Legal Research

Have the learners leapfrogged the teachers?

Blue Skunk Blog has an important posting that addresses the concerns some teachers have with respect to the following point of view:

"We?re so far behind our students. How do we catch up and move past them so that we can then teach them things they don?t know?"

It ends with this conclusion:

"No matter how sophisticated the N-Geners are technologically, in matters of ethics, aesthetics, veracity, and other important judgments, they are, after all, still green. By virtue of our training and life experiences, we can apply the standards of older technologies (the pencil, the podium, the book) to those which are now technology enhanced. And we?d better. Given the choice of having Socrates or Bill Gates as a teacher, I know which one I would choose.

Increasingly the teachers and librarians who can survive and thrive in schools ever more permeated by technology will need to view themselves as ?co-learners? in many learning experiences. Remember that ?life-long learning? applies to us as well as the kids.

So after re-reading this, I am asking myself "What in the hell are we doing in our staff development efforts in technology that is so belittling to teachers?" Have we truly lost sight of the fact that the end result should not be using technology well, but using technology to teach well?"

Read the whole post here:

Old folks and technology
and I loved the starting quote:

"There are three great questions which in life we have to ask over and over again to answer:
Is it right or wrong?
Is it true or false?
Is it beautiful or ugly?
Our education ought to help us to answer these questions."

There's a lot to learn and a lot to teach. We all play a role.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on December 14, 2009 (boomark / email).