Content Items for My Graduate Education Classes. Much of this I write personally for my students to provide needed perspective on the state of Instructional Technology AND Contemporary Education. I'm currently teaching for Touro College (Integrating Technology for School Leaders) and New York Institute of Technology; I've taught for Fordham, Lehigh, and others in the past.
On November 14, 2018 my (graduate level) course titled
Integrating Technology (for School Technology Leaders) was visited by a guest,
Mr. Sean Arnold. Mr. Arnold is a STEM Coach who works with a large number of
teachers in the New York City Department of Education’s District 75 (Special
Education Division), supporting them in adopting a wide variety of digital,
instructional resources, and applying them appropriately and insightfully in
their work with their students.
This recording is the audio portion of the meeting using
the ZOOM web conferencing resource over which the classes are held.
Below are links to items that are referenced in the
recorded conversation:
Our recent history is full of examples of predictions for a future that didn’t turn out to be realistic. Below is a clip, the intro for the network broadcast show The Jetsons (September 23, 1962, to March 17, 1963,) that is an instructive and fun example of how speculating about the future can be difficult, sometimes bordering on silly…
We Educational Technologist can not avoid being, at least in part, futurists. And while that may be true, it is also true that we must reflect well to avoid become advocates and creators of Steam Punk (steam•punk/ˈnoun: a genre of science fiction that has a historical setting and typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology) or simply getting it wrong and consequently misguiding our colleagues.
Focus Questions:
- Which of the actual developments presented in this article do you feel are likely to impact education significantly?
- Why?
- How do you feel the forward thinking (dare we say, “visionary”) school technology leader might best prepare his/her school community for ‘next level technology innovations”?
One of the oldest areas of concern, argument, and
confusion related to the use of technology in the classroom has been the old
“Computers will/will not, replace teachers!”ditty. And for the longest time, those of us who have had even the thinnest layer of experience with
computers in the classroom, who dispassionately have observed and reflected,
have understood that crises go, this one was obviously a total “nothing burger”,
a non-issue conjured up out of the uncomprehending fears of folks reflexively
suspicious of change. Our understanding quickly came to be that computers are tools
for teachers to use with their students, that increase their reach and
efficacy.
But the landscape of Education changes and the
movement of its geologic features long thought to be solid bedrock can move
with time. A number of impactful things have appeared in recent years that
require us to re-map a bit with the end in mind of not only understanding the
nature of where we are, but how it is determiningwhere we will arrive at in the future.
“And
Now For Something Completely Different" Monty Python
There are many examples of technology “improving” teaching
in the sense of making classrooms more efficient by helping to make processes
and chores easier and more effective. For instance, digital grades books make
the keeping of student performance records easier, more reliable, and easier to
store, retrieve, and share. And LMS can similarly improve the distribution of
instructional content and the collection of student responses to it.
There are examples,as well,of technology
improvingthe quality of the learning
experience through applications to instruction that feature things like
interactive, media-rich content items
- There are examples of technology applications that have somewhat transformed
the very format of school by expanding its capabilities and reach as a platform to deliver instruction. Virtual
field trips, after school hours access to content, student access to experts in
the field are a few.
As impressive as the above examples are, they all
largely make their contributions in a liner fashion by offering the possibility
of more of what was done traditionally – and/or of supporting students and
teachings in doing it better.We are now
beginning to experience applications of technology to work of teaching and learning
that truly is different.
Here’s a list of some prominent Instructional Items
to include in our measurements of Instructional Continental Drift, and
Education Plate Tectonics(Sorry,
couldn’t resist the temptation to follow through a bit on the Topography metaphor
J:
-The Flipped
Classroom(by having students access and familiarize themselves with
contentit on their own through means
driven by digital communications technologies (e.g. video, audio, animations,
game oriented, etc.)their face-to-face
class time with their teachers can be maximized for higher order thinking
goals: reflections, analysis, meaning making, and application of facts and
skills in important, often real-world contexts) Thus, this approach deepens the
value of teachers.
In a sense, many emerging items are oriented
similarly, relieve teachers and students of the need to interface for basic
functions that now can be handled by machines so that human bandwidth is freed
and explanded allowing for deeper, more relevant and more meaningful learning
to be accomplished.
