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Is the human brain still the smartest thing on the planet? When enhanced by technology, it is.
Leave it to Marc Prensky to use a line like that in his essay "Our Brains Extended."
The focal point of Prensky's article is that students don't think of technology the way we do. For them, since they are digital natives, technology is as natural as air is to us. They are well adapted to use it to their best advantage. Or as Prensky notes - to extend their thinking.
I think it's our job as educators is to show students (or model for them) how to use technology to learn. That is how they should view it in school.
Students come in, or so I believe, using technology not to learn but to communicate, gossip, bully, and game. It's our job to show them the tools to use technology to make learning richer.
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I came across this TED Talk this week. It's focus is on using PISA data to improve our schools. There is plenty of interesting information and statistics, especially regarding Korea and how they were able to turn their education system (and standard of living) around in just two generations. Why? Large classes which means fewer teachers which means they pay their teachers very well which means they attract better candidates. They spend dearly in professional development for their teachers and they expect students to spend extra hours on homework.
Now, I'm not saying that we need that in the US (though there are some components to it that I agree with). But what Schleicher found was that there isn't just one way to have successful education. You just have to run your program well and commit to it. Something the US has not done particularly well. And the results show that.
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"The Net Generation Unplugged" from The Economist
This article brings up the same point I made earlier about the Prensky article: we need teachers to use technology more than ever to model and show students how to really use them. Simply assuming they know how to use technology for educational purposes (some would argue to 'really use them') because they can use that technology easily is foolish.
We've all heard stories about a ten year old who picks up their parents' new digital camera and within hours is taking pictures, cropping and editing them, and uploading them to the internet.
That's great. But that anecdote doesn't prove that the said child knows how to really use technology wisely. Yes they can get devices to function, but can they use those devices to enhance their learning? That's why it's more important than ever for teachers to be up on technology.
Here's a excerpt I like from the article -
But does it really make sense to generalise about a whole generation in this way? Not everyone thinks it does. “This is essentially a wrong-headed argument that assumes that our kids have some special path to the witchcraft of ‘digital awareness' and that they understand something that we, teachers, don't—and we have to catch up with them,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies at University of Virginia.
Michael Wesch, who pioneered the use of new media in his cultural anthropology classes at Kansas State University, is also sceptical, saying that many of his incoming students have only a superficial familiarity with the digital tools that they use regularly, especially when it comes to the tools' social and political potential. Only a small fraction of students may count as true digital natives, in other words. The rest are no better or worse at using technology than the rest of the population.
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An interesting infograph on the effects of multi-tasking on the brain.
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