why we learn

My 18 month daughter loves my iPod Touch. Don’t believe me? Check out the audio…

Gracie_iPod.m4a

I don’t have any apps for her, though I believe there are some for children nearly as young as her. Typically I give it to her turned off, and she hasn’t been able to figure out how to “unlock” it. The UI is such that when she does have a chance to play with it unlocked she “gets it” to some degree, i.e., she understands that she needs to move her fingers across the screen to make things happen. Right now she’s playing the Disney Puzzle Slider game.

What does that clip say about the integration of technology into our culture?

There were many things that I realized as I worked through my first week in a supervisory position. A large portion of what I had to accomplish was procedural, e.g., the signing of documents and attending meetings. But, it has become obvious that I will have to be tactful in my approach, as I am responsible for two distinct staffs, operating independently, at different times, and with different student populations. Moreover, my unfamiliarity with one of these groups, the adult education programs that I supervise, makes things more difficult.

Balancing Act

One week in and I can already tell that balancing my role as supervisor of high school and adult staffs is going to be a challenge. I am much more comfortable with the high school staff, as I’ve worked with them since I was first employed nine years ago. The adult education component of the school has always been foreign to me. I did teach an adult physics class in the evening, maybe five years ago. This was, up until just recently, my only experience with the adult programs.

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Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society is unique in its ability to expose the distorted rationale of public schooling. This is not to say that his argument is completely convincing, but the time spent reading the 116 pages or so is certainly worthwhile. My time with the text has presented two questions.

• What assumptions does Illich make in his critique of the public education system?
• How does Illich’s views of public education relate to his views of society as a whole?

My assessment of each is addressed below.

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I came away from BLC 2008 with two notions of interest. One applies to procedural or systematic change and the other is more personal in nature. As I’ve stated in my previous posts, it seems that the presenters at this conference were a more progressive bunch as a whole, compared to those that I saw at ETech. It was also my sense that the overall level of knowledge was a little higher, and in general, the content was more theoretical in nature. My first take away is the idea that incremental change can be harmful. This wasn’t explicitly stated by any of the presenters, rather it sort of emerged from a synthesis of their disparate presentations. It seems that one of themes running through what I saw was the idea that technology should be viewed as a tool or a support for a new paradigm, new pedagogy if you will. My summation is that incremental change lends itself to assimilation and/or accommodation rather than transformation. That is to say that if we try to change our school “one step at a time” we may well end up with teachers using new technology as a replacement for old technology. More profound is the notion that at the end of this process we will have lost an opportunity to create real change. I think if you look at school reforms of the day, and the ways in which most new technology is used, you will find data that supports this postulate.

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Maxine Greene’s piece¹ is one of the more challenging essays, in terms of verbosity and ideas, that I’ve read. Typically, when I consume something this dense, I spend a day or two away from it before I once more review the contents and begin to pull together something that resembles coherent thought. I have done so with this piece. I take a risk here, as it would be safer to acquiesce, but I cannot.

So much of what the author advances resonates, as she meanders through history, tracing philosophical approaches to knowledge, and its pursuit. I subscribe to her underlying postulate regarding the nature of “truth”, specifically the interpretability and relative nature of truth. Moreover, the way in which Greene elucidates these intrinsic qualities, citing the preeminent philosophers of of the past, is particularly helpful. Finally, the way in which she, after what I describe below as a bit of a diatribe, comes back to the terms “imagination” and “metaphor”, relieves a modicum of tension. More importantly, this return to the center also provides the reader with some direction in terms of what might be a way to bridge the divide the author seems set on exacerbating throughout much of this work.

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