We don't need no pen and paper...
"All in all there's a 'smart-board' on the Wall"
Thinking about
teaching and new technologies takes me back in time to my school days and
brings memories of one of my geography teachers, who knew every page, in fact,
every comma and every full stop of our prescribed geography book by heart. I
remember following what she was saying from the top of her head, in the book I
had in my hands. Initially, I stare up at her in amazement – What a
performance!, but soon I lost interest as there was nothing more to it and I
asked myself: Why should I listen to her If I could read the book myself?
As
far as I am concerned, education has been target of a lot of criticism over the
years, with critics emphasizing the need for improvement, above all, concerning
the idea of prompting learners to think for themselves. Seemingly, this has not
been the case in the past few decades, with teachers not used to the idea of
being challenged. In fact, depending on how far you go back in time, 'physical
punishment' was a common practice.
The
use of Metaphors in the context of technology has been part of one of the
discussions in this course, and therefore, I feel I could probably refer to my
geography teacher as ‘robot’, or at least as someone with a perfect 'memory
system’. Would that have been a setting where 'humans' replaced 'robots' rather
than the other way round? It is hard to say, before defining 'what is it to be
a human'- another interesting discussion
we came across in this course.
Certain
advertisements available in the weekly resources, displayed an utopia vision of
the future of instruction, where a lot of engagement could be noticed, notably,
when kids build a bridge together. At the same time, dystopia views presented
images of people who hardly interacted with each other. As an online student myself
I have experienced courses were I felt quite isolated, yes, very much like
'reading a book on my own'. Only now, I learned that there are clear
distinctions between 'xMOOCs and cMOOCs' and a course such as 'E-learning and
Digital Cultures' does allow for a lot of engagement and an opportunity to
'think for ourselves'.
But, how about
empirical knowledge? How important is it to have 'mentor'? Would blended
learning be the answer? One thing is certain, in the past we would ask our teacher, today, we google it. Perhaps, 'we don't need no pen
and paper…’