Category: Schools

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Where was that option?

A teaching colleague in Australia asked a question on a mailing list the other day about ways to incorporate ICT into the teaching of literacy and numeracy for her students. She received a rather sensible suggestion (from a teacher/librarian) that her own school’s teacher/librarian should be able to help her with such a request. That seems sensible… after all aren’t librarians supposed to be trained in the use of literacy resources? Don’t librarians deal with information-based resources on a daily basis? And don’t most of our information-based resources come in a digital format these days? Logically then, wouldn’t a librarian be the best person to speak to if one wanted to some assistance with the use of ICT for assisting literacy?

So the suggestion was made. “Ask your friendly teacher/librarian. They should be able to help you.”

The answer came back… “Our teacher/librarian is not really into ICT”

“Not really into ICT?” Sorry, but when did the luxury of being “into ICT” become one of the choices? As a teacher, or a librarian, but especially as a teacher/librarian, you can’t just be “not really into ICT”. You’re free to choose many things… you can be “not really into heavy metal music”, or be “not really into black jelly beans” or be “not really into Dan Brown novels”, but to be “not really into ICT” is not an option you have. It makes me a bit cross, because it seems there are still librarians, and teachers too for that matter, who pick and choose what aspects of their job they decide they will “be into”.

I’m not really into writing programs and registers, but I have to. It’s part of the job of being a teacher. I’m not really into standing in the playground in the middle of winter, but supervision duty is part of the job of being a teacher. I didn’t used to know a huge amount about developing literacy skills, differentiating the curriculum, or dealing with peanut allergies, but I had to learn these things because it’s a part of the job of being a teacher. Not “being into” these things was not an option for me. It was “deal with it, or find another career”.

I’m not sure why being “into ICT” is still seen as optional for so many teachers. This is 2006. The use of digital technologies is so deeply embedded into our students’ cultures, lives, thinking and day-to-day existence, that for a teacher or a T/L to simply be “not into ICT” amounts to what I can only describe as professional negligence.

There I said it.

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Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives

I’ve just been watching David Warlick’s excellent keynote address for the K12 Online Conference. (which I’m sure most of you teachers will be taking part in, right?) He raises some excellent points and coined a few new phrases… I particularly liked the idea of being “derailed”, and the notion that the side trips can often be more powerful an experience than the actual main trip, or what he calls “the rails”.

Having him explain this from the platform of his local railway station was a nice touch. 🙂 If you haven’t seen it, go watch it and then contribute to the excellent wiki space that David has set up for us.

But he also mentioned the term Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, a term first coined by Marc Prensky I believe. The concept here is that the kids coming through our schools now are Digital Natives – they were born into a world where they don’t know what it’s like not to “be digital”, as Negroponte would say.

Us older folk who were born pre-Google, pre-MSN, pre-blogs, even pre-computers, are the Digital Immigrants… people living in a strange and sometimes unnatural digital world. The argument goes that if we as teachers want to relate to the things our students see as important, then we had better start integrating into this digital society, and fast. Prensky talks about us immigrants never quite losing our “digital accent” though, and that we will never truly be as fluent as the Digital Natives.

dad.jpgMy father immigrated to Australia from Poland during the war. Once he arrived here in Australia, he worked damn hard to become an Australian – he went to night school to improve his English, made efforts to spend time with Australian friends, married an Australian girl, and so on… In my eyes, my father was very successful in making the transition into Australian culture, and in learning the language (and he was an absolute stickler for correct grammar and spelling!), adopting the conventions of the local culture, following the local sports and so on… and most people who knew him while I was growing up had no idea he was not born in Australia. My grandparents on the other hand, never really made that transition. I loved my Babcia and Dziadek, but they spoke very little English, only really mixed with other Poles, and that made it very hard for me – as a native Australian kid – to get to really relate to them.

And that’s the issue we face in our school right now. If we Digital Immigrant teachers are to meet the needs of our Digital Native kids, we need to do what my father did… to abandon the old ways and to learn the new ways, to make a concsious effort to learn this new language and these new customs and to learn them well, to really, honestly internalise them. My dad didn’t take his transition into Australian life lightly… he worked hard to make sure that everyone around him knew that he was serious about becoming an Australian, or at least as Australian as he could be.

The days of being able to teach using the “old culture” are long gone. Those days are over. Some of us have not woken up to that fact yet, and it will hit us hard in the next few years. We simply have to accept that the nature of the kids we teach has irrevocably changed and that if we are to remain relevant and able to perform the job we go into the classroom to do, then we must change our thinking. It’s no longer acceptable to think that this is all too much work, or too hard, or not that important. This change is no longer optional.

We may never completely lose our digital accent with our students, but my father is proof that an immigrant to a new land can become fluent and integrated enough to become “one of them”. It takes a lot of work and desire and commitment, but it can be done.

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Time to retire the Stagecoach

One of my very favourite writers and thinkers about education is Seymour Papert. I really like his views on the ways in which schools need to change.

It cannot be incremental, it as to be revolutionary.

I get very frustrated when I hear teachers talk about the way technology can be used to “improve” teaching. It’s not about “improving” teaching. The fact is that the model of schooling which we blindly accept as a given is rooted in 19th century methodology, but the world has changed so dramatically that it’s not a matter of introducing a few computers and doing the same old things. We have to start doing new things, not old things in new ways.

One of Papert’s articles likens education to an old fashioned stagecoach, and talks about the ways in which a stagecoach could be improved. Although stagecoaches were an effective means of transportation in their day, as a means of transport they can certainly be improved upon. He muses on the idea of strapping a jet engine to a stagecoach as a way to improve its performance – in much the same way we tinker with adding technology into our outdated curriculum and thinking they will somehow magically improve things. Like the jet engine on the stagecoach, we need to do more than just add on some new technology to an old system. We need to design a whole new jet airplane, not add a jet engine to a stagecoach.

You can read the entire article here.

I particularly resonated with the notion that the early airplanes were still not as effective in their day as an old fashioned stagecoach. Some people say the same thing about education today – “we added computers to our classrooms but nothing really changed”.

But as Papert observes…

“… You have to stop trying to improve the functioning of the old system. Instead lay down the seeds for something new. Maybe this will result in decreased performance according to the traditional measures. Remember that the first airplanes were not so good as stagecoaches as means for getting around. But they were destined to revolutionize transportation…”

It’s about time for that revolution.