Quotes, Notes, & Thoughts on Rethinking Education – Chapter 1

Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology

I’m participating in the #edbookclub chat on Twitter. It’s a new chat that I found by following Yoon Soo Lim. The first book that I’ll be participating about is Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson (Teachers College Press, 2009). In order to organize my own thoughts and catalog my learning, I am posting my notes and reflections here. You are welcome to comment here, but the better discussion will be on Twitter under the #edbookclub hashtag.

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Note from the Preface: “We think it is time that educators and policymakers start to rethink education apart from schooling. Education is a life-long enterprise, while schooling for most people encompasses only the years between ages 5 and 18 or 21” (xiv).

Chapter 1: How Education Is Changing

Quote: “While the imperatives of the industrial-age learning technologies can be thought of as uniformity, didacticism, and teacher control, the knowledge-age learning technologies have their own imperatives of customization, interaction, and user-control. Knowledge-age technologies emphasize access to allow people to pursue their own interests and goals. Instead of accessing knowledge through visiting physical locations such as schools and libraries, people can find information on practically any topic and communicate with others wherever they are” (4-5).

Notes:

• Chapter one begins with a series of narrative vignettes demonstrating many ways that people are using technology to take their education out of school into the places where they live and work.
• People are also taking control of their education by taking control over what, when, where, and how they learn.
• At the same time, traditional K-12 schools appear to be in crisis as various pressures force many schools to limit learning options while technologies expand choices.
• Universal schooling has led us to equate learning with schooling.
• New alternatives are developing that may reduce the dominant role of schools in education as individuals opt for new venues.
• Technology vs. Schools:
  • Tech makes life difficult for teachers by requiring new skills.
  • “Lockstep” model of classroom undercuts technology’ ability to individualize learning.
  • School allowed for somewhat equitable access to learning.
  • Key challenge to technology–driven learning is the problem of access. How will access be equitably distributed?
• Rest of chapter is an explanation of the book’s structure.

My Initial Thoughts

I’m not yet comfortable with the authors’ word choices when delineating between education and schooling. For me, education still carries a connotation of formal schooling (primary, secondary, or post-secondary). My preference would be to talk in terms of personal learning and formal schooling or formal education. Yes, it’s just semantics, but that’s been the terminology I have utilized for the past few months and makes better sense to me.

In the past year, my own personal learning and formal schooling (what, when, where, & how) has drastically changed. I had already begun to connect with a few educators online via Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter. Then, last summer I took my first online class with Dr. Monte Tatom at Freed Hardeman University. I learned more in that one month online than I did in any traditional course I have taken. (Dr. Tatom introduced me to Skype and used Blackboard, Facebook, and a traditional text for course activities.) After that course, the number of connections and learning interactions I had online drastically grew and developed into a learning network. Tools like educator blogs, iTunes podcasts, YouTube videos, Diigo bookmarks, webinars, and shared presentations along with Twitter conversations opened a whole new world of learning and exploration to me. I truly believe I have learned and grown more as a professional educator in the last 10 months than I did in the five years prior (and I was fully enrolled in graduate school at that time). I’ve become passionate about using technology as a professional and personal learning tool and think we are doing students a disservice by not teaching them digital literacy skills.

I’m ashamed that I haven’t given more thought to the idea of equitable access to modern learning. I’m surrounded by technology and quite spoiled. Whether it’s the 300 cable channels piped into my TV (that we never turn on), my high-speed Internet connection, or my iPhone addiction, I have plenty of access to information, and I don’t really have to worry too much about the cost. The same cannot be said for most of the students in my building. My school is a Title I school with a high percentage of students on free and reduced lunch. While some students have all the latest gadgets and gizmos, all students do not and I hate the idea that the achievement gap between the have’s and have not’s will be further widened.