*This post originally appears on my blog: http://ahnjune.com/?p=142
I’ve learned a nice lesson during my dissertation. Lessons that bring me back to my days as a teacher and technology director. What is the lesson?
Educational technology requires a complex level of policy, organizational, and classroom change in order to be effective. The task appears daunting and sometimes impossible.
You can’t build a spiffy new video game and expect it to change the world. Conversely you can’t fund billions of dollars to put computers in classrooms and expect it to change anything. You can’t hold up singular success stories of teachers using technology and expect that millions of others will follow suit. These disparate strategies alone, do very little. Some kind of systemic approach is needed.
The problem with popular discussions of technology is that we only focus on one part of the conversation. There are numerous projects out there right now. Many university and research groups are creating video games to teach everything from writing to applying to college. MacArthur Foundation’s grantees are examples of innovative new projects in learning with digital media. We have videos like this one telling us that students use technology so much that the traditional classroom needs to change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
The problem with these techo-focused discussions is that all of these great projects and ideas reside in their own bubbles. Stand-alone research and development projects come and go. Funding comes and goes. And our classrooms remain the same. What these historical trends say is it’s not about the technology… once we have the nice shiny new video games, social networks, and digital media tools how do we work them into youth lives and into schools so that they are effective?
The first thing to do is understand reality beyond our technologically optimistic bubbles. This realization has been the starkest, most brutally honest lesson of my dissertation (where I am trying to use social network sites in public schools). Yes, youth spend all their time online and it’s engaging for them. However, when you introduce “school work” into this environment, the dynamic changes from engaging to mundane. How do teachers combat this? All the nice and bubbly stories of teacher success stories with digital media mask the hard lesson that some level of coercion is necessary. The classroom has power dynamics that supersede how cool a technology is. How do we teach educators how to resolve the tensions between the coercive model of teaching-learning vs. the happy go lucky matra of “do whatever interests you/exploratory/participatory learning” in the social/digital media camps?
Yes, some teachers have successfully integrated Twitter and Wiki’s into their classrooms. But, these stories neglect the 98% of other teachers who aren’t willing or want to change their pedagogy. Particularly in K-12 education, the institutions, regulations, and plain old (non)motivation of the teaching force combine to hinder any real classroom change. It’s a common theme in research on K-12 schools. How do we break through these stark realities?
I remain a techno-enthusiast. Changes are afoot in our education system, merely because technology is so ubiquitous, we cannot ignore it any longer. Unfortunately, until we can answer the difficult questions I pose here, K-12 schools will continue to chug along quite nicely while the rest of the world moves forward.
June Ahn
