I’ve felt for a long time that education is the most important vehicle for social change. I mean, really how else does anything actually get done? You’ve got to have some kick ass teachers along the way, or you’re gonna be a vegetable. And vegetabledom happens to entire societies. Watch out.
So I’m a little depressed that I don’t get to work directly in the education sector anymore — I used to have a great time working on educational evaluation projects, and for a time I was a mentor. Now I’m a full time geek staring at an LCD, and I don’t so much ever get the thrill of seeing kids make the grand connections. (read: manipulating young minds, bwah ha ha.)
Anyway, just watched a great TED video from Dave Eggers. Give it 20 minutes and tell me if you don’t want to sign up to be a volunteer. It’s a hilarious talk anyway, even if you hate kids.
David Warlick posts insightfully about the uses of technology in education. Right now he seems like a pretty stressed out guy.
I’m not an educator (though I do work in education via nonprofit evaluation). And I don’t get quite as excited as he does when discussing the latest crop of communication technologies.
But in one of his most recent posts on his blog 2 Cents, I am right there with him pulling out my hair. The story is kind of funny actually, in a sick way (kind of like the way it’s funny when Cheney shoots a 78-year-old man).
The story is like this: Warlick presented to a large group of teachers here in North Carolina recently and polled them informally about the technologies they used.
“How many were blogging, I saw only three hands.
How many read blogs? Perhaps 20.
How many had listened to a podcast? Maybe ten.
How many had podcasted? Zero!
How many used flickr? Zero!
How many knew about social bookmarks? Zero!
Delicious (del.icio.us)? Zero!”
This is all really not that surprising to me. I know that two years of hype about blogging has done little to clarify its value as an fun, educational tool. And these are a particular type of hype-prone (”Web 2.0″) technologies.
And yet, really, these things are exciting and useful. Teachers would love these things. They aren’t just hype. I only wish teachers knew more about these great, fun technologies that kids would love. For sure, I have seen great integrations of podcasting (AKA: grassroots audio) and blogging (AKA: networked writing) into the classroom — and I have seen how serious critical thinking skills are engendered in the use of these technologies.
So I think these teachers’ technological literacy is unfortunate, but I don’t think it’s a tragedy, as David might say at this point. I think we are just at an early stage, and we (progressive type/educational bloggers) are impatient to show off the great strides the internet has made in recent years. Or at least, that’s the polite way of putting it.
But when I read the following I was a little more disturbed:
“I asked how many of them had used Gopher. About three-forths of the hands went up. This surprised me. I asked about Telnet. Again, a vast majority of the hands when up.”
That’s right. Gopher and Telnet are not only still on people’s radar, but teachers are apparently much more familiar with these medieval implements than blogs. Why is this so difficult to catch on to? It’s just writing on the internet. Where are the barriers to understanding and use coming from? I know that technological literacy and the digital divide are real complex issues, but dammit, I don’t get it. Why did people stop paying attention when it got interesting? Blogging is so much more engaging and Telnet was … just such a drag!
As David writes: “These are educators who, in the early 1990s, were on the edge. They were paying attention, recognizing an emerging revolution in information, and latching on. What happened between then and now? Why have they missed the new revolution?”
I hope that online communication will become much more mainstream this year. But for now I think that white-hot hype + cold, ivory-tower perspective of technologists has done a lot to keep powerful new communication tools out of the mainstream, locked in some elite computer lab. For now I resolve again to remember that I’m part of an extreme minority of addled programmers and gizmo fetishists. I want to do what I can to remind people that simple, free, worldwide publishing and distribution is now a reality. And for now I just hope that educators aren’t teaching kids that dial-up BBS’s define the world of technology.
The Digital Library for Earth Systems Education is a good example of the potential for using the web as a community repository of educational resources.
Unlike some of the other educational websites I’ve seen (which typically distribute prepackaged course materials), the DLESE has a strong emphasis on community input.
Having been around since 2001, it has a pretty extensive selection of resources, most of them related to the natural sciences (from the Mars rover to tsunamis).
I have seen some discussion recently about the value of this type of resource in reas like New Orleans, where entire libraries have been lost. It’s not difficult to extend this logic to the context of Liberia or Pakistan, though we have a little way to go before this type of resource is widely multilingual and accessible to teachers worldwide.
The Scottish government has an excellent collection of resources regarding the use of Information Communication Technology in classrooms. They have multi-part articles grouped by subject (Biology, Drama, Physics), and examples of how, for example, you can show students living cells using microscope and digital camera, or how to use th einternet to teach French. Most of it is not Scotland-specific, though they do feature Scottish schools.
My major criticism of the site is that it doesn’t explore low-cost options (such as using open source software). Correspondingly, this site won’t be as useful in less-developed countries. That said, it is a great example of free, user-friendly tutorials for “best practices” education.
