[Air-l] Technology Transforming Education

[Steve Jones]

"We" refer to air-l.

The choice of limiting to the U.S. is mine, because that's my  
experience. YMMV.

No doubt that teaching is always being redesigned, and for any number  
of reasons, many of which are often out of the control of the  
teacher. I was speaking only about two reasons that I think are not  
very good ones.

In my case the classrooms I sat in (K-12 through college) haven't  
changed much at all.

This brings up a point I may have buried in my previous message,  
though, which is that there are "levels" of redesign - individual,  
departmental (or other next larger administrative unit), collegial,  
etc. Of course one size doesn't fit all, but the discussion of  
redesign of teaching (not necessarily the one on air-l, but certainly  
ones in which I have participated in other online and offline venues)  
often embodies assumptions that one size does fit all and that there  
are broad "trends" that are somehow "inevitably" going to change  
"everything" (right, I exaggerate...but just a bit). By bringing that  
up I'm urging that it not be a footnote to the discussion that the  
discourse surrounding such redesign is also about power, that  
teachers, students, administrators, parents, etc., deploy particular  
arguments for particular reasons in their circumstances.

Sj


On May 22, 2007, at 10:25 PM, Mary-Helen Ward wrote:

> I'm not clear who 'we' are  (people on this list? Academics?) or  
> why we
> would limit this engagement to the US. Shifts in the technologies of
> learning are happening worldwide.
>
> Teaching is always being redesigned - the classrooms my children  
> sat in
> in the 70s and 80s bore little resemblance to the classrooms I sat in
> the 1950s. The classrooms my grandchildren sit in today are very
> different again
>
> M-H in Australia.
>
>
>
> Steve Jones wrote:
>
>> <nostalgia>That takes me back to my UIUC days, and PLATO...Programmed
>> Logic for Automated Teaching Operations.</nostalgia>
>>
>> (That probably gives away my age as much as admitting I have a
>> "record collection.")
>>
>> These are the kinds of discussions in which I wish we could engage
>> many U.S. faculty and administrators. One of the things I'm seeing on
>> a lot of campuses the last couple of years is excitement among
>> administrators about "blended" learning because it promises to free
>> up classroom space, which ties into two important administrative
>> matters, namely an interest in increasing enrollment as a means of
>> increasing revenue, and an interest in keeping a lid on construction
>> costs (or, in some cases, the cost of leased space). I agree that
>> those are important matters, but I disagree that they are sufficient
>> reasons to "re-design" teaching (though maybe in really dire
>> circumstances, along the lines, say, of what happened in New Orleans
>> and along the Gulf Coast due to Hurricane Katrina, it would be
>> justifiable as a temporary solution to buildings that must be
>> rehabbed and are unusable in the meantime).
>>
>>
>
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