Un Profesor

It seems to me that there are two potential paths towards the future, depending on whether societies evolve or devolve. It appeared to me that through much of the 1950’s and 60’s and 70’s there was a general-if ever so slight- trend towards equality and- even more slightly- redistribution of wealth. Under President Carter’s leadership from 1976 to 2000, ‘Human Rights’ became a phrase that began to mean something; that began to register with people as a vital and viable concept worth standing for and worth expanding. The Iran Hostage Crisis, that went on for what seemed an interminable amount of time, is what most people remember about the Carter administration. His attention to the cause of championing human rights has been unfortunately lost in history.

Through the 80’s and 90’s and into the 21^st century we have been engaged in a bitter partisan struggle in the United States. When the Soviet Union collapsed one result was that Republicans couldn’t scare the country by painting the Democrats as unable or unwilling to combat them. They found, however, a much more convenient and marketable enemy by simply replacing the Soviet Union with the Democrats themselves. Instead of wrestling against a common enemy, the enemy became the Opposition. Roger Aisles (now head of Fox News!) and Lee Atwatter were the architects of this catastrophe.

Those slight trends towards equality, and even slighter trends towards redistribution of wealth began to be rolled back. Average wages for minorities began to fall. We began to see the rise of corporate leadership salaries expand exponentially in comparison to worker’s salaries. Families that had prospered with one wage earner now needed two wage earners to merely get by…Hey; you said you wanted my vision, O.K?

Anyway, two paths…To survive and grow as a society, the World has to begin treating people fairly. If we continue on the path towards wealth being siphoned into the coffers of a tiny minority of humans, the rest will become revolutionaries or irrelevant. And the few cannot survive without the many. This path is a dead end.

The other option-and I believe it is the natural one-is for society to begin to recognize not just the necessity of utilizing all our human resources, but the futility of ignoring or marginalizing them. The person who could develop the cure for cancer may be living in a mud hut in a third world country at this moment. For education, people are going to have to put pressure on politicians to appropriately fund their future-the students. There can be no better investment. But without that pressure, tax dollars will continue to flow to corporate hog farms in Iowa and bridges to nowhere in Alaska.

The expanding role of technology is connecting people across borders, across boundaries, across cultures and across ideologies. I believe this is the central element that holds the hope of maximizing the inherent talents and abilities of humans around the globe. Information is power. That’s why it is so feared and controlled by the powers-that-be. In Myanmar, in
Pakistan, the first thing dictators do when there is any trouble is cut off the flow of information to the masses.

The Internet in changing the face of the world. Blogs and Wikipedia are allowing people to share and exchange and create knowledge. This is real power. When people have the means to control it themselves, they have the power to create movements and methods for further change.

Well that’s pretty general. I guess I should get more specific.

For my students, in my classroom, blogs can really be a way for them to connect with other voices around the world-hopefully remaining relatively anonymous-and to begin to build their skills at writing and expanding their knowledge and concepts of the world all around them. It is a format for them to grow as students and as people of the world, seeing new ideas generated by their own thoughts, and taking those thoughts one or more steps further. When they read something that moves them or that prompts them to react, they may well be able to connect with the author and communicate through her/his blog to exchange ideas directly with them. This is a truly powerful experience for young men and women, and something that was inconceivable not very long ago. They can begin to create knowledge instead of simply learning to repeat what someone else has presented to them to memorize.

 Much of the work in the future may come out of people working in groups over the web, like we did during this course. In the future employees may well be hired to work on projects for companies, instead of being hired by them for permanent work. Knowing the technology and being familiar with these dynamics will be valuable tools for the future. Having the confidence to work with and through those tools can only come through their experiences. Making education applicable to real-life eventualities means bringing students valuable skills and offering them realistic applications to engage in their own education.

