The inspiration is my son’s visit this weekend.  He’s just started college and seems to have all the trappings of a typical student including all the electronic gadgets the digital generation is known for.  However, he can’t seem to log in to his online course without the help of his tech savvy mother.  Unfortunately, I live in a different province now, so he’ll actually have to find the tech guys in the school to get him some answers.  Nice to know these youngsters don’t know everything. (Of course, my husband and I couldn’t figure out how to get the tv back onto cable after my son used the dvd player.  Turns out we just had to change the channel back to 3.  Sheesh!)

Here’s the link:  http://www.pixton.com/ca/comic/syqqnlas