July 27, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 2000 Vol. 9 No. 2
Colloquium:
Using Technology to Create a New Paradigm for a Learner-Centered Educational
Experience
by Phillip Harris and Michael F. Sullivan
We
are on the edge of a new century—a phrase, admittedly, that has been
greatly overused. Every age has conditions of life that determine how people
work and spend their leisure time. Such activities change slowly, as those
life conditions change, and sometimes the change is so slow as to be almost
imperceptible. Today, for example, there are thousands of clubs and lodges
that are disappearing because people no longer spend their free time there.
Lodges, being private organizations, must respond to these changes, eventually
closing when membership declines. Public institutions, on the other hand,
are not forced to change quite as directly. In fact, public agencies often
continue unchanged even as society changes.
A Life of Constancy and Routine
We are also on the edge of reinventing our nation’s public educational
opportunities—another phrase that has been overused without much reinvention
of education actually taking place. Because schools, for the most part, are
public agencies, they are bureaucratic institutions reluctant to change. Indeed,
they have not changed noticeably in the last 50 years, even though our society
has changed greatly in that span of time.
The last change occurred when the public realized that the automobile, invented 40 years earlier, made it practical to close one-room schoolhouses and to bus students to larger schools that provided untold advantages. With enough students at each grade level, one teacher, lecturing to 30 or so students and assigning readings from textbooks, became the norm. These group instructional practices were established when people attended lectures as a form of entertainment, reading was the only form of mass communication, and therefore these activities were the only practical forms of communication and instruction. And yet, this model remains the norm today.
Students in the first part of the 20th Century had very definite life expectations: they would become farmers or factory workers; a very few would attend universities to prepare for professional positions. And the public schools had a clear mission: to provide students with the skills and discipline needed to live a life of constancy and routine.
Schools still provide students with those skills and discipline. They may even be doing it better than ever, with increasing attention to standards and assessment. But today’s students will not work in factories or on farms and will require a different set of skills and discipline. They will work in settings that are technology dependent, they will work in teams, they will have to learn new skills, and they will change jobs frequently. The routine of school, with the focus on listening and reading homogenized material written years earlier, drives many students to despair and leaves many parents frustrated. Both parents and students know that completion of 13 years of this type of study just prepares kids to compete with dropouts for low-end service jobs. Only those who pursue additional training can hope to fulfill the American dream. In fact, a dropout who is certified or trained in a technical field is much more likely to succeed than a high school graduate who possesses no particular skills.
Technology Transforms the Learning Experience
There is good news. The technology revolution now in process brings with it
the first major opportunity to rethink fundamentally how and what defines
education and who controls access to it. We have spent the past ten years
bringing our nation’s schools on line in order to begin the task of developing
computer literacy. But literacy is no longer the goal that should be our focus.
We need to utilize this significant tool to recreate what children in the
21st Century will need to know and be able to do, as well as when and where
they can and will do it.
The technological revolution can be used to reframe the very nature of the educational experience, for the barriers we often faced in the past are no longer barriers, and students no longer have to be bound by time and place to learn. The tremendous technology potential will only be realized if we can create a new vision of how technology will change the way we define teaching and how we believe learning can take place.
Unfortunately, the past decade has produced few models of technology use that reflect a reconceptualization of this learning experience. As we look to the future, we must attempt to envision what technology can do to create an educational experience never before seen or experienced.
The effort of the past ten years and for the foreseeable future will be to retrofit technology to existing structures. This is a very necessary step. But while this is taking place, we need to spend time and creative energy in designing new educational experiences. There are numerous ways technology can be of use to expand opportunities and to improve teacher productivity and student learning. Designing a new system of education with technology as an integral part would likely result in a system vastly different from that of the present.
The system we now have was created for a different time and population. Isn’t it time we create a new paradigm?
Imparting a Vision of the Future
What should a school look like in the coming century? Understanding, as we
do, that experience is the most powerful teacher, how can we create more experiences
for students that will enable them to have that first-hand kind of experience?
How can we utilize the tools of technology to enrich the learning experience?
If we relegate technology to the curriculum list, study it and test it, we
will only cause students and teachers to avoid the creative opportunities
that await them.
Our new schools should be a reflection of our society. They should engage students individually and in teams. They should be based on technology and expect students to maintain and increase their technological—as well as their creative—skills. They should develop flexibility and an ability to learn independently. This would suggest a new discipline, where students are held responsible for learning rather than for time spent. Teachers would challenge students rather than control them. The object of learning would not be content and test scores but skill and creativity.
The system we now have was created for a different time and population. Isn’t it time we create a new paradigm?
Today schools are subjected to a huge amount of criticism, often vague and lacking in substance. Many educators are perplexed, because they are working harder than ever before and reforming schools at a torrid pace. Why are so many people scornful of schools? The critics seem unable to verbalize their real concern: that schools have become irrelevant because the skills and discipline taught there are no longer required for a successful life. Much as we have seen thousands of community hospitals disappear, complete with caring employees and strong histories of service, in the next century we will be seeing many community schools disappear as newer, more nimble institutions emerge to address the real needs of society.
The schools that survive will be those that have a vision of the future, one that will push the visual and conceptual barriers away and will allow a strong commitment to prepare students to live in that future. This is our vision.
Illustration by Brenda Grannan.
Michael
F. Sullivan has been executive director of the Agency
for Instructional Technology (AIT) since 1991. He spearheaded the publication
of TECHNOS Quarterly, AIT’s journal in 1992, and the development
of the first complete, standard-based curriculum to be delivered online, The
Learning Odyssey (TLO), in 1998.
Phillip
Harris became executive director of the Association
for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) in August 1999. Previously,
he served as director of professional development at Phi Delta Kappa International.
AECT and AIT share headquarters in Bloomington, Indiana.