Technologies can provide powerful tools for student learning, but their value depends upon how effectively teachers use them to support instruction. Education leaders agree that all new teachers must graduate from teacher education programs with the knowledge and skills that will allow them to integrate technology easily and effectively into their daily teaching, whatever the setting. Many do. Nonetheless, far too many teacher candidates graduate without adequate exposure to, or experience with, effective teaching with technology. Even the best of teacher education programs need to continually review and renew their programs to ensure they are responsive to changing expectations for teachers and to make sure the programs take advantage of the opportunities offered by ever more powerful technologies for teaching and learning. Without a strong foundation in the knowledge and skills for using technology effectively, teacher candidates entering today’s schools will fall short of meeting the “highly qualified teacher” expectations set out by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (2002). This is a national problem but one that appears to be particularly severe in urban and rural schools that have difficulty attracting and retaining high-quality teachers.
Information technology can and should be integrated into our lives in ways that support people’s deep urges to learn… and to teach. Information technology should provide easy paths connecting people with information, teaching, learning, and educational institutions—and with each other. The terms “distance education” and “lifelong learning” should fade away as most learners and teachers become comfortable with a wide range of changing educational and telecommunications options, and participation in formal (and informal) education becomes commonplace for people of all ages.
The biggest challenge is to reduce the growing gap between the educational “haves” and the “have nots” and to build more effective learning communities. Making quality education widely available with and through information technology in the next decade is one of the keys to improving the quality of life for everyone. This will require increased investments and annual expenditures at every level.
Education is being transformed at every level, from state university systems and consortia of colleges to individual faculty members and students. Information technology is now widely recognized as both a significant cause and a vehicle for shaping this transformation. Unfortunately, there is no clear, irrefutable quantitative evidence of the superiority of educational uses of information technology; and if information technology were certain to provide a simple solution to the “education problem” it would already have been reported in every news medium.
However, recent data indicate that use of applications of information technology in conjunction with teaching is spreading faster than any other form of curricular change and moving irreversibly beyond the pioneers and well into the mainstream of the faculty. [See Green's first chart in the March/April, 1996 issue of Change Magazine]. Still in the minority, but in rapidly growing numbers, faculty members are convinced that they can teach more and better by using information technology. They also believe that their students must integrate the use of technology into their lives as preparation for careers, or risk being (further) disadvantaged in the competition for jobs in industry, academia, and other sectors. Finally, institutional leaders are recognizing that increasingly often students and faculty members’ decisions about which institution to attend or affiliate with are being influenced by their perceptions of the availability and use of information technology in academic programs. There is no longer any question about whether or not information technology will become an integral part of education. There are only questions about when and how.
Information technology can turn nightmares into reality; or information technology can become the excuse and the means for achieving important institutional educational missions, personal teaching and learning goals, and human values. There is still time to choose between nightmares and visions.
Educational decisions should be based on a deepening understanding of the ways in which face-to-face communications, telecommunications, and independent work can fit together for the best learning (and teaching). Collaborative work within and across groups of learners and teachers from all levels of expertise should be valued and supported. Previously, many faculty members could talk about how they would like to tailor their teaching to meet the growing variety of learning styles and needs of their students; but very few teachers had the time or other resources necessary to respond effectively to those differences. Emerging educational uses of information technology seem to make this a possibility for the first time. Institutions need to support faculty members, students, professional staff, and institutional leaders in what must become permanently continuing efforts to improve teaching and learning with newly available tools and methods.
Students should be active participants in making and implementing these choices, accepting increasing responsibility commensurate with their age and educational maturity. However, faculty members should retain overall responsibility for setting parameters and objectives and providing guidance and direction for the students. Faculty members may quite reasonably decide that lecturing is an important element in one of these combinations, along with computer-mediated collaborative work, independent use of multimedia simulations, and other forms of groupwork, independent work, or uses of telecommunications. If the educational mission of the institution includes serving the needs of students (or faculty) who cannot easily get to a campus because of location, work schedule, family obligations, or disabilities, then it is likely that telecommunications and independent work will have a larger role and face-to-face communications a smaller role in the educational combinations selected.
Teachers of the youngest students must retain most of the responsibility for choosing effective teaching/learning/technology combinations. Without significant institutional support, or re-configuring traditional elementary school classrooms and schedules, little can be done to integrate new applications of technology. However, some elementary school teachers are already among the most receptive to new options and with the help of teaching assistants and technical support staff are finding many ways to permit their young students to work directly with computers and telecommunications—within their classrooms or in other spaces where computers are accessible. Most young students respond enthusiastically to using the tools that were already part of the world they were born into.
