Let us begin with the obvious (thanks to @tseale via Twitter):
And then bring in Kevin Jennings of Trinity College - The University of Dublin:
"Lets imagine a country which we will call Foobar, where reading and writing don’t exist, but which despite this has managed to develop a sophisticated culture of science, the arts, philosophy and commerce. A bit of a stretch I know, but not entirely inconceivable. All cultural transmission in such a society would take place by oral means and a good memory would undoubtedly be an invaluable asset. Education would probably consist of much rote learning and place a high value on memory work. Now imagine what the impact on such a society and in particular on its education system might be when someone finally invents the pen. Well, undoubtedly a politician somewhere will pound a table and insist that we need a ‘pen in every classroom’. An education administrator will say ‘no, we should have a pen room where children can go once a week to learn how to use these pens’. So, eventually schools will all have pens and teachers will have to figure out how to make use of them. The Foobarian Department of Education will ponder the issue. They will eventually write a ‘pen’ curriculum and issue guidelines on how the ‘pen’ may be used to support memory work and rote-learning in schools……"
There are really no "natural technologies." Even if your method of survival is climbing a tree, it becomes vital to learn how to best use that tree. Do you climb high enough to escape one predator from the ground only to expose yourself to a predator from the sky or a deadly fall? But there is something else - the nature of having that tree transforms you, and transforms your understanding of the world. Once you've climbed that tree, things will never be the same for you, and if someone insists that you may not use the tree, or the tree is taken away, you will be more limited than you were.
I say all this to every educator who says something like this quote from Steven D. Krause's history of educational technology, "All you need to teach English are books, desks, paper, pens, and a chalkboard. You don't need any technology-just use what's there." Krause, of course, responds, "Of course, all of these items "just there" in elementary, secondary, and higher education classrooms are in fact technologies that have had profound influences on how and what we teach, just as profound as contemporary technologies like the World Wide Web."
It is all technology. All "information and communications technology," and if you truly think that there is a significant conceptual difference between (a) paper, pencils, pens, books, and (b) a smartphone or an internet-linked computer, you may really need to go back for a refresher course in human history.
Not only are all of these simply personal information and communication technology choices, they can all be used well, they can all be used badly. They all must be learned - yes - there was a time when dialing a phone needed to be taught...
...though today most of that advice (except the admonition that the "hyphen is not dialed") has become historical trivia.
The chalkboard, the pencil, the affordable mass-produced book - these are the best technologies of 1840. They needed to be learned back then. They were considered disruptive back then. But schools adapted we no longer insist on papyrus-making or quill-cutting in our classrooms.
We've had this conversation before, but let us repeat - rules against specific technology uses in the classroom are simply expressions of social-reproduction power. They never have anything to do with education, simply the 'comfort' of the teacher and the teacher's desire to remain comfortable by insisting that all around them behave as the teacher wishes to behave. That's a power play which ensures that the further the student is from the teacher (or administrator) socio-culturally, the worse they will do in school.
Which might be fine for the off-spring of the teacher, who them have an easier path to inherited elite status. But which does little to make us a fairer, or more successful society.
Nicholas Negroponte is many things, good and bad I am sure, but one thing he may not be becomes obvious from the following quote: He may not be someone who can see beyond his own understanding of technology.
"Learning is many things," Negroponte says in GOOD Magazine, "one of which includes reading. Another is the ability to control, create, and collaborate. Books have sizes for reasons. Keyboards have a size, too. Surely we are not going to force children into literary expression with their thumbs. A laptop is a window, a contemplative experience, nomadic not mobile. The cell phone is a point of contact, a burst medium, interruptive in both good and bad sense. It is a lifeline in any sense. The device itself, however, should not be confused with connectivity. Laptops need to be connected too. Would I want an unconnected laptop over a connected cell phone. No. No more than I would want to be driving a car with brakes and no steering wheel."
"Books have sizes for reasons"? "Keyboards have a size, too"? Could these statements somehow be true?
