Jeremy Price's Library tagged determinism → View Popular

Filter:
All
Annotated

21 Aug 09

apophenia: some thoughts on technophilia

www.zephoria.org/...some_thoughts_o_1.html - Preview

technology education communication web2.0 determinism utopianism critique

All too often, our conversations center on the need to get technology into the hands of learners, as though the gaps that we're seeing can be explained away by issues of access. Push comes to shove, most of us know that there are problems with this model, but in a world filled with dichotomous rhetoric, it's easy to get into the habit of being the proselytizer in the face of fear-mongering.
How people embrace technology has less to do with the technology itself than with the social setting in which they are embedded.
7 more annotations...
- Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations.
- There are also no such things as "digital natives." Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't.
- There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.
- Along the same lines, keep in mind that the technology that you adore may hold no interest for your students. They don't use del.icio.us or Second Life or Ning or Twitter as a part of their everyday practices. And the ways that they use Facebook and MySpace and YouTube are quite different than the ways in which you do.
- Yet, when we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do. This never works out and can cause unexpected strife.
- Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful.
- As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.