Inanimate Object Blamed for Failures of 21st Century Learning!

Undermining a system that was designed to produce factory workers is ok in my books.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

When I look at this quote by Postman, I can’t help but feel as though the context would really help frame the statement.  On its own, the quote can mean one of a multitude of things.  But the slant that I am taking has more to do with undoing a system that no longer serves a purpose.

Education is no longer in the hands of traditional teaching and those teachers.  Rote learning serves little purpose beyond taking a test that requires hard dates and facts.  

Link to study

I can’t help but think of why Postman would claim that Sesame Street is seeking to undermine the education system.  If we look at some of our own learning in this course, we have seen that other tools, such as blackboard, have already been blamed for the failings of the education system.  So why not put the target squarely on a show that engages students?

There is discomfort in the idea that technology can replace some of the roles that traditional education has had in the past.  If we no longer need to go to the library, then how will students learn to find information that was written, printed, and then not updated for 10-12 years?  Facts change.  If we learn that cholesterol is bad for you, we take that information and use it as fact.  Yet, we learn that there are two types of cholesterol, ldl and hdl, we then understand that we need cholesterol to help us process the other cholesterol.  

When we look at the implications of technology in the classroom, it is hard to deny the fact that it is here to stay.  When I look at my own practices, I have come to rely very heavily on Google’s suite of software.  I know that I greatly appreciate being able to hop into a shared document with a student to assist them with their ideas.  For a student, being able to take your own device home and ‘remotely’ (what does that even mean anymore?) access their own writing.  When I left the building as a high school student, if I didn’t have my floppy disk and the same version of windows on my PC, I was out of luck when it came to wrapping up work.  

The teacher is no longer the center of learning in the classroom.  There are some pieces of knowledge that I hold, but that is because of my time with a book, not because I decide what is valuable information.  For one of my students to supplement my learning with youtube, I would consider that a win.  If we take a look at the chart below, we need to understand that there are so many avenues for student learning that we directly impact, and others that are a bit more out of our sphere of influence.  If I can tap into using some school based tech to engage my students in learning, then I will use that.  But if I have students who hold some of that key learning, then I would also consider leveraging that as well.

In the end, I do believe that education has become a partnership between student and teacher in a much more complex manner.  Both parties will need to make use of all tools available to them to best meet the needs of the learner.  Sometimes the learner will be the student, and other times it will be the teacher.

Education fails when we worry where the source of learning comes from.