Welcome to SMACtalk, my embarrassingly public commentary on the Education Technology class I am taking for the Master's of Arts with Secondary Certification (hence SMAC) program at the University of Michigan. My concentration is English with a Political Science minor, so I am interested to discover how I will be able to incorporate technology into my classrooms. I hope that by the end of this program, which lasts one year, I will have many techology tools that are useful, practical, and effective in reaching students.
In our first class, we discussed various research resources for ourselves and our students. The professor asked what we thought of Wikipedia and the concensus was that it is a good starting point for research. I think Wikipedia is great and I use it all the time, though I must admit some pages are better than others. I learned how to do research before the age of Wikipedia, however, which I think made me less reliant on using such general information gathering. I read Wikipedia content with a skeptical eye.
On the other hand, much information from other sources is biased or unreliable. When I did reports in elementary school, I am sure I used sources that were marginally credible. Furthermore, I usually started with an encyclopedia, which often provided glib facts and biased commentary...sounds like a few Wikipedia pages I've seen.
I was surprised to find that we discussed John Dewey in our class. I assumed that a technology class would not entertain such a sociological perspective on education. But in fact, technology is about communication and about being part of a large society.
And what will be my role? "The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences." - John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed.
So, if I take what I know about the role of technology in society along with Dewey's perspective on the role of education and educators, I realize that I actually have a duty to incorporate technology into students' learning process, and to guide them in managing the onslaught of information they receive as a result of technology's infiltration into their lives. Dewey wrote the above statement in 1897, and in our accelerating, technological age, never has it been more relevant.
I like your point comparing wikipedia with traditional encyclopedias. They both have their biases because they are both written by people who have opinions. To me wikipedia seems more democratic. More easily changed to say silly things, certainly, but also more easily changed to present diverse opinions.
ReplyDeleteI certainly remember using sketchy internet sources in middle school, when first learning how to use the internet as a research tool. Thankfully I got a bit of a tutorial, but so many pages look credible when they're not. I think it will be similarly difficult for all of us to find 'credible' ways to use technology in the classroom. There are a lot of online resources, but not all of them are good or useful.
I like how you expanded on the Wikipedia thing in class because it makes me wonder what sources do we have students use? I mean we students to challenge themselves but the works of Michael Foucault or Roland Barthes are probably way to specific and reading intensive for high school students but other sites like Wikipedia or not as reliable. How do we discover what databases and level of articles our students should use?
ReplyDeleteI completely agree about having a duty to help students deal with technology. The fact that I used a physical card catalog as a kid isn't relevant to today's students (except as shock value, I guess). They need to learn how to find and filter information using the resources that surround them, and I'm going to teach them that!
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I appreciate your take on Dewey's article. I also thought the same thing when hearing that we were going to be reading Dewey. I thought, "What does this have to do with technology"? However, I like your viewpoint that we, as educators, have a duty to incorporate technology into the learning process of our students. It is interesting that Dewey wrote this over 100 years ago, and it is still very applicable to life today. Nice post.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you about John Dewey. It's crazy that he is so much like a prophet! Among other things, Dewey was a social reformer, and I don't think that his role in that sphere of American life can be diminished when we talk about his pedagogical creed. However, is the technological, social revolution too fast for us as teachers to keep up with? Should we? Or should social change instituted through schools revert back to paper texts and what not?
ReplyDelete"Duty to incorporate technology" that is an interesting way of putting it, but it makes sense ! This comment made me rethink my disdain for technology, and even if I do not like it so much, it is an inevitable part of our lives.
ReplyDeleteYour first sentence made me smile :)
ReplyDeleteI agree that it is almost a duty to incorporate technology in the classroom--especially with the amount of information students will be inundated with on daily basis. It will be important to show them how to filter and sort through everything.
p.s. Thank you for grabbing my book. If "Someone Has to Fail"--I guess it was me on that one!
I, too, used many embarrassingly NOT credible sources for projects and papers in school, but the really unbelievable part about that for me is how long I was allowed to do that for. I cannot believe that no one taught me how to find scholarly sources (or even what a scholarly source was) until late in high school (try junior year for English or history!). I only learned what a peer-reviewed journal was before that because I had to do literature reviews for my unusually advanced chem, bio, and physics classes. I think it's pretty unacceptable for freshmen in high school to not know how to write a persuasive essay and be able to use scholarly sources to back up their claims. As a high school English teacher, one of the first things I hope to have my students do is learn how to do research.
ReplyDeleteLove the title of this post. Jeff and I both use technology all the time, but we feel a pretty strong commitment that technology as just a fun tool limits you as teacher and students as learners. As avowed Dewey fans (I was in Burlington, VT, earlier this year and excitedly emailed Jeff that I HAD JUST PASSED JOHN DEWEY'S HOUSE!!), we like how Dewey helps give us a grounding in what matters in teaching. That helps us know what tech is worth doing and what isn't.
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