MATTHEW  ISOM

 

 

DURING THE DISCUSSION I PLAY THE PART OF NEIL POSTMAN, AND WHAT I SAY IS IN LIGHT BLUE FONT

 

Neil Postman	Matthew Isom
Richard Wurman	Student 2
Curtis Bonk	Student 3
Douglas Rushkoff	Student 4

 

QUESTION:

Many people feel that our education system is in need of an overhaul. Some advocate the technological fix, while others believe the problems run much deeper and that reliance on technology causes us to overlook more important issues. What do you feel is needed to bring our education system up to date? How have students changed as a result of new technologies? How has the role of the teacher changed? How can technology be integrated into schools effectively? What technology skills should we be teaching?

 

BONK LEADS OFF THE DISCUSSION WITH HIS ANSWER TO THE QUESTION

Bonk: The educational world needs to clasp onto all of these emerging technologies as hard as they can and ride this wave into a new phase of human knowledge and prosperity. These new technologies offer new hope in educating ALL the peoples of the world not just the wealthy or lucky who have access to books. Thomas Friedman in his book "The world is flat" argues that all these new technologies has made the world flat regarding social, economic and business practices. I argue that these new technologies will also affect the educational process as well making the world "open". It is the opening up of education that ultimately makes a flatter or a more robust economic world possible. In the twenty-first century, education trumps economy as the key card to participation in the world. The buzz word in education today is "Open". We have open source software, open access journals, open educational resources, and even open courseware. All of these open sources must be made available to every person who wants them and when they are a new era of human spirit, optimism, opportunity, and hope will arise.

 

Neil Postman: I'm really glad to see your emphasis on the word "open" here, Curtis. Yes, no doubt there has been a move toward open source software, educational resources, and the like. And the trend now is to share information in the hope that we, as a community, will have the data and the tools to do more things. Here's my concern, though. The focus of our contemporary society seems to be upon facts and not values. We share numbers and ideas to help our world become more prosperous and more sophisticated, but I have to wonder if we've allowed our selves to get caught up in a very successful rat race and left behind the good life. Here's a quick, somewhat simplistic example to illustrate what I mean: We share the information that makes it possible to make amazing cars, and everyone has one, even the people in little villages in rural Umbria have them, but now we never see the beautiful life ("la dolce vita," those Umbrians say) that lies between points

A and B.

 

Richard Saul Wurman:

You both have very good points. Curtis, you say that we need to make things accessible, available to every person who wants them. I say, yes, if it is what we are interested in. It is through our interests that we learn and grow as individuals. But Neil, you say we also have to take time to enjoy the journey. Well, here’s how I see that those 2 ideas really fit together: As human beings, we are inherently curious and passionate… we can lead an enriching life if we are seeking out the things that are of interest to us. If your interests, your passions in life, can be further explored and developed through the use of technology, then you should have those things. My journey will be different than your journey. Different than everybody’s journey…In education, I think the role of students and teachers are changing. We should be in charge of what we learn, after all learning is nothing more that remembering what you are interested in. We find things that excite us, make us curious… then we begin make patterns and clear pathways to explain this learning to ourselves and others. It’s all about understanding. If you are taking a class, or sitting through a lecture, and it is boring you to tears – get up. Walk out. Why would you stay and listen to something you don’t care about? So, I see education changing to become anindividual pursuit. And where will this learning happen? Everywhere. And if technology can get us there (to that place where we are pursuing our passions) effectively, then we should be using it

 

Neil Postman:

Richard, you make two points that, individually, have a lot of merit. But when taken together, we see what I consider to be perhaps the single greatest danger of technology in education. First of all, you say that students should find things that excite them. Yes, so true. I love nothing more than to see my students catch fire. Secondly, you make the point that students should be the masters of their own destiny and that if a lecture bores them, they should realize that they have the freedom to leave and make their own way in the world (and this is so much easier now, as Curt points out). But here's the rub: As human beings, we are weak willed creatures; we gravitate toward more exciting and titillating experiences and ideas at the expense of challenging ideas that give us growing experiences. And for the most part, these "exciting" experiences are fairly shallow. Many a student would walk away from the lecture--from the entire unit!--on The Scarlet Letter. "It's boring," the least enlightened say as they walk out the door and head off to play their role playing games on computers in dimly lit bedrooms. "I can't relate to Hester," others say. "She should just tell everyone to shove it and move on with her life." The concept of working through life's troubles, injustices, guilt, pain and suffering--these things aren't all that exciting. But are they important lessons to learn? And so, I come back to where I began. Yes, all of us should find ideas that excite us. But exciting things seldom have much to do with ideas.

