Doug Johnson in Blue Skunk Blog posts an interesting Trick Question
The stumper, it seemed, during yesterday's interviews for our new high school library media specialist was: How will you demonstrate that the library media program is having a positive impact on student achievement in the school?
Challenging déjà vu, I realised that I have come up against this question before - but in New Zealand and in the context of the impact ICT_PD for teachers was having on student learning outcomes.
I believed then, and continue to believe that the question is unanswerable given the complexity of factors that influence student achievement.
The question/s we should be asking
- What are the conditions of value in teaching and learning that have a positive impact on student achievement in the school?
- How can the library media (or technology) program enhance or betray these conditions of value?
Insouci put me onto Tara Brabazon’s Digital Hemlock, and I’ve just finished reading Brabazon’s reliability versus validity arguments in BA[Google]: Graduating to information literacy
Reading Brabazon makes me realise that my questions of value, enhancement and betrayal above are the equivalent of the V / / A G R A from 3 , 33 $ spam emails that clog my inbox – they are distracting me from the questions that I need to be struggling with.
I need to tear myself away from all these how to “learn through ICT” type questions and begin to look at the social and cultural impact of ICT in society - on democracy (smart mobbing), on what we consider authorship, on social relationships, on our environment.
Although it will take a decade to ramp up, mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell, govern, and create. (Reingold. 2002)
Postman (1995) is a good place to start. He asks a question I seldom hear asked in the context of ICT and teaching and learning in New Zealand, where 82% of Zealand primary schools in 2002 and 78% of secondary schools in 2001 had internet connections.
What we needed to know about cars-as we need to know about computers, television, and other important technologies-is not how to use them but how they use us (Postman, 1995, p324).
Perhaps as an educator the question/s I should be struggling with is,
How do they use us?
How does ICT use teaching and learning?
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