craig skinner's List: 21st Century Education

• First, it helps to look at the typical process of technology adoption (keeping in mind, of course, that schools are not typical of anything.) It's typically a four-step process:

    
   
  • Dabbling.
   
  • Doing old things in old ways.
   
  • Doing old things in new ways.
   
  • Doing new things in new ways
• Old Things in Old Ways
• continue doing things within the technology the way we've always done it.
• but the results were certainly cheaper, and far more efficient.
• We use it mostly to pass documents around, but now in electronic form, and the result is not very different from what we have always known.
• new technology still faces a great deal of resistance
• using computers to collect old stuff (such as data or lesson plans) in old ways (by filing).
• educational benefits, though, including allowing teachers to access data more easily and parents to do so more extensively.
• Old Things in New Ways
• When we begin adding digital demonstrations through video and Flash animation, we are giving students new, better ways to get information.

• Still, our best teachers have always used interactive models for demonstrations, and students, like scientists and military planners, have been conducting simulations in sand, on paper, and in their heads for thousands of years. So, though some observers trumpet these uses of technology as great innovations, they are really still examples of doing old things in new ways.

    
• online gaming; screen saver analysis; photoblogging; programming; exploring; and even transgressing and testing social norms.
• peer rating of comments
• If we want to move the useful adoption of technology forward, it is crucial for educators to learn to listen, to observe, to ask, and to try all the new methods their students have already figured out, and do so regularly
• Two big factors stand in the way of our making more and faster progress in technology adoption in our schools.
• The Big Tech Barrier: One-to-One
• The missing technological element is true one-to-one computing,
• For true technological advance to occur, the computers must be personal to each learner.
• prices of these devices, as with all technology, are falling dramatically
• The Social Barrier: Digital Immigrants
• Schools (which really means the teachers and administrators) famously resist change.
• school system has evolved an extremely delicate balance between many sets of pressures -- political, parental, social, organizational, supervisory, and financial -- that any technological change is bound to disrup
• the pressure against disruption has always been stronger than the pressure for change
• These "digital natives" are born into digital technology. Conversely, their teachers (and all older adults) are "digital immigrants." Having learned about digital technology later in life, digital immigrants retain their predigital "accents" -- such as, thinking that virtual relationships (those that exist only online) are somehow less real or important than face-to-face ones. Such outmoded perspectives are serious barriers to our students' 21st-century progress.
• they often face antitechnology pressure from parents demanding that schools go back to basics
• The only way to move forward effectively is to combine what they know about technology with what we know and require about education.
• I suggest that every lesson plan, every class, every school, every school district, and every state ought to try something new and then report to all of us what works and what doesn't; after all, we do have the Internet.
• Let's adapt it, push it, pull it, iterate with it, experiment with it, test it, and redo it, until we reach the point where we and our kids truly feel we've done our very best. Then, let's push it and pull it some more. And let's do it quickly, so the 22nd century doesn't catch us by surprise with too much of our work undone.

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