Inaugural Address

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.