“That Which Is Old Is New Again”, …or “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Rocky and Bullwinkle might title this week’s blog as “That Which Is Old Is New Again”, …or “The Emperor’s New Clothes”  In any case,  I found  humor in this week’s reading assignment as I discovered how various technological innovations through recent history have been touted as the next great revolutionary advancement that would change education as we know it.   While early stereo graphs and lantern slide projectors were seen as auxiliary enhancements to traditional education, subsequent advancements with more pizzazz, such as Radio, Film, and Television were hailed with fanfare yet never truly delivered the revolution.  History would repeat itself with the invention and eventual wide-spread proliferation of computers in the educational setting.

 I very much enjoyed the quote from Thomas Edison “Books will soon be obsolete in the schools …. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture.  Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years”.  This struck my funny bone, but not because of the ease in which we can look back at what would seem like ridiculous claims, but because I remember in my childhood being told how computers would change the world.  To some extent this is true, I use a little magnetic card to purchase groceries, and my job for the most part revolves around me staring into a little box connected with wires that connect it to other wires that lead to other little boxes with other people staring into them.  I can do in a short amount of time what used to take entire rooms of typists all day to accomplish, yet I lament along with many others that life is remarkably unchanged.  We get up, drive to work, carry out mundane tasks, and the days go by. 

Please don’t get me wrong, I am incredibly thankful to have the opportunity to be able to work in a job I enjoy, but where are the robots, where are our jetpacks?  Well OK, I know where the robots are, they took a lot of our jobs, but it didn’t lead to a life of leisure for anyone I know.  But back in the early 80’s the personal computer revolution was on the horizon, life was different.  There was no ATM, and if you didn’t make it to the bank during the week, you just didn’t have money on the weekend.  Listening to my elders, I invested my time into learning how to program computers while in high school.  The adults in my live took great joy in calling me a “Computer Whiz Kid”, and yet here with at least one foot firmly planted in middle age I still don’t have a robot companion.  Note to self: “buy Roomba”.

Ranting aside, each of these technological advances played a part in enhancing education.  The history buff in me found the quote from the WWII German Chief of Staff interesting.  “We had everything calculated perfectly except the speed with which America was able to train its people. Our major miscalculation was in underestimating their quick and complete mastery of film education”

So will the computer ever revolutionize education?  It’s safe to say, that it hasn’t happened yet, however the jury is still out.  We’ve seen a lot of talk about One-to-one computing, and 99-dollar laptops, but thus far the computer is still warming the bench, waiting for its big moment.  It seems to me that the potential is there, and maybe just around the corner.  Part of the delay has been money, or the lack of it to buy computers for every student.  Part has been the lack of a unified front in developing a system to identify and deliver the goods, or computer-based educational materials.    In the free market, goods and services compete, there are winners and losers, and the winners generally go on to dominate the market for a time.  Examples of this can be seen in VHS vs. Betamax, CD’s vs. Records and tapes, etc.  Once a platform, or standard dominates, production streamlines to that standard and costs go down.  In the early 1980s a VHS player would have cost around $600.00, ten years later a good machine would have been one quarter of the cost.

Looking back to our reading on Web 2.0 I wonder if the cloud has the power to transform education via applications that run on a level above the machine?   Can education solve the problem of limited financial resources by riding the coattails of the commercial success of the smartphone/tablet platform?  If there were a way to identify and rate the best—and cost effective—applications for educational use; could a school system really afford to step fully into the realm of One-to-one computing?  It’ll be interesting to see, that’s for sure.

The other part of our assignment was to set up an online photo-sharing account.  I personally have use Photobucket for several years now and enjoy it very much.  One of my hobbies is to repair vintage bicycles. 

My wife's bike before I stripped it down, de-rusted it, rebuilt it, and repainted it:

Before:

After:

Here are a few pics of an old bicycle that I fixed up for my brother-in-law:

How to paint a frame when you don't have time to do the job right:

Giving it a name:

Coming:

Going:

Side View:

 The downside to a cloud service like Photobucket or Flickr is that you can lose the rights to your intellectual property by putting your stuff out there for all to see.  Yes, there are ways to secure your photos, but if it’s out there, people can take it.  If you think you've got the next Life Magazine cover photo, you might want to keep it a little closer to the vest, but for everyday stuff, an online photo sharing account gives friends, relatives, and potential buyers easy access to your photos. 

*edit*  Addendum

After a quick look at my classmates' posts, I realize I did not address the question from the text on page 28, so here are my responses:


Three reasons that would account for lack of performance in a class in this situation would be:

1)      Lack of objectives:   The teachers as well as the students need to be aware of what it is they are to accomplish with the new tools that they are entrusted with. This is shown in the portion of our chapter that talks about Robert Mager and the early advocates Bobbitt, Charters, and Burk.

2)       Lack of Training:  The teachers would need to be educated in the best ways to use the new tools in class, and the best methods that work well with different students, allowing individualized pace in learning.

3)      Lack of understanding in the Assessment process:  Tied closely to Objectives, and Training, knowing how to measure the outcomes.  Assessment need not be done strictly at the end of the experiment, but can be a continuous improvement basis, where the teacher or assessor or both can make changes to how the tools are used to bring a student back on course to learn their objectives.

Two strategies that could have been employed are:

1)      Keep the traditional materials and use them alongside the new computers.  This is partially a security blanket , or magic feather, as people in general are uncomfortable with change.  This is also partially a practical solution to get the class up and learning as you transition them to the new learning tools.  Without a transition, you’re really throwing the learners—as well as the teacher—into the deep end of the pool in a sink-or-swim situation.

2)     A complete training program that is instituted first in a pilot program and later in a more widespread manner providing that assessment shows improvements in student learning.  This program would have to include the three items from the previous portion: Clear Obtainable Objectives, Comprehensive Training for the teachers prior to teaching the class, and a clear method to measure results in student learning.