Technology in schools

Was listening to CBC Radio this weekend and they were having a show discussing the relative merits of technology in the classroom.

One side posits that an over saturation of "new media" has occurred, with phones, music players, games, computers, email and social networking, so ubiquitous that learning has become nearly impossible to focus on. Notice I used little quotes around new media, since technically social networking is not a new media, but... it just might be the next evolution. As Mark Cuban succinctly put it in his infamous tweet; "the medium is no longer the message. the network is."

The other argument of course, is that all this technology is a boon to education. It is easier to learn with computers, and programs, and podcasts and ways to connect, interact, visualize, conceptualize and analyze. All the reasons we love technology in the first place. It makes life easer, and makes what might otherwise have been impossible, very simple.

The callers were of varying usefulness, particularly one girl who said she was 25 years old, and that when she was in high school she "barely had any computers," and "used overhead projectors mostly." Also, she claimed technology was making kids today dumber, according to her completely scientific opinion. Nevermind the fact that I am 26, and distinctly recall programming in a huge computer lab in high school that also included a Mac lab. Oh, and we had a graphing/CAD lab too, which naturally used computers. Slide rules can be so cumbersome, you see. But I digress.

One question that was not discussed however is the only one I have been mulling over still on and off for a few days. Undoubtedly, today's younger generation are tech savvy. But are they technologically literate? These might be defined as different things.

Sure, kids can put up myspace or blogger websites, but whatever happened to Free Hosting? With no GeoCities or Tripod like service, very few kids are forced to look at a blank page and learn to code in HTML, CSS or Flash in order to get their creation on the net. All the steps have been simplified to one-click, and thus they never have to learn the fundamental building blocks.

Isn't this the equivalent of reading to a child his whole life, but never actually teaching that child to read? Can someone be conversationally intelligent but illiterate? I don't see why not, and to a limited extent I almost feel like that's what's happening with a lot of students these days.

They understand the end product, but are sheltered from the process.

If anything, I think that's the real issue with technology in the classroom -- it's too dated. You can't be teaching stuff like "this is a mouse" to kids. There needs to be some sort of plan to actually advance them knowledge that won't be irrelevant within a year's time. Education not only needs to embrace technology, it needs to essentially become it's main driver if both are to achieve something continually useful for students of all ages.

Now I feel like I should register for some continuing education classes or something.