There was a time when "books" were carved into stone tablets. Later they came as scrolls on papyrus or a very thin lambskin, written without punctuation or even space between words. At some point they became large leather bound "books." Or small pamphlets. Or the original "pocket" poetry books young swains carried with them on walks in the fields with the lassies they romanced. Mass transit created the desire for the contemporary paperback (something to read on the streetcar, el, underground, subway) and the "tabloid" ("Berliner") size newspaper (because turning pages of The New York Times on a rush hour Lexington Avenue Express train requires an advanced degree in origami). Along the way, each new variation seems to have opened reading up to more people.
Keyboards have, in their short lifespan, moved from steeply-sloped narrow configurations to the flat, wide keyboard I'm typing on now, to the semi-QWERTY of my Blackberry Pearl to the miniaturized virtual form of the iPhone or Storm. How we use them has changed as well. "Typing" - as we know it, that is "touch typing" - was created for secretaries to quickly convert the boss's handwriting, or shorthand, into a "typed" form. If you notice, those who "write" - that is create - on a keyboard are often much less exact in their typing techniques and often do need to look at the keys. Now half the population types with their thumbs. We type different things than we used to, in different ways, on keyboards unthinkable just a few years ago, with amazing new technologies (predictive spelling). Again, the more the "fixed" notion Negroponte sees has faded, the greater the variety of people who can join the party.
Negroponte is committed to a "form" for his technology. Yes, he's invested years in the OLPC computer, and yes, it is a brilliant thing. But while he and his team were hidden away working, technology changed, and the mobile phone grew up, and whole new visions and understandings of how information flows developed.
We do this all the time. We mistake the thing for the reason. The "reason" in Negroponte's case is global access to information, communication, and education. But the "thing" is a computer form that he is comfortable with - even if the mobile phone that every family already needs might be the more logical system for the users he wants to help.
The "reason" behind learning to read in school is to offer students a gateway to the information and culture they need. The "thing" is the bound book with alphabetic characters printed in ink - even if other delivery systems have arrived which might make more sense for many students.
The "reason" behind learning to write in school is communication and creativity... well, I could go on and on.
Technological change is difficult. A professor of mine commented last semester on his confusion when he collects student phone numbers these days. "There used to be just two or three area codes in a class," he said, "but now your phone number is more likely to say where you came from than where you live now." There are many people still confused by the fact that more than half of our phone calls are made to people, not places. Or that text messages have replaced many calls, and have morphed into something different entirely.
Information technologies only last until a new technology supersedes it. The first cave painting probably dealt a blow to those early human artists who drew only in the dirt, and it has progressed from there.
So, it might seem odd to someone under, say, 25, but there was a time when people really wanted to see their photographs right away, not wait 3 to 5 days after dropping them at the drugstore. So Edwin Land developed the Polaroid, and it changed many things - from parties to asking for that part at the hardware store (now you carried a photo of the broken plumbing piece in) to, yes, amateur pornography (which no longer had to be placed in the hands of that kid in the FotoMat). Whole art forms sprang up in response.
Polaroid never displaced traditional film because it couldn't do "everything" film did. Duplicates and enlargements were expensive and difficult. There were limits to the cameras. We might think of this in the same way we'd say that cassette audio books couldn't fully replace print. But digital photography swept away both "film" and Polaroid - and most photo stores - because it did everything both could do. Not at first, of course. I remember my first Sony digital camera which recorded its images on a floppy disk. Great Zeiss lens, but... you understand. Beyond that, digital photos have changed, fundamentally, the way we take, see, and share photographs.
Some may miss film, darkrooms, all those photo albums and shoe boxes crammed with pictures. That's legit. Still, if we "bring pictures" to a share at a family gathering these days we are most likely to plug the camera into the TV and show them, or we have already posted them on Flickr. The experience is different. It has changed. But it is not necessarily worse.
