Technology Driven Education

Technology has grown by leaps and bounds in so few years. When I was in the fifth grade we played "Oregon Trail" and thought it was the coolest thing. When I was eleven I mowed grass for a whole summer in order to save money for a Nintendo. That's a Nintendo, not a Super or a 64, just a Nintendo. I once told a young teenager that I was interviewing that story and he gazed at me with amazement. "A Nintendo...how old are you?" he asked in disbelief. Truth is, I'm not that old. The Nintendo was top of the line when I was eleven, but that wasn't really that long ago (less than twenty years, more than eighteen). My point is that even though that 8 bit gaming system seems so archaic now, the Playstation 3's and XBox 360's have sprung up on us fairly quickly.

The game stations aren't the only things that have grown so rapidly. The way we teach and the way we learn have grown as quickly, maybe quicker. Today it's even possible for home school students to get a high school diploma without even having to get up and go to school. My twenty-two year old brother was home schooled his whole life. He finished his high school education only a few years ago and the option of an actual high school diploma was not offered. In just those four or five years Web 2.0 has completely revolutionized even a high school experience.

I remember learning to use a card catalog system in a real library. I wonder how many high schoolers can do that these days. It's much easier to sit at a computer terminal in the library and type a title into a search engine and find the book that way. It's even easier to sit down in front of your computer in your bedroom, type a title into a search engine and read the book online.


I'm only criticizing the technology to a point. As Thomas pointed out in his post, "The Effects of Technology" this new way of doing things has it's downfalls, but it certainly has it's perks as well. The ease and convenience of learning online is hard to rival in a class room setting. Without the online courses offered by COTC or many other institutions, many people including myself could not fulfill their dream of a higher education. The Web has made it possible for more than just students to learn. In effect, it has made the average person a student without being enrolled in school. Anytime a person looks up a "how to" online, they are learning because of this technology. Anytime a person researches a political topic they're interested in, they are learning because of this technology.

I think the future offers more than we can even imagine now. It seems to me that we already have the technology for real time classroom discussions, we just need the structure and coordination. In Kevin Kelly's lecture we watched this week he mentioned an idea of his. The semantic web, the one, the machine, will someday create even more opportunity to learn in new ways. A total connection of data and people and people and data will revolutionize education both in an online learning community and in the classroom. I'm very excited to be a part of this early part of history, and even more excited about the possibility to be a part of creating the next chapter.