I am of the option, that effective educational technology must be appropriately, properly, and reasonably configured. I am also of the opinion that the individual who can make decisions in all three domains of educational technology is exceedingly rare. (Most who claim they can do it are mistaken.) Fundamentally, technology professionals and education professionals understand Read More
60: Four Prepositions for EdTech When we think about computers and information technology (ICT), and the models that educators have developed to use ICT in classrooms, it seems we can capture the nature of students’ and teachers’ interaction with it with four prepositions. Each is described and illustrated in this post. Teaching about computers- When Read More
In 2006, futurists Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler captured the relative speed of change throughout society with this scale: businesses appear to be adopting new information technologies and adapting to them at 100 miles per hour, with other organizations (such as professional organizations and non-governmental organizations) moving almost as quickly; families in the United States Read More
Palfrey and Gasser (2016) used the term semiotic democracy to describe the effects of participatory content creation on society. They observed, “any citizen with the skills, time, and access to digital technologies to do so may reinterpret and reshape the stories of the day” (p. 233). It appears high school students are providing us with Read More
The situation regarding IT management in many schools is well-captured by the hypothetical (and sarcastic) Putt’s Law. According to Archibald Putt, “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand” (Putt, 2006, p. 7). Further, Putt articulated a corollary, Read More
Michael Crichton (who would later author Jurassic Park among other well-known novels) wrote Electronic Life in 1983; the book was his response to friends and acquaintances who were constantly seeking his advice on buying, setting up, and using their first computers and that would become embedded in the culture as computers gained acceptance and penetrated Read More
In 1644, John Milton composed a pamphlet in which he argues for freedom of expression; areopagitica has been adopted as a term to describe the capacity for individual to compose and distribute any ideas they see fit. Digital tools, especially those called Web 2.0 tools have been interpreted as the realization of areopagetica and students Read More
Appropriate Proper Reasonable Reflexivity was originally used to describe the effects of social science researchers on the situations they were studying; the presence of researchers affects the behavior of subjects, thus the observations made. More recently, the term has been used to describe the influence of ICT on how people use information and how they Read More
Appropriate Proper Reasonable Computers and information technologies have an interesting characteristic: We can use it to be more efficient in our work, but getting to that point requires a temporary decrease in efficiency. We can illustrate this with this picture: When we are using a “primitive” technology, we must exert a certain (and familiar) level Read More
For several years, educators and other who care about your people have been hearing about “the Millennials,” which is the name given to the young people who were in school around the turn of the century. My children (who were born in 1990 and 1994) are firmly in the Millennial generation. Jean Twenge, a psychologist Read More