What has been particularly striking to me over the course of this class is the widespread dichotomy of attempting to embrace technology as both teachers and consumers, yet finding ourselves unsure of its usefulness in the classroom. Presumably, the hope is that after experiencing these technologies firsthand and thinking extensively about their uses, that we will bring it upon ourselves to infuse education into the technology itself. To me, that’s is the trick—infusing education into technology, and no I didn’t write that backwards. The problem that many of us have expressed (some of us more than others) is that it seems in a way degrading or capricious or wasteful to spend our precious time trying to infuse our education with technology simply because: because the school boards say we should, or because kids these days blah blah blah.
I think the true insight in all of the reading we’ve done so far in the past 6 or so weeks, but particularly in the reading we’ve looked at in this mod is that everyone benefits from opening our perspectives to new possibilities. The thing to remember is that technology’s only purpose is to make our lives easier and better. If it doesn’t achieve that, then it doesn’t succeed. If we keep that in mind, then it’s easy to see what is purposeful in the classroom and what isn’t. Ten or fifteen years ago, some photographers accepted and embraced digital photography for the sake of being forward-thinking and frankly, just because. In my opinion, their work is forgettable, and probably has been forgotten to everyone except historians because at the time, the technology of digital photography wasn’t better than film photography, and wasn’t that much easier for that matter. But in the interim, technological advances have made photography more accessible to everyone, less expensive, easier, and better. Now only the most die-hard truist film geeks and people who shoot film just because are left in the dark(room), and I ask, “is that better than embracing technology just for the sake of embracing technology?” At some point, we all have to come to terms with the idea that with the advent of the internet, programmers and coders and other tech geeks are tirelessly working to make every aspect of our lives easier and better, and to ignore that fact is the equivalent of shutting ourselves in the dark(room) and refusing to see how our lives can be made more productive, more purposeful, and more connected.
The classroom should be no different—but keep in mind that the point is to use technology that’s meaningful in our lessons; technology that makes teaching and learning easier and better through (in the words of Universal Design) multiple representations and multiple expressions. Don’t make your students use twitter just for the sake of using twitter. Don’t make your students construct a wiki if it’s not fostering new knowledge! No one gains anything if there’s not genuine interest and everyone’s just getting through it. But if we can take the technology that’s appropriate for opening up our students’ capacities for learning, and infuse it with an educational experience, then that’s where we find technology’s purpose.
MISTER SHIPLEY 