Here’s the site: www.ltscotland.org.uk - Secondary
Here’s a link to a nice comparison of Google Scholar and Scrius. It points out that Google Scholar has become neglected and is no longer updated regularly. This is a super-unfortunate development; Google is the web’s best hope for easy, inexpensive archiving of scholarly research. (In other news, however, Amazon is now offering scholarly articles for a fee. It’s easy — they’re delivered electronically, but they aren’t cheap — about $5.00 per article.)
Evaluation is an important, albeit rarefied, science of promoting nonprofit organizations. Do you need to measure the effectiveness of a specific program — or your entire organization? Well, there’s an entire discipline devoted to helping you do just that.
Unfortunately, as with most rarefied, important sciences, the “discipline” part tends to mean something more like “punishment,” rather than “a codified mode of study.”
At any rate, doing a real, formal evaluation of a program is still better than wasting your time doing something that’s useless, fruitless, a waste of energy or just a sham. So here’s a buch of resources from the internet to help you get going for free. Thanks for this post go to Joyce B. Morris and David Colton, Ph.D., from the EvalTALK Listserv.
Tools for Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation
“Also, there are some good, free resources on the Internet and from state and federal government agencies. For example, you can order “Introduction to Program Evaluation for Comprehensive Tobacco Control Programs” (2001) from the CDC (www.cdc.gov/tobacco). Don’t be turned off by the reference to tobacco control as that is used for context. The “W.K. Kellogg Foundation Evaluation Handbook” can be ordered from the foundation or is available as a free download in pdf format
.”
Summary: There is a new, exciting model for programs exporting technology to the developing world. But the real issue is about education, not just setting up a rural network.
Here’s the scene: A decade after the technology-sector collapse in the highly industrialized world, a humbled tech industry has begun to take interest in exporting basic technologies to extremely poor countries.
Here’s an example:Geekcorps, founded by techie Ethan Zuckerman with his cash-out-quick money from now-defunct Tripod.com (remember them?), is sending folks to Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America to live out a kind of Peace Corps for nerds.
Contemporary communications technology is central to the process of international development because it is effective — and damn efficient. Communication systems can organize political movements, prevent humanitarian disasters, strengthen communities, streamline markets and enrich education. In fact, they will do these things.
Here’s the point: These new groups are doing good work. Technology can work for people. It can work wonders for really poor people. Communications technology, in particular, has the potential to connect and empower places that you have never heard of, perhaps in poor parts of your district, perhaps in Africa or Asia. Just like it connected you.
But perhaps that’s a problem. Do we want the Ugandan internet to look just like the US internet? Are we capabale of taking a critical approach to the way that we are teaching people to use the internet? Will the internet of 2030 connect communities or consumers? Will it empower or merely reinforce existing power?
Information technology is a virtually limitless resource. A single telephone (or perhaps a bicycle-operated VOIP system, if you prefer) is a surprisingly powerful vehicle for community development. Installing a single, inexpensive server can support the communication needs of an entire village, just as digging a well can support a village.
But ICT (Information Communication Technology) is not just a commodity, it is also a system. It requires a market, consumers and investors. Which means, I think, that there is a lot more than just altruistic service-giving, training and infrastructure development going on here.
The effort to grow ICT in the developing world is not just a “new model of volunteerism,” as the Peace Corps describes it. Because the power of technology is social. Tech training is an intervention in society akin to grassroots organizing. In this way, teaching technology is a political movement, a movement primarily toward open expression of ideas, in whatever form they may come.
Or it can be, at least.
We (the ICT development community) recognize that we have to train people, not just build phone booths. This has long been seen as the difficult side of exporting technology, but I think it’s important that we value the process of teaching that is at the core of this process.
And teaching has its attendant concerns. Teaching can be progressive, or teaching can recreate the ways of thinking that have led to our current crisis of poverty. Those who are involved in the transfer of technical knowledge for the sake of human development need to think about their method of creating this change, their pedagogy.
Education, not technology per se, is the only sustainable path out of inequality, and we would do well to be appreciative of the fact that we are teachers.
Here’s a neat article on scholarly blogs from 2003 in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s outdated but excellent, framing the issue in real-world concerns of “academic posturing” vs. “realtime idea exchanges.”
Here’s what I mean:
“In their skeptical moments, academic bloggers worry that the medium smells faddish, ephemeral. But they also make a strong case for blogging’s virtues, the foremost of which is freedom of tone. Blog entries can range from three-word bursts of sarcasm to carefully honed 5,000-word treatises. The sweet spot lies somewhere in between, where scholars tackle serious questions in a loose-limbed, vernacular mode.”