When the Google Search engine improved its interface algorithm a number of
years back, many of us had an unsettling, almost spooky “ah ha” moment with it
as we suddenly came to understand the reality of working with a technology that
tracked our preferences and interests and predicted the relevance of items to
present us with.
I remember my own experience when one day I was totally astounded by what at
first appeared to be magicial synchronicity. I couldn’t understand how, out of
the tens of thousands of advertisers Google must have had, vendors who, in the
aggregate were offering a very, very broad range of goods and services… how, I
wondered, could it be that the ads that showed up on my screen as I was working
could be for particular brands of kayaks and electric guitars and tours of
Thailand, etc. –the very things that I was most interested in back then? And
then it hit me like a ton of bricks (try to understand or remember that this
was cutting edge new back then and not announced or explained to the public) –
the truth that came to me was that while I was learning with Google… IT was
learning about me! Those ads were for things I had been searching for
information about… were the same things for which I had recently been clicking
links and by doing so reinforcing my interest and narrowing down the field of
possibilities. Son of a gun, Google was figuring out what I was interested in,
what I liked, what I wanted to see more of… and it was doing it in a spiral of
specificity and relevance and accuracy that was uncanny. My computer was
working with me and it was working with other individuals behind it who wanted
to increase their chances of presenting me with things that resonated. Welcome
to the age of machines that learn and that act on what they learn.
From Amazon’s online store to Instructional Software
- Adaptive
Digital Instructional Resources
This same principle used by Google to find out about
its users has more recently been applied to teaching and learning, the idea
being that by identifying a student’s interests and preferences, his strengths and
weaknesses, his ways to approach learning, and on and on, highly Personalized Learning experiences could be provided him. Each
student no longer has to access the same content as his classmates; nor does
his content have to have the same form, look, and feel as that offers to
others; nor does the path established for him to react and respond to the
content presented to him have to be the same, either. Welcome to the world of Adaptive
Digital Instructional Resources.
Of course, this is a new development in our field and some attempts at bringing
the ideas above to life for actual student use are better than others. There
are varieties and grades of A.I. available to resource designers and there are
designs that are better than others as well. This is an area that we will be
seeing a great deal more of in the immediate future.
Peruse the links below for some examples and related ideas:
It’s
already common for students to have their own personal digital devices that
offer calendars, calculators, search engines, and more. Students interface with
these generally through keyboarding. AND, we are now all familiar with Siri the
ever so polite and perky little digital assistant who will activate and guide
your iOS device by engaging in a conversation with you, many of us now have the
Google Dots Alexain their homes (I do),
a little digital assistant who will ask you what you want to hear and then
retrieve Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven if you direct her to. These digital
assistants are cropping up in many places, my online bank offers one, the
Dowloadable GPS App, Waze, for instance, will take your requests for directions
verbally and advise you when to turn left verbally, as well. So what happens
when these technologies are reconceived for the learning of young people?
………………………………………………………………………………………………………
- Teaching Robots
The impending emergence of the Connected Auto Didact (self teacher)
"With the huge and continually growing body of tutorials directed at learning all things (technology, guitar, cooking, home construction and maintenance, health and fitness, etc. etc.) are we not redefining our species' relationship to learning. Are we not heading toward self teaching as a major dimension of the whole of Education? (Just asking... :)
One
of the newfound destinations established by all of the above is the very healthy
body of query that asks "What’s a teacher? What’s Teaching? What should teachers do? and the
corollary questions What should students learn?(curriculum yes, but
Learningshould be the curriculum, too)
How will they learn it best? A final point… It seems
that whenever a new technology emerges that there are some folks who quickly
wrap their brains around how it may be applied to Education. Granted, some of
these folks are simply tech enthusiasts, but other truly understand that these
new technologies (especially afterareas
of work other than Education have adopted and gotten significant value from it)
represent potential. There are other new technologies not discussed above, but
that may prove to be important in the future if not soon.As an example, oneof these is Blockchain which is well
discussed in an article in Forbes, “20 Ways Blockchain Will
Transform (Okay, May Improve) Education”(https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanderark/2018/08/20/26-ways-blockchain-will-transform-ok-may-improve-education/#36a656784ac9
) . Most of the applications for blockchain
relate to Education in ways that are other than instruction, but there are several
in this article that do. What do you think?
