Bit By Bit

Reflection on:
Who’s Teaching Who? Are We Ready? by Chris Kaminski

I really appreciate hearing from the students, and the ones presenting in Kaminski’s film are incredibly articulate. In fact, just listening to the audio, one probably would think that these aren’t students at all. Which would probably expose some of the age biases that exist… but that’s probably another post down the road…

This presentation again illustrates how important it is to have the student voice in this journey, and how clear it is that these students have already done a lot of thinking about the issue of technology in schools and the impact on their lives.

Currently, I’m reading Papert’s The Connected Family (which is amazing!), and he talks about the fine balance between “giving” knowledge and letting students “discover” meaning independently. It is clear that Kaminski is allowing his students to be co-partners in the discussion and exploration and that the journey is shared between students and adults. Some of his students foresee that more technology will replace teachers… others disagree. Whether it increases or decreases “positions” may not be the thing to focus on, but rather, the positive impact will be that the relationship of teacher/student will drastically evolve.

One issue of interest to me is the idea that technology will allow increased opportunities for students to take courses online. I completely agree and think that we will see an explosion in the near future of, say, private companies offering alternatives to brick and mortar schools. I could see this becoming a requirement for schools/students — that at least a small percentage of your high school credits need to be acquired online, for instance — as we hope to better prepare our students for the 21st Century (see Time’s article).

Technorati Tags: bitbybit, k12online06, k12online