Week 2 - Initial thoughts, chapters 1&2

Technology is always an interesting topic for me, probably because of how I started out with technology in high school. Going to a vocational school, we had recent tech - not the latest and greatest, but definitely better than the average kid at home experienced. That being said, we started out with punched cards and everyone was really excited to get an IBM Model 36 which allowed for "online" entry. Imagine how frustrating it was for us to have to wait our turn to run our programs and if something didn't work then you had to get back in line to test the fix! Looking back, we had an infinite amount of patience. This is something today's technology doesn't foster in kids. But we must utilize our patience now as I need to step away and will return with a fully realized blog entry.

Okay, so after a few days where the juices were simmering, I am back to try to finish this blog entry. I found the Venn diagram from p.13 of The Connected Educator by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall very interesting especially given that our school has instituted a month-long focus on cooperation. We are also looking at using cooperation as a standard for grades (alongside skill) that would encompass cooperation, attitude, and effort, but is it cooperation we need to encourage or would it be more valuable to model and reinforce collaborative efforts? I think it will take some dedicated thinking on that one!

I think the "Did you know?" presentations on the evolution of technology amazes young people who have seen many types of new technology as basic and universal only to find that, if they had been born a few short years earlier, the new technology is in fact very recent in relation to the technology field as a whole. Older persons have had more experience with the speed of evolution in technology and are less amazed and sometimes much more dismayed at the speed things change, realizing that not all changes are completely positive. Yes our students can do research 24/7 from almost anywhere and yes they can participate in social networking, but do they play together as part of in-person social events or experience the world to make their own discoveries? This is not a new concern as evinced by this NY Times article from 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 or this Huffington Post article from late-2011: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/09/children-texting-technology-social-skills_n_1137570.html or even this article from the journal Children and Computer Technology from back in 2000: http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/journals/article/index.xml?journalid=45&articleid=205&sectionid=1342. People have been asking and researching these questions for decades, but the emphasis on technology never really loses any steam in this world where STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) is the buzzword that gets people looking towards the future without truly seeing the present as it stands.

It will be interesting to see where technology takes us in the education field, who drives the bus, and how well equipped our students are at the start, during, and after the trip.