On the technology and learning trail
Posted: February 20th, 2010, by John WarrenWhen Paul Baran conjured out of the haze of sunny Santa Monica summer afternoons the concept of “distributed communications”—later called packet switching—did he imagine that his theory, born out of the Cold War as a means to help survive a nuclear attack, would bring new connectivity both high and low, that the desire to hurtle bits through the ether with a “go/no-go” message would somehow lead inevitably to email, instant messages, and ‘tweets, to Facebook and LinkedIn, to new tools that change the way we learn, create, and collaborate?
I’m looking forward to three packed days of learning and discussion at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference. So many great sessions, workshops, and keynotes are scheduled on an impressive variety of topics, not to mention a social event here and there. I don’t know when I’ll sleep!
As a prelude to the TOC conference, I posed some questions to my panelists for the TOC blog, on the prospects for e-book devices in education, the digital divide, open access, and reconciling the push for lower textbook prices with the desire for multimedia and interactive functionality (Full post).
I’ll be moderating a panel on the Future of Digital Textbooks with Eric Frank, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Flat World Knowledge; Frank Lyman, Executive Vice President of CourseSmart LLC; Nicholas Smith, Chief Operating Officer, Agile Mind; and Neeru Khosla, Co-Founder and Executive Director of CK-12 Foundation. The format will be Q&A, but our presentation slides are available now.
We’ll be discussing how emerging technologies are impacting teaching, learning, and creative expression in K-12, higher education, and professional learning. This is a subject that has interested me for many years. In my first year after college, I was teaching Spanish to K-6 students at a private elementary school in Santa Cruz. The 4th and 5th graders were wowed by “The Oregon Trail”—an early interactive computer game played on the Apple II. Two things struck me immediately: the students didn’t think of it as learning, for them it was a fun game, and they had no problems with the technology; and the teachers were completely unnerved by having to learn how to operate the computer. Fast forward a decade later, in the mid-90s I was developing and marketing products featuring pioneers like David Thornburg, Alan November, Jamie McKenzie, Michelle Swanson, and Skip Stahl, training teachers on how to use technology in the classroom. Schools and teachers then struggled with many challenges: how to employ new technologies and teaching strategies with an extremely limited time allotted for professional development; how to implement new technologies across the curriculum to improve student performance and make projects more meaningful; how to afford new technologies at school and reconcile differences among students’ ability to access technology in the home.
Always, it seems, technology is on the verge of promising a breakthrough in teaching and learning. And while it appears we may again be verging on a breakthrough, with new products like the iPad, the Kindle DX, and smart-phones promising to change the way we teach, learn, create, and collaborate, and with forward-thinking companies like CK-12, Flat World Knowledge, CourseSmart, and Agile Mind helping to drive change, the challenges described above remain significant.