Saturday

Thing 1

The thing about Thing 1 that is most poignant, is that change is happening so rapidly and the world that we are sending our students into is as well. The problem is - the education system isn't doing too well a job at understanding that it's a whole different world out there.

To borrow the masthead from one of my top-10 blogs, Dangerously Irrelevent, Scott Mcleod has placed this quote:

Our intelligence tends to produce technological and social change at a rate faster than our institutions and emotions can cope with. . . . Innovation is cumulative and the rate of change accelerates. We therefore find ourselves continually trying to accommodate new realities within inappropriate existing institutions, and trying to think about those new realities in traditional but sometimes dangerously irrelevant terms. - Gwynne Dyer, War, p. 441


That pretty much sums up what I see as well.

2 comments:

RESA 23Things said...

That is a great quote - sums up many of today's schools and their approach to technology, doesn' it? Listening to a national speaker (can't recall his name) who said, "Education is the only sector that still debates the importance of technology."

Excellent blog.

Anonymous said...

Well I think some of the worst part of the problem is the age of our teachers and administrators, at the risk of sounding ageist. Maybe I am unintentionally linking age with the "old school" attitude? Nevertheless, our old schoolers are some of the people who are now in positions of authority and don't understand the technology, let alone how to use it in their schools.