Final Reflection on Educational Technology

Final Reflection on Educational Technology

This course has been a grand tour of the ideas informing the use of technology in education.  I have encountered a multi-dimensional landscape of philosophies, practices and modes of evaluation that defy simple explanation. The entry-level notion of Chromebooks, web pages and Power Point presentations as the central necessities of improving education is as simplistic as saying that World Population can be solved by contraception or that our nations problems can be solved by gutting one small segment of discretionary spending.  There are too many nuances to talk about all of them, but I will try to give a tour of the ideas that I found most fundamental to the knowledge that I have gained from this course.  

I appreciated Bruner's Folk Pedagogy idea as a starting point.  It is important in any endeavor to examine one's beliefs on a topic, especially those that may be hidden from our conscious consideration.   Our preconceived notions of "what children's minds are like and how to help them learn," is built in to each of our interactions with children and young people.  The closer we plumb these for meaning, the more we can learn about what is actually going on in their learning process.  We must examine not only what we think about their process and abilities, but what they think about their abilities before we decide how to approach their education.  I feel that this was a theme that we hit over and over again in this course, whether directly or implicitly.  

Another important foundation of this course can be summed up by the work of Cope and Kalantzis as far as the nature of what they call the "New Media."  Their work gets at the important changes in media technology, as well as the landscape within which it is used.  The situation that exists today is not that of the top-down didactic lecture approach of the last century, where different modes of education--written, seen, heard--have been cobbled together awkwardly and presented as the "thing to be learned" by more-or-less passive students.  Instead, we see what the authors refer to as Agency (on the part of students), Divergence (from imposed norms), Multimodality (seamless multiplicity of modes of expression) and Conceptualization (the ability to learn a new level of knowledge representation according to this scheme).  As a result, students become Designers in charge of their own path on some level, including the task of fitting and pacing learning to their own learner needs, as well as mastering the many modes of expression that are in use today.  Finally, the authors note the necessary change in our own pedagogical style necessitated by these new paradigms. We cannot lecture to the new paradigm because they are not built for that anymore.

Finally, I think the Wendy Drexler material captures something about how this course all fits together. In the case of the application of technology, SAMR and other philosophies of the application of technology, technology must be transformative, not just a newer way to do drill-and-kill.    Her student's video of her Personalized Learning Environment was an inspiration to me as a science teacher.  I look forward to being able to have all of my students that involved in their education, reveling in the freedom that technology provides for multi-directionality, self-monitoring and finding ways to accomplish their educational goals.  

I will say, though, that her actual article makes a point of caution that has occurred to me both in my studies for this course and in my own implementation of technology and new educational paradigms.  She points out both the awesome power of her "Networked Student" model, and the drawbacks that may be experienced by some users.  In her words: 

 No longer is there a smooth, charted path that defines what must be done to get an “A”. Traditional, lecture-based classrooms are designed as passive learning environments in which the teacher conveys knowledge and the student responds (Chen, 2009). Imagine the potential frustration that self-regulated learning holds for students who are quite comfortably accustomed to specific teacher directions with finite expectations.

We may have a big new world for them to discover, but many of our students are still waiting for "Reading Rainbow" to come on and paint the picture in front of them instead of learning to paint their own with the new tools that they have been given.  

Honestly, there is so much more that has affected me--the study of Connectivism was brand new for me, the trip through instructional design and the implementation and evaluation of its success, Robert's interesting presentation on his flavor of the Agile Process, as well as the many, many wonderful ideas from my peers that I saw last Saturday.  What fun!

At any rate, I must say that I have enjoyed what I learned in this course.Our residencies were pleasant and fulfilling ways to engage with the ideas, and I feel like we had a remarkable class dynamic.  I feel ready for, and am excited about, the next steps in my coursework--Instructional Design and perhaps  Advanced Topics in this area (What's the Meta-for?).  Very enjoyable.  Thank you.