I've been thinking a lot recently about education and technology following digging into some of the research of the Llano Grande Research Center. What I find so interesting about this research is the positioning of the role of technology.
In many accounts of education technology, the role is seen as providing supplemental or additional resources to students. That is, the fundamental model is to provide some external resource that enables the child to make more rapid (or deeper) progress through a curriculum. Khan Academy and many online resources are fundamentally in this model: the idea is they bring both new content (instructional videos) and capabilities (content recommendations and individual assessment) to improve education. This model I would characterize as "outside-in."
What I see in the Llano Grande Research is quite different positioning of the role of technology. First, the role is fundamentally more creative: the whole programmatic focus of the Llano Grande Center on "digital storytelling" falls in this model (see their "Transformative Education" article). Technology is not something you consume, it is something you adopt to create (look at the picture of the video camera on the center's home page in fact). But more importantly than just creation, technology is something that you use to amplify local assets. In this case, the idea behind "digital storytelling" is that students use technology in order to take a local assets - history and stories of their community - and engage with those (i.e. develop them through digital media) in a way that amplifies them - increases their impact to students and the local community by drawing attention to them.
This strikes me as a very different model of how one leverages technology, one quite different than we see in many of the leading, dominant accounts of how to use technology to improve education. Instead of outside-in, it is inside-out: it is about adopting, developing and re-purposing existing community assets. it seems to me this has a lot to do with Anderson's concepts of authenticity as well: the idea that education needs to be embedded into local concerns, both ones shared by the student individual and ones shared by the community the student lives in.
LR>>Comment great lead-in to our pending introduction to capability approach -- how to think about capabilities and functioning (flourishing). Technology as an resource/input is neutral, and useless, unless it serves an underlying and fundamental objective. In this case, to increase individual and organizational 'agency' (i.e., personal power through enabling voice).
ReplyDeleteLR>>Sources you might check-out if you don't already know about them:
ReplyDelete1) Sherry Turkle: see her TED talk and recent book, Alone Together.
Note Turkle's institutional affiliation (MIT) and its long intellectual traditions and networks related to technology and learning theory that emphasizes experience and social interaction: Examples include Media Lab and AI – artificial intelligence; Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert; turtle computer programming for kids; theories of learning and knowledge – social constructivism/constructionism).
2) Diane Ravitch. her book, Reign of Error and her blog. Ravitch is convert from high stakes accountability/testing to one of its most vocal critics.