It is my birthday today, so please forgive me for allowing my contemplation once again lead us down a well-travelled path. I have discussed this topic in posts before, but it is a subject that will not go away as long as we have younger people working next to older people. As one of those older folks, I might better state it as the “rookies” working beside the “seasoned veterans”. Of course all of this is further confused by the introduction of the digital native theory. For these, and some other reasons, there seems to be a growing divide between those educators who embrace technology in education and those who shun it. Somehow, it has become perceived by many, as a generational gap. The younger teachers are seen as the tech ninjas, while educators over 30 are all viewed as Luddites.
I believe it was Sir Ken Robinson who talked about technology not being considered technology if you grew up with it and it always existed in your lifetime. If we grew up in the time of horse-drawn carriages, the introduction of the car would be technology. Today we don’t think of the car as technology. What they put in the car however, is another story. Not the radio of course, we don’t think of that as technology. The radio has been around longer than cars. Video displays of rear views, and traffic-monitoring Global Positioning Satellite displays, now that’s technology. So,since we have always had cars, we accept them and expect them. We are now only awed by what goes inside them.
Of course in the olden days as technology was introduced it was at first very expensive. Many people viewed the ownership of any new technology a privilege. I remember a time when my family TV was the first one on our block. I remember moving the TV outside the house in the summer so the kids could gather around it. Later more TV decisions as more technology emerged. Families came together to discuss whether or not it was time to get a color TV. Today, none of this is even remembered, unless you are contemplating your birthday. Today there are no black and white TV’s. Every house has more than one. Mobile devices access television for on-demand service. The big decision now is should we go 3D? The TV is now a right for every American to own if they want to. It is not technology anymore it’s a staple of American life. Many of the same experiences parallel the advancement of the telephone.
Now we come to what many of us think of as technology in the classroom. I was around when 4 function calculators were introduced. My first one was $99 from Sears. It made averaging at report card time a dream for an English teacher. I remember first introducing computers to the class. I remember the first computer lab. My friend had, what we called, a Car Phone. It was a huge mobile phone that came in its own carrying shoulder bag. To an old guy like me this was all technology.
What about the kids of today? Have they ever experienced a time without cellphones? Desktop computers are on the way out in their time. Laptops are being replaced by tablets and cellphones are now smartphones. Our children are growing up with these tools. They don’t see it as technology. It has always been there for them. They expect Wi-Fi. They demand the right to texting. They grew up with iTunes and have no concept of vinyl, 45’s, albums, reel to reel, 8 tracks, tape carts, and digital tape. Our technology has been relegated to being artifacts of another time. Technology is developing at a speed that will only be increased with the development of more technology.
Now we read articles that question whether or not technology is needed in schools. We have administrators banning access and limiting technology tools for learning. Educators who view tech as something we are privileged to have. It is to be controlled and doled out until the controllers have a better understanding of it. The problem is that the controllers have stopped their curiosity for learning. They are not challenged by the new. Relevance is a word and not a reality for many. At the pace that things develop today it takes work to keep up. Learning is not a passive endeavor. Too many educators teach that to kids, but fail to practice it themselves.
This is not a generational problem. It is a learning problem. I grew up in a time when much of today’s technology was not even a dream yet. (Of course flying cars still are the elusive technology.) I am an educator. I recognize that what was commonplace in my world has nothing to do with kids today. If I want to affect their lives in any way I need to do so on their terms with tools for learning that they accept and will use moving forward. I grew up with a slide rule, I don’t think they are even made any more. Why would I use it to teach a kid who has a mobile app that will take him much further than a slide rule ever could.
We need to be more visionary about how we teach. We need to blend the tried-and-true methods with what our kids will be working with in the future. Textbooks may have worked well for us, but a new wave of eBooks is coming. Encyclopedias are fine, but compared to proper use of the internet, the encyclopedia will soon be the black and white TV of research. We need educators to be able to guide kids in using these technology learning tools to continue to learn. In order to do this, those teachers need to learn as well. As Technology advances, so does everything else. We can’t have everything moving forward and our educators standing still maintaining the status quo.
When schools ask the question; how do we get our students to be media literate and responsible digital citizens? The answer to that is obvious. Schools need to first get their teachers and administrators to be more media literate and good digital citizens. We need to model what we teach. To be better teachers we must be better learners. To be better leaders we need to be better learners. This is not generational. Old and young alike can give up on learning. We see that every day.
As the owner of an education Ning site The Educator’s PLN I have observed a really neat thing about the membership. The site has over 10,000 educators from all over the world. Each member has to be approved by me in order to be in the community. The age of each member is popped up as part of the data. The observation I made that astounds me is that anywhere from 1/3 to almost half of the members of the site are 50 years old or older. These are technology active educators still continuing to engage in learning and collaborating.
Happy birthday Tom. Blow out some digital candles and enjoy your day.
Happy Birthday Tom,
Thank you for all of your posts.
Pat Parri
Happy Birthday Tom! As a 36-year old Technology Manager for a district of 1200 students. I LOVED your article!! Well done
Happy birthday! What a relevant and meaningful post, it took me back to the days before all the technology we expect and need. My kids can’t imagine having a black and white television in their room like I did – and back then, that was living large! I still can’t keep up with the fact tablets are phasing out laptops – but is it crucial as educators to keep up with the changes and help kids use them responsibly.
