I have to start this by saying that I am an unabashed disciple of Michael Wesch, who's participating in this forum, and the methods he demonstrates so vividly in his videos. I didn't start out looking for any guru but encountered Wesch's videos while I was struggling myself, as a novice educator, with the institutionalized boredom of my students and their constant absorption in their laptops during class. Before I got to Wesch's notion of a "crisis of significance," I had probed my students about exactly what was going on with them, and it was clear that they had been bored for years.
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Pioneering tech writer and critic Howard Rheingold will contribute a post to our "Brave New Classroom 2.0" forum on Monday. His topic: "R.I.P.: Lectures, Notes, and Tests: Scrapping the Old Ways." Tune in . . .
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Neither Michael Wesch or Mark Bauerlein are fundamentally wrong. But how can neither be wrong if they, respectively, wrote blogs in this forum where one said technology in classrooms could really help and the other said technology in classrooms has been proven again and again to be basically useless? It’s simple really: Technology for technology’s sake is not a cure in the classroom. But technology can be a part of the solution for our schools, provided it is implemented correctly ...
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Question: Will Web 2.0 be an integral part of K-12 education? If we assume that the best predictor of the future is the past, then the answer is “no.” Web 2.0 is new, but the structure and assumptions underlying its use and benefits, as outlined by Steve Hargadon in this forum, are not new. At the heart of Hargadon’s vision — and Michael Wesch’s — is the collaborative student project, and this idea has been prominent in American education since 1919 ...
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Every month, it seems, a flashy new initiative to digitalize schools rolls out accompanied by officials commenting on “21st-century skills,” achievement gaps, and the like. For all the enthusiasm, however, they don’t seem to produce much improvement in student learning in writing or reading, at least not enough to justify the massive expense of outfitting classrooms. In 2000, for instance, Kirk Johnson of the Heritage Foundation analyzed National Assessment of Educational Progress---NAEP data and computers in classrooms and concluded, “Students with at least weekly computer instruction by well-prepared teachers do not perform any better on the NAEP reading test than do students who have less or no computer instruction.”
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Students at every level, from grade school to grad school, face dramatic changes in the institutions they attend thanks to new digital technologies. But do the new classroom technologies represent an educational breakthrough, a threat to teaching itself, or something in between? Utopian and dystopian visions tend to collide whenever the topic comes up, and our new blog forum this week will reflect these varied opinions and perspectives. We welcome your comments on each of the posts.
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