Just as students differ in their needs and abilities, so do faculty. The richest education will not be achieved by removing all traces of individual differences among faculty, but by honoring their individual strengths while supporting their weaknesses. Most faculty members should be helped to master new ways of teaching. Some should not. Every effort must be made to sustain the excitement of the pioneers—those faculty members predisposed to try to improve their own teaching and their own students’ learning with new applications of technology; comfortably engage the mainstream faculty—those who are not by nature especially interested in technology, but who are often concerned with improving their own teaching and their students’ learning; and maintain institutional respect for the laggards—especially those who can be respected for their teaching
By contrast, at most of the smaller private and state colleges the proportion of students and faculty with their own computers is rising much more slowly, as is access to the Internet and related services and facilities. (Even within many of those institutions most effectively integrating the new technologies there are examples of “have” and “have not” departments. Students and faculty in the sciences often have better access sooner to new computers and more powerful telecommunications resources than do their colleagues in the humanities.) In addition, the number of part-time and older students who have jobs is growing rapidly; but they are less likely to have these new technologies comfortably available for educational use at home or in their workplaces. They also have less time to use public access facilities on a campus.
Many of us still see the enormous potential for computing, video, and other forms of telecommunications for increasing access to information and improving the quality of education—for everyone—when used in conjunction with face-to-face meetings and independent work. And many who frequent the Internet claim they are finding new forms of communications and new relationships, especially new academic relationships that may be the beginnings of new kinds of scholarly communities or the extensions of old ones. Again, it may now be possible for a wider variety of academics—including students—to participate more actively, fully, and equally in some of these scholarly communities. The idea of “learning communities” may become a more attainable vision. However, current patterns and limitations of integration of educational uses of information technology will widen the already-growing gap between the wealthiest and the most impoverished people in our society—locally, nationally, and worldwide. Those who cannot participate in new technology-based educational options will be seriously disadvantaged. So will those whose only educational options are through technology.
Information technology can and should be integrated into our lives in ways that support people’s deep urges to learn… and to teach. Information technology should provide easy paths connecting people with information, teaching, learning, and educational institutions—and with each other. The terms “distance education” and “lifelong learning” should fade away as most learners and teachers become comfortable with a wide range of changing educational and telecommunications options, and participation in formal (and informal) education becomes commonplace for people of all ages.
Some educational uses of information technology, especially some versions of distance education, are already providing less costly educational options that work well for some kinds of students in some subjects with some educational goals (note, for example, the continuing success of the Open University and the National Technological University and the emerging success of the University of Phoenix Online Campus and the Mind Extension University). So far, these options seem to fit best the needs of young students who cannot afford a four-year undergraduate education, older students for whom learning in or near their jobs or homes is significantly more attractive, or students who have quite specific learning goals. These cost-effective educational applications of technology seem to be easiest to develop for courses where there is the greatest clarity and consensus about the knowledge and skills students need to master (such as business courses, engineering, and basic skills in mathematics).
In the long run ten years? perhaps educational uses of information technology that significantly reduce the costs of many other kinds of education will be developed, but so far most improvements to the quality of and access to education via information technology have increased costs. Of course, some operational inefficiency in our educational institutions can be removed or improved— some replaced by technology. But most institutions are already moving expeditiously down that path. For the next few years, it is more realistic to strive for better quality and accessibility of education and for ways to meet “reasonable” increases in expenses. The nature of the institution and its access to funding determine what is “reasonable.”
Today even the wealthiest institutions (perhaps 100 colleges and universities?) must struggle with the expense of moving ahead to integrate new technologies and new media into teaching and learning. But they seem able to afford both to extend high quality traditional education and to use technology to increase the quality of communications between and among faculty and students. However, the majority of schools, colleges, and universities must work much harder to reach higher new levels of revenues to support their integration of information technology (and to develop financial planning procedures and accounting categories more supportive of the full integration of educational uses of information technology). One of the most powerful motivators is the growing belief that institutions unable or unwilling to move at all in this direction are unlikely to be able to compete for students, faculty, and funding in the next decade.
