IT and Teachers - How will they work together?
posted by Darius at 4:06 PM
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Saturday, January 19, 2008
About Me
- Name: Darius
- Location: Ventura Co., California, United States
My description of Croquet: An "Idea Processor/Editor" vs. a word processor or spreadsheet number processor with all the storage, publication, transmission, freeform malleability, shared content editing, and universal authorship that these common tools imply, with multimedia added. A “visual metaphor generator”. A “visual narrative canvas for exploring, creating, learning, recording, storing, & publishing processes & simulations… secure, yet eliminating most boundaries to fast, accurate creation, transmission, & updating of dynamic, living representations of anything that one can imagine”.
Previous Posts
- Computer Lab Instruction
- What is "Mathematics"?
- IT and Teachers - How will they work together?
- "Sandbox" or "Theme Park"?
- Qwaq Forums talk at BarCampLA
- OpenSocial
- Need to Become Three
- Futures Book Club
- Justin Rattner's Talk Summarized
- School Ideals suffering through Hyperinflation
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I do agree that there is a gulf between IT and educators.
Like many technologies, the value of the tools for learning is determined by the value of the tools in the students' "after graduation life". But the tools take on the style of how they are used in business... PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, word processors, security, hierarchies of authority, etc. Also, as "after graduation life" tools become more complex, specialized, and expensive, the path to bringing a student to competence with those tools becomes more complex, probably exponentially complex.
I have Psychology training, have taught in a school, and have professional IT experience.
Part of the solution will be achieved by the "digital natives" as they become educators. They will demand change. But, who will provide it?
I believe the other part of the solution will be revealed through the metaverse. How? Just like spreadsheets try to model the functions and states of human projects and relationships in businesses, everyone will begin to model these same projects and relationship in 3D simulations. Like Google Earth, 3D allows one zoom further and further out to see the entire context of the complex systems. Simulations also archive the past for examination and study. So too, they model the anticipated future and intended goals of the systems we create. Hence, we begin to play with time itself, such as one does with time-laps photography.
Everyone looking at the model must consider how their piece fits in it, functions in it, and helps achieve the goal. The goals can not be represented as just "words" subject to interpretation, miss-communication, and debate. 3D simulation components enact the people and organizations actually performing the resulting intended (or unintended) effect.
This is a response to Marsha's blog entry:http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/627/25204156