For the teacher, RSS is a vital component today. I used to spend precious time searching sites over and over again to get updated on the latest postings. I am now beginning to compile subscriptions to sites that can provide me with that information at my fingertips. The time saved by this is immeasurable and allows me to devote that time to preparation for my classes. All of this contributes to making the world a smaller place, a market where you can examine all the commodities available in front of you instead of running all over town to inspect what is the freshest produce. It’s a form of one-stop shopping; finding a great source and tapping into the flow from it instead of constantly rechecking that source.

For my students I can put together a list of these sources and let them work with them as they go through different projects. Right now we are doing reports on different Spanish-speaking countries. Encarta can be helpful but many students rely on it as their single source for information. Making other resources available for them will open up their eyes and expand their horizons. They should be able to see opinions and read descriptions by people with first-hand knowledge. They should begin to start thinking for themselves instead of selecting and printing and editing. The only way to develop critical thinking skills is to have various sources to consider and then to evaluate them through other sources. The teacher can facilitate this in the beginning and the students will learn to collect their own RSS feeds as their skills and interests increase.

With Wikipedia students can jump into the information world and participate in exploring the vast amounts of material there. Much more importantly they can participate in co-creating information. This is an incredibly powerful learning experience for students. For most of them information has been something static that they have to break into parts and find some way to insert into their brains; because their brains are only for storing knowledge not for creating it. But in Wikipedia they can be the knowledge providers. They can assume the responsibility of adding to the accumulated wealth of knowledge. They all have opinions. They all have things they feel strongly about. They all have accumulated knowledge through their interests. Now they can demonstrate that they have something of value, however brief at this point. Seeing that there is a place where anyone with something to add can make their mark presents a real source of affirmation.

I think these are the really earthshaking changes that technology is bringing to the classroom and to the world, people-students- becoming empowered to believe in themselves and to take responsibility for their own education; and teachers becoming part of the dynamic that frees students to grow at their own pace into their own place. Differentiated instruction can be cumbersome to implement in a ‘paper classroom’, but in a classroom that runs on the Web the possibilities are endless and the implementation is facilitated by the versatility available through the technologies. Flickr and podcasting and screencasting for example are all technologies that can be used to access personal learning styles or intelligences. Keyboarding is an essential skill for students but to demonstrate their understanding and to create meaningful and skill-building projects, the variety of applications will really offer ways to differentiate instruction while presenting opportunities for student to express themselves and see others’ expressions of their own

creativity. It is a way to create a community of learners that is potentially as large as the planet.

There must certainly be computers for all students in the future. Outreach programs by business and community groups can help make this possible. There will always be a nee for schools because students need and want that socialization. Face-to-face encounters will always remain valuable learning/growing experiences even as we connect with others around the globe over the web. But I think school from home or from distant locations is also going to be a real part of education in the future. School attendance to a large degree may become optional as students work from home or from museums or from their own ‘field trips’ sharing audio and visual data with others. There are already courses available by phone.

Teachers will be helping effect the changes by offering varied opportunities to study content and material that is considered critical. But there may develop a Central Conduit of lessons /activities/projects that students can choose from for their education. With sharing of data and sharing of developed work there might be Councils of Science teachers of other subjects who collaborate on preparing and presenting sites where students can go to look through a menu of options for study.

The 64 billion dollar question is “What technological breakthroughs/developments are in the future?” I’m sure that we can be certain that technologies that are inconceivable now will be available at a discount in Walmart in the not-too-distant future; just as we are seeing now with Ipods, etc. This is the real unknown element and one that will prompt changes beyond our ability to visualize them.

For teachers,
Richardson makes an interesting point when he describes their role as ‘collaborators.’ A sobering thought is that, “We can’t pretend to know everything any more, and we can’t be effective if we don’t tap into the work of others who are willing to contribute their ideas and content as well.” I am working on my Masters Degree and the concept we are threading into all of our courses is ‘The Teacher as Agent of Change.’ The web is transforming the world. Whether the powers-that-be attempt to control the flow of information for their own sakes, which I believe is, at best, a short-term strategy; or whether the flow is beyond control at this point, teachers will have to help deliver their students to the sources- and let them begin the process of personal growth and of deciding for themselves how much of the future is in their own hands.