Musings of a Techie-Librarian

  July 17, 2007
Chapter 4Chapter 4 of our text, “Technology and Learning: Getting the Story Out,” by Sanna Jarvela, deals how technology can generally improve learning. This chapter provided no new information for me, but reinforced beliefs I already hold. Again and again, I’ve heard that in today’s information age, it is not possible to know or teach EVERYTHING. There is no specific body of knowledge that we have to impart on our students (the learner as an empty vessel to fill with knowledge). We must instead teach students to become “life-long learners,” teach them HOW to learn, how to actively construct their own knowledge, how to learn collaboratively, HOW to evaluate information they encounter, etc.   I agree with all of this wholeheartedly. The real question I have … or rather the problem we encounter as educators… how do we convey this to the administrators and the policy makers who see students as a “product” and believe that we have to fill them with certain pieces of knowledge before they leave our schools? They are only concerned with standards & benchmarks, percentiles, test scores, “data-driven analysis,” etc.  I have no answer to this problem.  I do see a shift in thinking in the business world, in the media and in other arenas outside of the education world - they are aware of the changing global economy and new technologies that are changing learning and the transmission of information.  For example, new technologies like blogs, wikis, and social networking sites are taking control out of the hands of the institutions and putting them in the hands of the people.  People are SHARING information freely and socially constructing knowledge.  The Internet is growing “communities of learners,” where “information and expertise may be distributed across individuals and synthesized in collective knowledge construction” (47) - I think there is an amazing revolution, a great society shift happening right under our noses! Maybe eventually the education world will HAVE to wake up and realize that the original structure and purpose of schools in the U.S. is no longer applicable to this new environment and will have to adapt. They will develop a new model of learning which will prepare learners for today’s world.  As Jarvela says, “schools will “prepare learners for participation in an information and communication society in which knowledge will be the most critical capital asset for social and economic development” (55). The most important skills our students must gain include metacognition, the ability to collaborate with others, the ability to tackle higher-order thinking projects, become discerning consumers of information, etc. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if I’ll get to see this in practice while I am teaching. Hopefully there will be change in my lifetime, but it will be slow. Even though we constantly hear conservative backlash against progressive education and they claim that education is being ruined by progressive teaching methods and we have to get back to basics, I think that education has remained relatively stagnant. As a person who loves change, I find that change is frustratingly slow in the education world.