Welcome, Erin, to the collaborative blogosphere. Blog-o-rama? Whatever….
Barbara here. Another interesting night on edtechtalk. And I have found yet another use for a blog: decompression after a heated evening speaking sternly at my screen, typing as fast as I can into the chat room. My ten year old looked at me in a somewhat horrified fashion after the Saturday night shoot-from-the-hip-a-thon… he said: “But mom, I thought you LIKED these people?” This created a wonderful conversation with him about liking people and appreciating their ideas…but not always agreeing. Thank you Dave and friends, for the hot seat.
Some questions that still hang over my head (and these come with special thanks to my husband who has learned that after a long night of EdtechTalk — he goes to bed when I start talking on the headset to thin air — he can expect a continuation of the conversation with him over coffee the next morning):
–The notion that we need to teach our students tech literacy alongside the academic discipline…. doesn’t that presume that technology is a static thing that won’t change in the years to come?
— is education = training??
— and my favorite: are we fetish-izing the technology?
Comments?
the tech literacy is exactly that. a literacy. We need to teach people to use a pencil (which is a technology) typing (a tech literacy) and blogging (another tech literacy)
sometimes!
only if we’re fetishizing it. And i’m not only trying to be silly. If it’s being used with a plan, then no. If we’re using it because we just want to use it, then we are.
Teaching the tech literacy is no different than teaching physics, or popular culture. All scholastic topics are changing and evolving in some form. Yes, technology changes at an extremely fast pace as compared to some others but that’s all the more reason to dedicate time to discovering what may or may not work. Think about all the ways we learned to NOT do business because of the .com era.