Education and Technology

The university runs what's known as an LTHE (Learning and Training in Higher Education) course for all its Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs - remember what I was saying earlier about acronyms!). At LTHE 1 a very nice man from the Education Enhancement Department stood up and gave us a brief taster of the oncoming role of technology in education. A speech that I was reminded of as I read the opening few paragraphs of this article.

Now Jonny Rose (he of the blogs list to your right) will tell you that I am a luddite through and through; a man who believes technology should best be kept at arms length. He referred me to these two pearls of wisdom; one from Michael Hyatt and the other from the new media commentator Seth Godin. I include both here as I think they do have something worth saying.

Personally I recoil slightly whenever I think of technology and education. The idea of using Twitter (a source of all vacuous information) to advancing learning seems counter-factual. Yet I suspect our chap from Education Enhancement may have been right. Not completely; computers will maintain their ability to fail at the worst moments. We're not in a position to avoid them though. Two generations down from mine will be the first generation of the Academy to have grown up with Facebook as part of their lives. The speed at which society is adjusting to new technologies is incredible. I was reminded during the last US Presidential election for instance that Youtube did not play a large part in the 2004 election not because people hadn't got used to it but because it didn't actually exist then. MySpace, by now an old fogey among social networking sites, is almost twenty years my junior.

Society is changing, and we must change with it. Just don't expect me to like it much.