Making quality education widely available with and through information technology in the next decade is one of the keys to improving the quality of life for everyone. This will require increased investments and annual expenditures at every level, and can only be accomplished by allocating a larger portion of societal resources to education—in effect, assigning a higher societal priority to education . Unfortunately, this will be a major challenge in today’s political climate where some “leaders” argue that we should be cutting educational expenditures even deeper. It is confusing that some of these same “leaders” also argue that we need better education more than ever to produce the “knowledge workers” who will sustain our rapidly changing information-based economy and increase our international economic competitiveness.
However, the ultimate challenge is to use information technology to improve education, improve our lives, and shape a better future—one that avoids twelve important blunders.
Mohandas Gandhi’s list of “Seven Blunders of the World” that lead to violence was described in an article in the Christian Science Monitor on February 1, 1995 (page 14). In his final years, “…the elder Gandhi kept his grandson close at hand and set aside an hour every day to be alone with the boy.” I like the image of a gifted world leader devoting so much time to a young person, affirming the fundamental human urge to connect to future generations—to teach—and, perhaps, to learn.On their final day together, not too long before his assassination, Gandhi gave this important list to his grandson. Here are the seven—with an eighth “blunder” added by Arun Gandhi, the grandson, and four of my own that focus on teaching, learning, and technology:
• Gandhi]
• Technology without direction
• Connection without community
• Teaching without joy
• Learning without hope
Growing up in a digital world has had a significant influence on how today’s students learn. Pioneering faculty members and entrepreneurs working with technologists have been working for several years to meet the needs of this new breed of student by using the enabling power of information technology. The cumulative effect of this work is just now beginning to have a noticeable impact on the form and function of Technology enables the design of learning situations that actively engage and guide learners while allowing them to choose the style of the learning experience and to organize the knowledge outcomes. This conceptualization of the learning environment helps us make the transition from learning in a physical space such as the classroom or the library, to learning in a student-centered learning environment in cyberspace.Deeper learning is the goal of active, learner-centered practice that involves the interplay of technology and pedagogy. Colleen Carmean, a NLII 2002 fellow from Arizona State University-West, has mapped the learning space, based on learner-centered principles, i.e., active, contextual, social, engaging, and owned by the student, to show how technology promotes deeper learning. Read more about her work at http://www.educause.edu/nlii/keythemes. the teaching and learning landscape.
[...] Report on eductional website 1 # [...]
Pingback by TECHNOLOGIES LEARNING AND TEACHING « Christina’s Talking — March 7, 2009 @ 3:07 am
Technologies can provide powerful tools for student learning, but their value depends upon how effectively teachers use them to support instruction. Education leaders agree that all new teachers must graduate from teacher education programs with the knowledge and skills that will allow them to integrate technology easily and effectively into their daily teaching, whatever the setting. Many do. Nonetheless, far too many teacher candidates graduate without adequate exposure to, or experience with, effective teaching with technology. Even the best of teacher education programs need to continually review and renew their programs to ensure they are responsive to changing expectations for teachers and to make sure the programs take advantage of the opportunities offered by ever more powerful technologies for teaching and learning. Without a strong foundation in the knowledge and skills for using technology effectively, teacher candidates entering today’s schools will fall short of meeting the “highly qualified teacher” expectations set out by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (2002). This is a national problem but one that appears to be particularly severe in urban and rural schools that have difficulty attracting and retaining high-quality teachers.
Information technology can and should be integrated into our lives in ways that support people’s deep urges to learn… and to teach. Information technology should provide easy paths connecting people with information, teaching, learning, and educational institutions—and with each other. The terms “distance education” and “lifelong learning” should fade away as most learners and teachers become comfortable with a wide range of changing educational and telecommunications options, and participation in formal (and informal) education becomes commonplace for people of all ages.
The biggest challenge is to reduce the growing gap between the educational “haves” and the “have nots” and to build more effective learning communities. Making quality education widely available with and through information technology in the next decade is one of the keys to improving the quality of life for everyone. This will require increased investments and annual expenditures at every level.
Education is being transformed at every level, from state university systems and consortia of colleges to individual faculty members and students. Information technology is now widely recognized as both a significant cause and a vehicle for shaping this transformation. Unfortunately, there is no clear, irrefutable quantitative evidence of the superiority of educational uses of information technology; and if information technology were certain to provide a simple solution to the “education problem” it would already have been reported in every news medium.
