Saturday morning and I am cleaning out my Firefox Bookmarks list, deleting the temporaries (like the links to OBX hotels I used last Christmas) and getting the good ones into del.icio.us. Came upon this wired versus wireless debate from Design Share (not sure what they do). The debate took place in 1999, and one of the participants even comments that much of what they say will be irrelevant in five years. Certainly seems to be the case in this era of cell phone surfing. For me, however, the pertinent quote deals more generally with the issue of techology and education:
“There is a tendency to look for solutions that will work in all cases, but there isn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t one – what works in Raleigh, North Carolina will not likely work in New York City, Chicago, Detroit or Los Angles.” Glenn Meeks
And the reason the solutions are going to be different is because the problems are different. Teachers’ needs and wants are different. The communities around the school are different. All this diversity means that the one of the first steps has to be to actually identify problems. We must help teachers reflect on their practice and locate those areas of difficulty that might be addressed by technology. I always use the example of the reading journals that were part of my class’s reading workshop. The handwritten journals, while quaint and simple to use, came with several problems that could be easily solved by blogs. But, I don’t think that my school’s access would have supported that use since my kids would have had to go to the lab or the media center to get on the web, and I wanted the writing to arise more naturally from their reading. I would have had to weigh the problems and solutions, and I’m not sure technology would have won. Maybe now with laptop carts available and several computers in the back of each classroom, it might have been possible.
This is the way technology integration should be done, in my mind. Not a techno-centric view that starts with a cool new technology and looks around for something to do with it. Instead, integration must start with students and teachers. The wired versus wireless debate never answers the fundamental question: why do students and teachers need computers and networks at all?
