Technology as an either or proposition

Recently I have been part of several meeting where participants tried to paint the integration of technology in schools/classrooms as an either or proposition.  The use of technology was seen as an agent to end to face-to-face interactions and furthermore, that important personal connections would dissipate as access became widespread.

I never understood this caustic view of technology.  I'm not sure if this view stems from fear of change or results from a lack of  understanding on how technology and physical exchanges can coexist in the same learning environment.  Leveraging technology in classrooms and even outside of schools by students does not signal the end of interpersonal skills.  Instead, for example, physical collaboration in the classroom and sharing ideas via an online learning network both hold a place of importance as one constructs knowledge.  The more important and productive discussion should center on how both the physical and virtual worlds can serve as tools students organically access to help construct meaning.

While listening to the either or proposition I thought about NCTE's Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment (benchmarks provided below).  What it means to be literate has been reshaped by the ways in which technology is applied by a community of global users to communicate, collaborate, create and develop.  If we want students to embody NCTE's definition of literacy (personally, I cannot see why not) than the use of technology needs to be embraced.  The conversation should no longer focus on what is lost or at worst doomsday predictions in regards to technology.  The conversation should encourage educators and students to think about what is possible when access and the ability to connect is readily available to all.

Context for NCTE’s 21st Century Literacies Framework

The NCTE definition of 21st century literacies makes it clear that the continued evolution of curriculum, assessment, and teaching practice itself is necessary:

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the 21st century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities, and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Active, successful participants in this 21st century global society must be able to

• Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;
• Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes;
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts;
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.

How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Business and Educaton

Sharing a few personal highlights from Cathy Davidson's Now You See It:  How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century.

When we encounter a mismatch between our values and some new experience, we have a choice to either hold on to our values against all the evidence, to insist they are right or natural no matter what; or we can rethink them and even reject them, a process that can be smooth or traumatic, partial or complete. In any case, this process is a key component of the science of attention

To live is to be in a constant state of adjustment. We can change by accident—because we have to, because life throws us a curveball. But we can also train ourselves to be aware of our own neural processing—repetition, selection, mirroring—and arrange our lives so we have the tools and the partners we need to help us to see what we might miss on our own

The Internet is here to stay. Are we teaching them in a way that will prepare them for a world of learning and for human relationships in which they interweave their interests into the vast, decentralized, yet entirely interconnected content online?

Crowdsourced thinking is very different from credentialing, or relying on top-down expertise. If anything, crowdsourcing is suspicious of expertise, because the more expert we are, the more likely we are to be limited in what we even conceive to be the problem, let alone the answer

No matter how expert we are, no matter how brilliant, we can improve, we can learn, by sharing insights and working together collectively

The real issue isn’t that our schools are too challenging. It’s the opposite. Among the top quartile of high school students, the most frequent complaint and cause of disaffection from schooling is boredom and lack of rigor. That also happens to be true among the lowest group, for whom low expectations lead to low motivation

To be prepared for jobs that have a real future in the digital economy, one needs an emphasis on creative thinking, at all levels. By this I mean the kind of thinking that cannot be computerized and automated. This creative thinking requires attention to surprise, anomaly, difference, and disruption, and an ability to switch focus, depending on what individual, unpredictable problems might arise. Perhaps surprisingly, these noncomputational jobs, impervious to automation, occur at all levels across the blue-collar and white-collar spectrum

Intrinsic to inquiry-based learning, there’s a “gamer disposition,” which is to say a real commitment to learning that goes far beyond school to the cultivation of “risk-taking, critical reflection, collaboration, meaning creation, non-linear navigation, problem solving and problem definition, and innovation.”

Collaboration by difference is an antidote to attention blindness. It signifies that the complex and interconnected problems of our time cannot be solved by anyone alone and that those who think they can act in an entirely focused, solitary fashion are undoubtedly missing the main point that is right there in front of them, thumping its chest and staring them in the face

We need to measure practical, real-world skills, such as how to focus attention through project and time management. There is no punch clock in do-it-yourself culture, so where do kids learn how to manage themselves?