LANSING – Far from being an extra toy, computers and related technology will be essential to schools of the future. But it could take another generation before they are fully integrated into the way students, and adults, learn, John King, a professor in the School of Information and vice provost for academic information at the University of Michigan, told Gongwer News Service.
King, who researches and promotes use of technology in learning, said that the true use of technology is not in the educational programs used in many classrooms, but in the ability to connect larger groups of students in learning.
Pulling out its full value will take teachers not only trained in use of the technology, but whose life experience includes using it, King said.
“We’re not going to be there in the next 2-3 years. This is a generational change,” King said. “This is as big as the invention of printing. What our children and grandchildren see is a world that transformed as much as the world that transformed from the 15th to 17th century.”
He said many current teachers, because they did not grow up with access to the technology and the communication it provides, are not prepared to work with it. “There’s a gap that’s going to have to pass through the system,” he said. “Almost all the schools in the state in one way or another are connected to the network. …The next big challenge is having people who know how to make this stuff work to have value.”
But he said development of the Michigan Virtual High School/Virtual University shows the state’s political leadership understands how to allow the technology to develop.
MVU started with the intention of becoming a degree-granting university but now largely offers specialized and advanced courses for high school students as well as GED programs.
“It concentrates on the tails of the distribution. They’re recognizing the fact that the school districts, which are also financially challenged, have to deal with the middle of the distribution,” King said. “That’s a very important innovation and it’s one that wasn’t designed.”
He said it is that innovation that will be essential to working technological changes into the classroom. Teachers, he said, will need to not only mold the technology to the lessons they are teaching in the classroom, but mold their methods of teaching to the way children are learning to use the technology.
For instance, children use technology to expand their communities, he said. They use sites like Facebook and MySpace to meet people outside their physical community, and King said that same type of expansion is the future of education.
Similar types of networking can be used to expand learning opportunities. For instance, when the new large hadron collider comes online in Switzerland, there are plans to include high school students into some of the communities using the facility for research. Hadron is a sub-atomic particle, composed mainly of quarks, and the collider is a research facility that will study such sub-atomic particles.
“Now these 150 students can participate in a real way,” he said. “Out of 150 maybe 20 get it. That’s 20 more than we had before.”
He said it gives students access to such programs who otherwise would not have been recognized as having an affinity for such work because their home communities did not have access to such materials.
King admitted there was validity to those who argued the old system of lectures and textbooks made for successful students. “At least part of their position is correct: it worked for them,” he said. “For each one of them, there are a lot of people that are left behind. … The economics of our country is such that we can’t afford to shunt as many people into low learning as we did before. Michigan is particularly experiencing that.”
The education community also needs to recognize what the education technology can provide outside the classroom.
“We spend too much of our time limiting our idea of learning to formalized instruction. It’s one out of many forms of learning and if you limit your thinking to that you’re missing a big part of the picture,” he said. “You realize that whatever you do in that classroom is not separated from what’s happening in the rest of your life,” he said of the connections that can be made through technology.
In fact, he said, teaching children to use technology to learn could become a key focus of education.
“There’s increasing evidence that when people stop learning they don’t live very long,” he said. “Learning is more integrated to living than we thought. We’ve known that there was some correlation between learning and success later in life. The idea that a successful society is a learning society is a good place to begin.”
Some of the role of education also will be in helping students make wise decisions on how to use the technology. He noted the recent issues raised with MySpace and Facebook being used by pedophiles to try to attract children as an example of teaching wise use.
“Some things that they’re learning they’re learning before they’re ready and they don’t handle it well,” he said.
There are also some issues yet to resolve in the use of technology, he said, such as illegal downloading of music. He said the actions the music industry has taken against universities to stop such illegal downloads should be welcome. “We’re in a transition from the old way of doing things to a new way of doing things. It’s going to take awhile and there are going to be winners and losers,” he said. “They’re coming after (universities) because we’re easy to go after. I don’t mind if that comes to universities. Maybe we can help find a solution.”
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