Parenthetical Praise

Technology in education is a big deal. Why? Shiny gadgets are awesome and seem to evince panacean auras that, to some, promise glittering fixes to the complicated intractable problems that plague public education. Yes, this is an oversimplification.

Many things are made easier, better, or out and out  possible with technology (thank you wikipedia, padmapper, and all the other technologies involved in allowing my partner and me to select a rental house in a desirable location based on advice from locals, sign and pay for it,  get directions, and ultimately arrive here without ever having been to Georgia or knowing anyone here). 

That said. Doing something faster or louder or even more interactively isn't necessarily better if the thing you are doing isn't better in the first place. I'm thinking of (among other things) flipping the classroom and some of the critiques leveled against  it, but my awesome teammates and I will give more on that in a few weeks.  It seems that for technology to be truly worth the effort of earning something new, convincing others to learn something new, and expending the patience (not always a renewable resource) to play with it, that thing should do something at the very least better and ideally something that isn't possible with the current method of doing things. 

For example. I have a professor who loves to ask us to do activities such as think-pair- share and carousel by sharing our brainstorming and conversations via comments on the wiki rather than using the white board or giant sticky notes. In some ways, in that privileged context (all of us have laptops or tablets, we're all there by choice, etc.) that technology saves s the step of sharing pens, squinting at others' handwriting, and allows us to return to the conversation days or years after the class period is over. The technology augments the central, social tenants of the dialogic classroom. It allows us to share what we know, learn from others, and return to it should we need to. It also allows a space where we can bring the outside world into our discussions thereby expanding the dialogue beyond the boundaries of our shared reading. 

This is part of why I like blogs. Blogs allow students to reflect and articulate thoughts about the topic, while allowing students to link to content of interest, and to share that interest with others. It has the potential to create a multiplicitous conversational space instead of the typical Initiation-Response-Evaluation so common in many classrooms.