 

POSTMAN’S ANSWER TO THE QUESTION

 

Neil Postman is best known for his stance that the advance of technology has caused society to value efficiency over meaning. He is the author of Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology and Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman does not believe that we should abandon technology but, rather, that we should hold onto the meaningful intellectual life of the 19th Century.It seems that in the modern world we have begun to view technology as a god of sorts. I once gave a little talk on this concept—Deus Machina. Deus Machina means “God the Machine,” and we have begun to place our trust in technology, to view it as the savior of education. Another way that we view technology similarly to the way that people view divinity is that it is omnipotent and the direction it leads society cannot be reversed. “We can never go back.” “The old way of teaching is dead.” But is this really so? Might there be marvelous aspects of teaching and learning that we need to revisit? Perhaps we need to have the courage to actually say that technology is a very useful tool but that at times, the harm that it causes outweighs the benefits. In particular, I’m thinking in terms of students removing themselves from the hyper-stimulated world of technology in order for them to reflect on the impact of ideas. To ponder. How often do we see students at home sitting in an armchair simply thinking, not tied to an iPod, not checking their text messages every three minutes. Just thinking.

In Deus Machina I start with a fable taken from Japan. In this story, which is based on historical events, the Japanese chose to turn their backs on the manufacture of guns, even though guns were the wave of the future, would give their children power to make more money, “develop” their civilization, and lead them to great power as a civilization. And why did they do this? They felt that they had begun to leave behind the rich, meaningful culture of the Samuri. They chose meaning, art, and peace.And so, should we center our educational approach on technology? Certainly not. We risk losing a peaceful, reflective way of life if we’re not careful. Should we use technology as a powerful tool? Certainly.

 

Richard Saul Wurman:

True, Neil. Time for reflection and thinking is important. I have always said questions are more important than answers. To think deeply about those questions requires time.Technology is useful in making the world comprehensible, understandable, to us. This is our ultimate goal as humans - making things understandable. Technology might be our most powerful tool. We must be careful, however, not to allow makeshift solutions (in this case, technology as the bandaid to fix education) to distract us from the real problems. And the real problems with education run deep.

 

Neil Postman: I couldn't agree more, Richard. The problems in education do run deep. And it seems to me that we are in a terrible bind because one of the biggest problems we have is that students are bored with life and technology does nothing to cure this problem. In fact, quite often these kinds of students abuse technology and escape from life. If you don't mind, I'd like to briefly read a paragraph from my short article "Virtual Students, Digital Classroom." This is the part of the article wherein I respond to Hugh McIntosh's wildly idealistic view of technology. He says to a hypothetical student: "Bored with the real world? Go into a virtual physics lab and rewrite the laws of gravity!" Here's my response:I find it especially revealing that in the scenario above we have an example of a technological solution to a psychological problem that would seem to be exceedingly serious. We are presented with a student who is "bored with the real world." What does it mean to say someone is bored with the real world, especially one so young? Can a journey into virtual reality cure such a problem? And if it can, will our troubled youngster want to return to the real world? Confronted with a student who is bored with the real world, I don't think we can solve the problem so easily by making available a virtual reality physics lab.

 

Rushkoff: The thing is, Neil, that all of us media theorists and thinkers tend to be very extremist about technology. We tend to think of technology in an extremely positive and optimistic light or in a pessimistic doom and gloom kind of way. McIntosh is on the optimistic side, thinking technology can cure all our ills. Digital technology tends to invite these kind of polar extremes. There are very few theorists with a balanced view and that is because technology itself tends to create polarity.

 

Postman: Although I've always considered myself an open-minded and creative thinker, I sometimes surprise myself when I realize that I sit a bit on the conservative side when it comes to adopting technology. When I visit other classrooms I rarely see teaching that is greatly changed by the technology available to the teachers. And that's a pity, because great things could be done with that technology. But for the most part, yes, I'm a bit of an extremist and tend to hold the view that all a good teacher needs is a piece of chalk, and sometimes not even that when the material lends itself to class discussion.

