Techos: Neil Postman's Article

When any technology is used effectively it helps a society advance and improve itself. When it is used by greedy unscrupulous people it harms all. Part of today’s technology, especially instructional technology, is helpful in research and in the classroom. With the help of Open Source and The Digital Commons, students can easily and conveniently access information for their projects more readily than would have been possible even 10 years ago.

I do not agree with Neil Postman about is his view on school and individualized learning. America is such an individualized society; competition and performance is always measured on individual achievement and rarely in team effort. So when did American schools become a place to teach people about community, sharing everything and playing fair?With transformed and integrated technology American schools can actually learn and teach key leadership skills such as teamwork, collaboration and coalition building locally and globally.

However, I found myself swayed by his arguments in disfavor of technology. Take for instance a new technology like internet that has driven away an old technology and ways of communicating, record keeping and updating and sharing. For example yesterday at work we had no internet. Almost all functions of the organization came down due to a storm that had interfered with our connectivity. Even a simple word document could not be processed in these days of online support for everything. Billing could not be done or records updated because to access our cloud backup system we need internet, to connect with some of our customers’ servers we need internet.

In the good old days, we may not have noticed the damage a storm had caused the previous night unless it had caused a tree to fall on your roof. Manual data management was effective regardless of how slow, tedious and unreliable it was.

Postman, N. (1993). Of Luddites, learning, and life. Technos Quarterly, 2(4).