However, recent data indicate that use of applications of information technology in conjunction with teaching is spreading faster than any other form of curricular change and moving irreversibly beyond the pioneers and well into the mainstream of the faculty. [See Green's first chart in the March/April, 1996 issue of Change Magazine]. Still in the minority, but in rapidly growing numbers, faculty members are convinced that they can teach more and better by using information technology. They also believe that their students must integrate the use of technology into their lives as preparation for careers, or risk being (further) disadvantaged in the competition for jobs in industry, academia, and other sectors. Finally, institutional leaders are recognizing that increasingly often students and faculty members’ decisions about which institution to attend or affiliate with are being influenced by their perceptions of the availability and use of information technology in academic programs. There is no longer any question about whether or not information technology will become an integral part of education. There are only questions about when and how.
Information technology can turn nightmares into reality; or information technology can become the excuse and the means for achieving important institutional educational missions, personal teaching and learning goals, and human values. There is still time to choose between nightmares and visions.
Educational decisions should be based on a deepening understanding of the ways in which face-to-face communications, telecommunications, and independent work can fit together for the best learning (and teaching). Collaborative work within and across groups of learners and teachers from all levels of expertise should be valued and supported. Previously, many faculty members could talk about how they would like to tailor their teaching to meet the growing variety of learning styles and needs of their students; but very few teachers had the time or other resources necessary to respond effectively to those differences. Emerging educational uses of information technology seem to make this a possibility for the first time. Institutions need to support faculty members, students, professional staff, and institutional leaders in what must become permanently continuing efforts to improve teaching and learning with newly available tools and methods.
Students should be active participants in making and implementing these choices, accepting increasing responsibility commensurate with their age and educational maturity. However, faculty members should retain overall responsibility for setting parameters and objectives and providing guidance and direction for the students. Faculty members may quite reasonably decide that lecturing is an important element in one of these combinations, along with computer-mediated collaborative work, independent use of multimedia simulations, and other forms of groupwork, independent work, or uses of telecommunications. If the educational mission of the institution includes serving the needs of students (or faculty) who cannot easily get to a campus because of location, work schedule, family obligations, or disabilities, then it is likely that telecommunications and independent work will have a larger role and face-to-face communications a smaller role in the educational combinations selected.
Teachers of the youngest students must retain most of the responsibility for choosing effective teaching/learning/technology combinations. Without significant institutional support, or re-configuring traditional elementary school classrooms and schedules, little can be done to integrate new applications of technology. However, some elementary school teachers are already among the most receptive to new options and with the help of teaching assistants and technical support staff are finding many ways to permit their young students to work directly with computers and telecommunications—within their classrooms or in other spaces where computers are accessible. Most young students respond enthusiastically to using the tools that were already part of the world they were born into.
Just as students differ in their needs and abilities, so do faculty. The richest education will not be achieved by removing all traces of individual differences among faculty, but by honoring their individual strengths while supporting their weaknesses. Most faculty members should be helped to master new ways of teaching. Some should not. Every effort must be made to sustain the excitement of the pioneers—those faculty members predisposed to try to improve their own teaching and their own students’ learning with new applications of technology; comfortably engage the mainstream faculty—those who are not by nature especially interested in technology, but who are often concerned with improving their own teaching and their students’ learning; and maintain institutional respect for the laggards—especially those who can be respected for their teaching
By contrast, at most of the smaller private and state colleges the proportion of students and faculty with their own computers is rising much more slowly, as is access to the Internet and related services and facilities. (Even within many of those institutions most effectively integrating the new technologies there are examples of “have” and “have not” departments. Students and faculty in the sciences often have better access sooner to new computers and more powerful telecommunications resources than do their colleagues in the humanities.) In addition, the number of part-time and older students who have jobs is growing rapidly; but they are less likely to have these new technologies comfortably available for educational use at home or in their workplaces. They also have less time to use public access facilities on a campus.
Many of us still see the enormous potential for computing, video, and other forms of telecommunications for increasing access to information and improving the quality of education—for everyone—when used in conjunction with face-to-face meetings and independent work. And many who frequent the Internet claim they are finding new forms of communications and new relationships, especially new academic relationships that may be the beginnings of new kinds of scholarly communities or the extensions of old ones. Again, it may now be possible for a wider variety of academics—including students—to participate more actively, fully, and equally in some of these scholarly communities. The idea of “learning communities” may become a more attainable vision. However, current patterns and limitations of integration of educational uses of information technology will widen the already-growing gap between the wealthiest and the most impoverished people in our society—locally, nationally, and worldwide. Those who cannot participate in new technology-based educational options will be seriously disadvantaged. So will those whose only educational options are through technology.
