Brave New Classroom 2.0: Britannica Blog Forum
Students at every level, from grade school to grad school, face dramatic changes in the institutions they attend thanks to new digital technologies. PCs, the Internet, whiteboards, presentation software, and other high-tech devices, once considered educational aides for the library, the media lab, and the home, are increasingly a central part of the classroom curriculum itself, with results that have yet to be fully understood.
The new classroom is about information, but not just information. It’s also about collaboration, about changing roles of student and teacher, and about challenges to the very idea of traditional authority. It may also be about a new cognitive model for learning that relies heavily on what has come to be called “multitasking.” Many educators voice ambivalence about the power of educational technologies to distract students and fragment their attention.
Do the new classroom technologies represent an educational breakthrough, a threat to teaching itself, or something in between? Utopian and dystopian visions tend to collide whenever the topic comes up.
To explore the question intelligently we’ve asked several experts on educational technology to join us this week for a forum on the subject at the Britannica Blog.
Participants include (among others):
Tuesday
Michael Wesch / Post: “A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)”
Dubbed “the explainer” by Wired magazine, Wesch is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University who studies the impacts of new media on human interaction. He has turned his attention in recent years to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on technology, education, and information have been viewed over six million times and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences. Wesch is a member of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s editorial board.
Mark Bauerlein / Post: “Turned On, Plugged In, Online, & Dumb: Student Failure Despite the Techno Revolution”
Professor of English, Emory University, and former research director for the National Endowment of the Arts. Author of the recently published The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.
Wednesday
Steve Hargadon / Post: “Moving Toward Web 2.0 in K-12 Education“
Director of the K12 Open Technologies Initiative at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) and founder of the Classroom 2.0 social network. Hargadon blogs, speaks, and consults on educational technology, free and open-source software, Web 2.0, computer reuse, and computing for low-income people.
Dan Willingham / Post: “Why Web 2.0 Will Not be an Integral Part of K-12 Education”
Professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. He writes the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column for American Educator magazine.
Thursday
David Cole / Post: “Why I Ban Laptops in My Classroom”
Professor of Law, Georgetown University, legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Former staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he litigated a number of major First Amendment cases.
Michael B. Horn / Post: “Technology Can Have a Positive Impact on Education: Deploy It Disruptively!”
Michael Horn is the Executive Director, Education and co-founder of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector. He recently coauthored Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (McGraw-Hill: June 2008) with Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen and Curtis W. Johnson, president of The Citistates Group. The book uses the theories of disruptive innovation to diagnose the root causes of schools’ struggles and suggest a path forward to customize an education for every child in the way she learns.
Monday
Howard Rheingold / Post: “R.I.P.: Lectures, Notes, and Tests (Scrapping the Old Ways)”
Respondents and Commentators
John Seely Brown, “Chief of Confusion”: Writer and scholar on innovation in education and other fields, co-author of The Social Life of Information, The Only Sustainable Edge, and other books. Visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. Formerly Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
Karin Chenoweth, author of It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, is currently with The Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization. Chenoweth previously wrote the Homeroom column for the Montgomery and Prince George’s Extras of The Washington Post, which gained a national readership for its focus on schools and education.
Kevin Hogan, Editorial Director, Technology and Learning magazine.
Kathy Ishizuka, Technology Editor, School Library Journal.
Joanne Jacobs, author of Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds. After 19 years as a San Jose Mercury News columnist and editorial writer, she left in 2001 to create one of the first education weblogs, at joannejacobs.com.
Tim O’Brien, Online Editor and Author with O’Reilly Media, covers technology, science, and politics for O’Reilly News. Tim supported pedagogical virtual reality efforts at the University of Virginia in the middle 1990s, and now supports the development of a globally distributed K-12 learning system.
Howard Rheingold, a well-know writer, speaker, and observer of all things digital, is, among many other credits, the author of countless books, including Smart Mobs. More about Howard here.
Joyce Kasman Valenza, Library Information Specialist, Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim, Penn.; writer of School Library Journal’s Never Ending Search blog; and a former columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Valenza is prolific speaker and writer on issues relating to libraries, technology and education has won many professional awards.
As always you, the reader, are welcome, too.
Please come, read, and tell us what you think.
December 14th, 2008 at 3:42 am
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March 20th, 2009 at 3:27 am
I’ve never given this a try, but I think it’s about time I do.