Recently, I’ve been seeing some understandable and reputable backlash to increasing technology infusion in education. LAUSD’s iPad debacle became a pivotal issue in LAUSD school board elections; an Atlantic article by Toyama titled, “Why Technology Alone Won’t Fix Schools”, cites a variety of supporting research; several recent high-profile reports have disputed the viability of the “flipped classroom”, “personalized learning”, and “blended learning” models.
And then, yesterday, June 8, 2015, the LA Times published this article by Michael Godsey in its print edition, “Traditional Teaching Faces a Cyberthreat From School Model”, which critically examines “Altschool”, a new and rapidly expanding online education program that describes the new teacher role as a "facilitator". Godsey states that teachers cultivate “wisdom” and cannot be replaced by technology. He cites John Hattie’s, “Visible Learning” which synthesizes more than 800 meta-analyses and 50,000 smaller studies”, finding that “‘direct instruction,’ and ‘quality of teaching’ were all significantly more effective than ‘individualized instruction,’ ‘matching teaching with learning style,’ and ‘computer-assisted instruction.’.
Although I am a technology-based educator and artist, I am certainly not a technophile, and I wouldn’t claim technology itself as a panacea that will replace teachers. My friends know that I have been very critical of technology in general, and particularly of its misuse in educational settings. I agree with Toyama that technology is basically an amplifier. To some degree, it will reflect the school situation in which it is placed, good, bad or mixed.
With that introduction, this is my unedited, responding letter to the editor, which at least has been published on the website, if not tomorrow’s print edition.
Dear LA Times Editor
After using technology and media in the classroom for over 25 years, I can say with confidence that its proper usage will significantly advance education and learning, shifting the teacher’s role to facilitator and coach. You can simply look at the world around us to see how the average citizen has been empowered to learn and create through technology’s increasing access and sophistication. Traditional education is still based on an antiquated “factory” metaphor, with corresponding methodologies and curricula, which do not necessarily benefit from the mere insertion of technology.
The emerging metaphor for education is the “network”, with accompanying redesigns in infrastructure, curricula and methodology. The student is then empowered to produce and design anything imaginable within a virtual lab, within enriched, authentic contexts that support the real world application of core content. Beyond the either/or propositions in the article, traditional, networked and progressive instructional approaches are incorporated. This supports both the usual acquisition of facts, formulas and literacies, as well as “enactive” and “constructivist” pedagogy, whereby the student has an active role in constructing his or her own meaning, through projects for connected local and global communities. Thus, the 21st Century educational focus is on the mastery of the “student-sourced” learning and creating processes themselves. The national advent of “Media Arts Education”, through the recent development of voluntary K12 standards and assessments will contribute to this transformation.
We need to stop thinking of technology as a tool that one simply inserts into schools just as they now are, as a kind of magic pill. The system has to be redesigned around our new understandings of learning and technology. Technology is more of an ecosystem, with this potentiated virtual space and interconnectivity, which should be available to students for active creativity and learning. Technology requires specialized skills, abilities and circumstances to manage well, and schools need to begin thinking from the perspective of the student who is empowered to access an infinite, and self-originating learning and creating process that is the innate capacity of human beings.
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