Infusing and Integrating Technology

Reigeluth and Joseph’s case for technology transformation and integration caused me to ask critical questions for me as a trainer such as:

How can teachers and trainers use technology to enhance learning, create meaningful learning environments that support active, constructive, goal directed, reflective, authentic, and collaborative learning? I use content management systems but most of my students are not computer literate enough to engage the technology fully. So what is my role in this?

What specific strategies will be effective to help instructors overcome technophobic behaviors, and eliminate the barriers to change that they face as they work towards technology transformation and integration? Most of my colleagues are stuck to traditional ways of teaching yet they admire technology and its efficiency. Not because there is no technological support for them to transform, but because they are afraid of the constant changes and innovations.

What I liked about this article is the author’s focus on learners and learning as a collaborative event rather than a process of teaching and curriculum completion, testing and post testing. Principles of authentic  learning where students are exposed to diverse methods of learning, given ample time to practice and master a skill using their own learning style, freedom to choose content that is relevant to them, and solving real world problems collaboratively is what new learning technologies is all about (p.2-3). 

Reigeluth, C.M. & Joseph, R. (2002). Beyond technology integration: The case for technology transformation. Educational Technology, 42(4), 9-13.

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).