 

Bonk: Neil I certainly agree that any item should be used in moderation and to an extent that something is abused and over used can be detrimental to an individual or a society. And of course there is something to be said for "slowing down and smelling the roses". However, what I am advocating is that technology and information should be made available to all who wants it. We have places in our world where information is limited and students do not have access to ideas or technology so they are able to "reflect on the impact of ideas. Information should be open and available. I agree with Richard when he says, "We should be in charge of what we learn, after all learning is nothing more that remembering what you are interested in." However, if students do not have the access to all the information that is how there how will they know what they are interested in?

 

Rushkoff: Yes, I agree. Students should have access to everything, but it is also up to them to use it appropriately. In my latest book, I talk about the Ten Commands for technology. The first one is "Do not be Always On". This is really important in order to have balance in life. Students and everyone in our age need to learn not to be used and over use digital technology, but to balance it with life. The second command is to "Live in Person". We have to have time to "reflect on the impact of ideas" as you say. Living in real time with real people helps us do that

 

Postman: I'd like to respond to your statement that "the problem of information overload and distraction and attention not as problems of technology but problems of the way we use it." I know that sounds right, but as I look around at people I know, I do wonder if for some people, technology does cause the distraction. The fast-paced barrage of images and sounds absolutely captivates the mind. And now, so many students don't want to learn history. They want to watch the movie. They don't want to read the book. They want to see them movie. And I would submit that the technology itself is largely responsible for this shift.

 

Bonk: We have already moved into the info-tech age. That is without question and if you are not on board this ship you will get left behind. Information is power and to deprive anybody of information is depriving them of a basic human right. That is why information should be open.Below I list my ten "Openers" which I believe will open up access for information and learning to be made available to everyone.

1. Web Searching in the World of e-Books

2. E-Learning and Blended Learning

3. Availability of Open Source and Free Software

4. Leveraged Resources and OpenCourseWare

5. Learning Object Repositories and Portals

6. Learner Participation in Open Information Communities

7. Electronic Collaboration

8. Alternate Reality Learning

9. Real-Time Mobility and Portability

10. Networks of Personalized Learning

In today's world, information moves and changes faster than it ever has before and we can access those changes in almost real time. Unlike before where we had to wait for the latest version of the text book to come out. How is this not a better way to learn?

 

Wurman: Well, Curtis, you are right- we are inundated with an amazing amount of information these days, but, to quote myself, "contrary to Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, we are not living in the best of all possible worlds. Not only are we overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information, most of us are also hampered by an education that inadequately trains us to process it." I can't argue with real-time learning. So what will we do to insure that we are educating students with the best possible information literacy skills? How will we make these open access pathways (full of vast information) understandable and manageable?

 

Neil Postman: The TED conference series that you helped found, Richard, sure does a good job of making information understandable and edifying. Thank you! And I would say that within the concept of the TED conference we have part of an answer to your question. When we have a group of experts to oversee which podcasts are shown, we can feel confident that the information is creditable.

And as far as adequately training students to process information, well, critical thinking must be at the top of all teachers' list of goals in the classroom. It's scary to think of how ill-prepared students are to process the dangerously powerful information at their fingertips.

 

Douglas Rushkoff Bio:

Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and writer who coined terms like digital native and viral media. He was an early proponent of open source and was part of the early cyberpunk movement. Rushkoff was greatly influenced by media ecologists from the such as Marshall MacLuhan and Neil Postman. He has written ten best-selling books about media. He is currently a professor at NYU and The New School University and gives lectures around the world.

 

Neil Postman:  Hi, Doug.  Great to see you again.  Remember those days we spent with Marshall?  "The medium is the message."  I think I heard that about 20 times, and I have to say, the idea stuck and largely formed my view of technology.  With novels, the medium carries the reader to a mental place where he goes beyond plot and has to think about just what the human drama is all about.  I don't see much of that in our new era of technology.  Everything is plot-based and I don't see much reflection on the what it is to be a human being--longing, loss, the meaning of life.  Know what I mean?

 

MODERATOR:

Everyone makes some excellent points and I found this panel the most interesting and relevant to me as a teacher.  I am passionately on board with Neil Postman on this topic.  He is conservative but open to the use and advantages of technology. He is merely focusing on the values of the human character and not accepting technology as a Need.  I lived in a tent for 2 years and yes, I am weird, but I don't feel less for not having had the internet or a TV to do my thinking and experiencing for me.