Photography no longer means "film" or silver oxide or physical prints. You no longer have to sweat for years with an enlarger and trays of chemicals to be a photographer. Hell, now you can be a photographer with nothing more than that phone you've got. But this has not destroyed photography, nor has it invalidated the work of those old artists of film. If anything, it expands the audience and opportunity.
The same is happening with "written" communication. It too is becoming unbundled from the "thing." And this bothers people. Someone in a class last semester said that listening to a book was not as legitimate a way to read because it was "easier." The National Endowment for the Arts still doesn't think you are reading right now - whether you are using your ears or your eyes to take this text in. Others talk of the smell of paper, of holding the book, in ways reminiscent of those lamenting the vanished photographic darkroom.
And Nicholas Negroponte thinks a phone is just a phone, and won't give up the specific size and weight of his laptop computer. And that writing with thumbs is somehow not "writing" but typing on a QWERTY keyboard is.
But the world keeps spinning. And it is essential - in this Year of Universal Access - to remember the reasons why we want children to read, to write, to listen, to see, to understand. And for us to focus on giving them those operational, comprehension, and analytical skills they'll need to work with the flow of information coming their way. And then we have to prepare them for a world in which the delivery and interactive systems for that information will be ever changing, and ever expanding, so that they can grow up into learners able to make the best decisions for themselves - given the world they will live in.
Technologies change. Yes, they even change reading. That's all right. Reading is something apart from the technology. Helen Keller read one way. I read another. You might read a third way. Who knows what your students will do.
- Ira Socol who is finally starting to recover. thanks.
Yes, right now your students can have free high quality speech recognition working for them.
Consider, without paying for Dragon - or before deciding to pay for Dragon, or without struggling with all the problems of Microsoft Vista - or while waiting for the eventual "Service Pack 2" which will make Vista stable, usable, and much less annoying, or without waiting for MacSpeech Dictate to finally appear, your students who struggle with the physical acts of writing or keyboarding can be doing their own writing and doing it (probably) for free. You just have to let them have their mobile phone in the school, and you have to let them use it.
I re-discovered Jott via Karen Janowski's EdTech Solutions blog. I had heard of it, played with a very early version, then forgotten, until thankfully - through the wonders of social networking - Karen commented here, I went back to look at her site, and - voila!
Jott works very simply. 1. You sign up with Jott. 2. You register your mobile phone number and email with Jott. 3. You add other contacts into Jott - your teacher, your parents, your boss. 4. You call Jott. 5. You say "Send to me," or "Send to x." 6. You speak. 7. Jott writes it down for you. 8. Jott stores what you've written in folders you create on their website. ("Homework Assignments," or "My Second Novel.") 9. Jott emails the text to you or to whoever you wanted it sent to, or texts it to another phone.
A lifespan solution. And a real solution to myriad problems in school, from dexterity issues to dysgraphia to attention-spectrum issues to memory problems. And... yes, a high-tech solution which requires the school - in most cases - to spend absolutely nothing and requires none of that "precious" tech support time either (If a student did not have a phone a school could buy a mobile and minutes for far less than a computer and Dragon Naturally Speaking and a "strong enough for school" headset, etc, etc.).
Like most great Universal Design solutions Jott was not designed for people with "disabilities," nor is its impact limited to that group. Hands-free writing in your car just became easy, for example. So a student using this technology is not "marked" by their obvious accommodation - an important issue for children and adolescents, if not all of us.
And consider all the other ways your students' mobiles can support them, especially if tied in with a Google Calendar at least partially shared with the teacher (with text-message reminders), and with the ScanR website which converts a 2 megapixel camera phone into a scanner capable of producing accessible text.
So I signed up. It is free. And I put Jott's number both into my phone ["call Jott"] and into my free calling circle. And now that is free. And now I'm ready to write, no matter how awful my handwriting is (and it is completely illegible), or how slow my one-fingered keyboarding is, or even if I am driving to campus.
- Ira Socol
The Drool Roomby Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com
