Serendipity35

Chris Lehmann wrote a post a few days ago which referenced two other bloggers which often introduces me to other educators online. In this case, I first read something by Sylvia Martinez on Second Life, but what caught my attention was her apology that the entry is "both too long and too short. Too long for a blog, too short for real insight."

It's something that my grad students who were required to create blogs asked me last semester. How long, how short, how much detail, how is this writing different from the essay we might have been asked to submit?

I was equally interested at the end of semester to ask them if they thought their blogging (all newbies) had changed the way they were writing at all. No definitive answers, but it's something for me to write about here before the fall semester begins with a new group.

The other blogger referenced was Christian Long on think:lab who wrote:

I said to them then -- and say it now -- that we'd better become agile at the "What if all the digital tools disappear?" question and focus more on the "Has our teaching actually transformed?" question.

That's the question that has been running through my head the past few days. I even put it to a few teachers I was meeting with yesterday:

If all the technology you use in the classroom were gone tomorrow, would it still have affected the way you teach?

By "technology" I mean all of it - not only the computers & Net but the projectors (LCD or overhead), the films & videos, the cameras, the recorders, electronic gradebooks, word processors and the rest of the electronics.  That may be taking it to the extreme.

The unit on Macbeth where you normally show the film versions, go to all the websites, record the students doing scenes, have the students research - now you have books, papers & pens, the blackboard, some props. It was taught that way when I was in high school. But would you in 2007 only be able to go back to that way of teaching, or would your teaching have been transformed by your use of technology?

If you were deep into using blogs and wikis and web resources with your students and it all went away, what would happen in class? If it's a return to a kind of teaching from the past, then somehow the effect of technology on education seems diminished. 

If farmers or doctors lost all the technology created in the past 20 years, would they return to the methodologies of 1987?

Some thoughts that came up in my conversations with teacher (all of whom agreed that this is a tough question):

• What would still remain for the doctor, farmer & (hopefully) the teacher would be the knowledge they have gained by using technology.
• A classroom could still be read/write without technology - good teachers were doing it before the technology
• Word processing has changed the way we write and approach things like revision, including our willingness to do it because it's so much easier - still, people were not sure if how they changed could continue being done without the technology

One thing that came up in all my conversations was that this is "too hypothetical" and "the technology isn't going away" and that "you don't want to open discussions like this because it might lead administrator$ to say, so you don't really need all this expensive technology anyway."

I agree that the tech is not going away for most of us, though in some places it never arrived. I'll use an extreme example. Take that Will Richardson kind of teacher and send him to a third-world school without the technology and with a classroom full of intelligent but zero-tech-savvy students, and what would happen?

My suspicion is that he would still be teaching differently, but I'm hard-pressed to come up with the evidence or examples right now.

The Chris Lehmann post that I started with today is not all about this line of thought. He's mainly looking at curriculum design and reform, and he's asking questions like:

How can we create engaging schools? How can we teach students toward wisdom? How can we move beyond facts and skills and into enduring understandings and deep, connected learning? Those are the questions we need to be asking, and then we need to find the tools that support that vision, not the other way around.

He mentions the often-recommended Understanding By Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe which I had read back when the original edition came out. Looking at the book's Amazon description I find that it's full of questions too.

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment?

What catches me in the end is that none of them mention technology or are asking questions about how to use technology. Is that an omission that needs to be corrected, or is it that these are exactly the kinds of questions that all of us in educational technology need to be asking?