Happy birth date, Tom! and your favorite part of today will be ________?
As one of those gen “olders”, I love your piece and totally agree. It may take me a bit longer to learn how to negotiate through a new technology resource than my millennial takes to do so, but I can learn if I’m willing to take the time and make the effort. Of course, I had the same problem with organic chemistry- took me longer to learn than it took my genius lab partner, too.
We have contemporary technologies and older technologies. The stick, quill, pen and ink well, fountain pen, ballpoint pen, typewriter, and word processing device are all technologies. At every turn of the technology, people said “this is a waste, in one form or another.” Others saw possibilities and civilization – communication- advanced. Humans are, at the core of our being, tool users. Women, men, children. Tools change our work, our play, our behavior, our learning, our relationships.
Thanks for a fabulous post- a gift from you to us. Enjoy the day.
We live in times of profound educational hyperbole. History will record little of our struggle with change and humanity will simply adapt and move on as it always has done. Beware of educational gurus (Ken Robinson, Kohn,) bearing gifts of a bright new future for whilst their message is seductive it’s just a best guess. Revolutions and paradigm shifts are overrated and not the stuff to be messing with when it comes to minds of school children. My experience is that the kids of today are as mind blown with technology as we are and with that comes insecurity about what the future holds. I’m not convinced that we yet have a generation that can truly be called ‘digital natives’. A major challenge emerges that includes having to support children as they cope with the new technologies and at the same time supporting colleagues. Age seems not to matter when it comes to this challenge. After a nearly three decades of teaching I can share that “I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.” (W. White) Happy Birthday Tom
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Happy Birthday, Tom!
Another thoughtful post, Tom! While I do not always agree with your commentaries, I do find them stimulating because you are raising fundamental issues and putting ideas into action.
On the Generational Divide, I’m not surprised that some 33% to 50% of the 10,000 members of the Educators PLN are over 50 years of age. That’s consistent with the pattern up here in Canada.
Like you, I see it as more of an “Innovation Divide.” Somewhat ironically, I also sense that it begins with Asking the Right Questions and that, on such matters, Plato still has far more to offer than Dewey. What we lack is an educational vision that bridges the “fundamental incompatibility” of our educational goals.
It always amazes me that so many educators prefer to fly blind into the future. Where might we look for guidance? How about taking a serious look at Kieran Egan’s The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up (Yale UP, 2008)
“Technology” is “the art of manipulating the world” (though I hate quoting Nazi-loving philosophers). That is exactly what the word actually means in Greek, and it is the only right definition. As a “historian” by academic inclination, having read the huge book William Alcott had to write to convince educators to use the “Black Board” and “Slate” in the 1840s, I understand that none of these debates are new, nor do they ever stop being ridiculous. There was a time when Catholic schools prohibited ball point pens because it allowed one to hold a pen sloppily (unlike fountain pens)… oh well.
The real issue is how every communications technology change alters our sense of cognitive authority, and how educators spend at least half centuries denying this. Remember when black and white, or grainy television lines, indicated “real” in movies? Then it was the washed out color of old cheap movie film (see “JFK”), then, of course, the jerky hand-held “Sony MiniCam” look (see “Hill Street Blues”), then, that BBC webcam look… technology change alters the triggers in our brain which says “truth.”
The clearest example of this is that within the very first decade of motion pictures being public, audiences in the US and UK required moving images to convince them of the “truth” of the Spanish-American and Boer Wars. This was SO true that good ol’ Tom Edison was forced to fake the Battle of Manila in a New Jersey bathtub (perhaps one large enough for the current governor) for his Newsreels.
http://michiganstate.academia.edu/IraSocol/Papers/146462/Irreconcilable_Authority_Cognitive_Theory_Culture_and_Technology_in_the_21st_Century_Classroom
What teachers need to know is that students have good reason to no longer automatically trust what teachers say, what books say because the author has certain letters near his or her name or the publisher is this or that, what the government says, what NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, or Sky News says. Authority needs to establish its own truth, as it did in the pre-Gutenberg -“it is in the book”- days.
Bad or good, this fact of altered cognitive authority is simply true, and this requires a massive shift in pedagogy, from delivery to search and understand.
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Such a great post! A tech-oriented teacher, I see this with my own colleages. I’m in my 7th year as an educator, and many of my colleagues who get intrigued and explore the different possibilities web 2.0 and technology.. Quite a few colleagues in the 50+ are just as eager to explore, if not more so, than some of my peers. I try to share what I find with my co-workers, and help anyone who needs a little bit more help working through some of the tools.
I would like to wish you Happy Birthday and to Thank You! I have recently had to return to school after loosing my job and simply ran accross this article while doing research on the genreational divide. I am one of those students who has had to learn to adapt right beside those half my age and I truely embrace learning all of it. You are absolutely correct in saying technology is not a generational problem. I too remember when our technologies were thought of to be unappreciated and am glad that some things are still widely used today. I am glad that you Sir are speaking on behalf of the students and once again thank you for that.