Information technology can and should be integrated into our lives in ways that support people’s deep urges to learn… and to teach. Information technology should provide easy paths connecting people with information, teaching, learning, and educational institutions—and with each other. The terms “distance education” and “lifelong learning” should fade away as most learners and teachers become comfortable with a wide range of changing educational and telecommunications options, and participation in formal (and informal) education becomes commonplace for people of all ages.
Some educational uses of information technology, especially some versions of distance education, are already providing less costly educational options that work well for some kinds of students in some subjects with some educational goals (note, for example, the continuing success of the Open University and the National Technological University and the emerging success of the University of Phoenix Online Campus and the Mind Extension University). So far, these options seem to fit best the needs of young students who cannot afford a four-year undergraduate education, older students for whom learning in or near their jobs or homes is significantly more attractive, or students who have quite specific learning goals. These cost-effective educational applications of technology seem to be easiest to develop for courses where there is the greatest clarity and consensus about the knowledge and skills students need to master (such as business courses, engineering, and basic skills in mathematics).
In the long run ten years? perhaps educational uses of information technology that significantly reduce the costs of many other kinds of education will be developed, but so far most improvements to the quality of and access to education via information technology have increased costs. Of course, some operational inefficiency in our educational institutions can be removed or improved— some replaced by technology. But most institutions are already moving expeditiously down that path. For the next few years, it is more realistic to strive for better quality and accessibility of education and for ways to meet “reasonable” increases in expenses. The nature of the institution and its access to funding determine what is “reasonable.”
Today even the wealthiest institutions (perhaps 100 colleges and universities?) must struggle with the expense of moving ahead to integrate new technologies and new media into teaching and learning. But they seem able to afford both to extend high quality traditional education and to use technology to increase the quality of communications between and among faculty and students. However, the majority of schools, colleges, and universities must work much harder to reach higher new levels of revenues to support their integration of information technology (and to develop financial planning procedures and accounting categories more supportive of the full integration of educational uses of information technology). One of the most powerful motivators is the growing belief that institutions unable or unwilling to move at all in this direction are unlikely to be able to compete for students, faculty, and funding in the next decade.
Making quality education widely available with and through information technology in the next decade is one of the keys to improving the quality of life for everyone. This will require increased investments and annual expenditures at every level, and can only be accomplished by allocating a larger portion of societal resources to education—in effect, assigning a higher societal priority to education . Unfortunately, this will be a major challenge in today’s political climate where some “leaders” argue that we should be cutting educational expenditures even deeper. It is confusing that some of these same “leaders” also argue that we need better education more than ever to produce the “knowledge workers” who will sustain our rapidly changing information-based economy and increase our international economic competitiveness.
However, the ultimate challenge is to use information technology to improve education, improve our lives, and shape a better future—one that avoids twelve important blunders.
Mohandas Gandhi’s list of “Seven Blunders of the World” that lead to violence was described in an article in the Christian Science Monitor on February 1, 1995 (page 14). In his final years, “…the elder Gandhi kept his grandson close at hand and set aside an hour every day to be alone with the boy.” I like the image of a gifted world leader devoting so much time to a young person, affirming the fundamental human urge to connect to future generations—to teach—and, perhaps, to learn.On their final day together, not too long before his assassination, Gandhi gave this important list to his grandson. Here are the seven—with an eighth “blunder” added by Arun Gandhi, the grandson, and four of my own that focus on teaching, learning, and technology:
• Gandhi]
• Technology without direction
• Connection without community
• Teaching without joy
• Learning without hope
Growing up in a digital world has had a significant influence on how today’s students learn. Pioneering faculty members and entrepreneurs working with technologists have been working for several years to meet the needs of this new breed of student by using the enabling power of information technology. The cumulative effect of this work is just now beginning to have a noticeable impact on the form and function of Technology enables the design of learning situations that actively engage and guide learners while allowing them to choose the style of the learning experience and to organize the knowledge outcomes. This conceptualization of the learning environment helps us make the transition from learning in a physical space such as the classroom or the library, to learning in a student-centered learning environment in cyberspace.Deeper learning is the goal of active, learner-centered practice that involves the interplay of technology and pedagogy. Colleen Carmean, a NLII 2002 fellow from Arizona State University-West, has mapped the learning space, based on learner-centered principles, i.e., active, contextual, social, engaging, and owned by the student, to show how technology promotes deeper learning. Read more about her work at http://www.educause.edu/nlii/keythemes. the teaching and learning landscape.
Comment by christinajg — March 2, 2009 @ 3:01 pm