:Connecting the Dots

I just finished watching a 2005 video of Thomas Friedman lecturing at MIT. He provides a nice summary of his thesis in The World is Flat and explains the “flatteners” that are re-shaping our society and all societies. This was a “refresher course” for me, having read the book about two years ago. It’s especially powerful hearing it right from the horse’s mouth and having the whole thing boiled down into a very coherent, engaging, and funny one-hour presentation.

There’s a lot to think about there when it comes to schools and technology. The part that really got me thinking was when he discussed Paul David’s study of how the advent of electricity didn’t bring an increase in productivity …until business practices and structures evolved to take advantage of the new tools that were available. Silos powered by steam pulleys had to be replaced by warehouses with electric conveyor belts. Obviously, a conveyor belt is useless in a silo, but it took someone who could imagine life beyond silos to understand how they can be best used. It’s Shoshana Zuboff’s automating (10% productivity gain by using information technology to do old tasks better) vs. informating (massive productivity gains by using information technology to do things you couldn’t do before).

Schools are still silos with a lot of command and control and a lot of barriers to collaboration with the outside world. We distrust people who come in to the school. We worry about what kids will see and who they talk to when they go out of the school. We compete with other schools and teachers instead of learning from them. We replace a blackboard with a digital whiteboard and the teacher proceeds to give the exact same lesson – the same notes on the board, the same quiet copying into spiral notebooks – as he did last year before he got “wired.” We wonder why all of those computers and projectors didn’t magically transform our classrooms when the students are still sitting in the same desks in the same rows with the same textbooks hearing the same lecture.

So I guess schools don’t have to change in the face of all of these new technologies, but wouldn’t they be wise to? Why wouldn’t I want my students to videoconference with students in India instead of just memorizing the population of India in some textbook? Come to think of it, whatever the book said would undoubtedly be inaccurate; I’d place far more trust in Wikipedia’s number…

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A couple of weeks ago, I spent a lunch hour listening to two elementary teachers discussing a number of issues surrounding technology in the district. We spent a lot of time discussing Macs and PC’s. Our PC-only district shares a teacher center with an adjacent district with a large installed base of Macs and the teachers frequently attend PD sessions that are on the Mac. They lamented that the things they were learning on our neighbor’s Macs couldn’t be transferred to the computers in their school, that the PC’s were too difficult to use, that the district wasn’t hearing what teachers “really” wanted, that PC’s were downright evil!!

In my view, this is a non-issue. Didn’t we stop arguing about Macs vs. PC’s back in the 1990’s? Of all the decisions that districts, administrators, and teachers have to make about educational technology, isn’t this among the least important? I grew up with Macs and still love and admire the whole Apple gestalt; that said, the cost in switching to all Macs or trying to support both platforms simultaneously just isn’t worth it (in our case, at least) when one considers all the other things that money could be spent on.

At one point “Bill” tried to surf to a site on his classroom PC that happened to be blocked upstream by our service provider’s filter. When he got the “blocked” message he cynically barked, “Dell strikes again!” Of course, he didn’t realize that, were he working on a brand-new MacBook Pro, the same error message would still be staring him in the face.

His companion, a pretty savvy user, told me that a key criterion in her son’s college search had been finding a school with a Mac network. I’ve heard of brand loyalty but there comes a time…

In a world where we spend most of our computer time viewing the standards-based, platform-neutral Internet, why are we still having this argument? Why aren’t we talking about what we do on the computer and how it supports learning instead of which computer we’re going to buy?

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“The things you put on mySpace can come back to haunt you later in life when you are applying to college or looking for a job.” Many a school administrator, parent, teacher, and/or internet safety expert has uttered these words to groups of kids who generally receive the warning with varying levels of disinterest, fear, or shrugging shoulders.

Now, an internet startup has launched Reputation Defender, which promises to seek out and potentially erase our little lapses of judgment hanging out in the dark corners of the internet. This Wired News story examines the new site at length. What interests me is the “My Child” area, where parents can pay to have their child’s online presence monitored month-to-month. Obviously, parents want to protect their children but is it me, or is this also giving technophobic parents a way to spy on their kids? Dad can’t Google and Mom doesn’t have a Facebook account, so they pay someone else to keep an eye on their children in cyberspace. Convenient, but whatever happened to just talking to your kids?

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