Writing Archive

"* SHALL * WE * PLAY * A * GAME * ? *"

BROKEBACK TO THE FUTURE: TECHNOLOGY RULES, TECHNOLOGY ROCKS, TECHNOLOGY WHIPS A WILD CHEETAH WITH A LEATHER BELT AND A RUSTED RODEO BUCKLE...

...more from the files of a recalcitrant graduate reduxionista...

ITEM: TED-INMD 410 Paper #1: "What are your current beliefs about the availability, accessibility, and use(s) of technology in K-12 education? What is influencing these beliefs?"

In response to the questions for this paper, I must confess my limited reference points for the use of technology in K through 12th-grade education, as I teach at the college level and have not been in a primary or secondary educational context since my own time in school years ago. Back then, in Spring 1988, I had my first and only encounter with a computer in my small-town Texas school system: Computer Math, a high-school, seniors-only course using the RADIO SHACK TRS-80 microcomputer. It was a time of wonders, in which our school had just created an honors program and there was even talk of satellite-linkup classes connecting us to all the world’s majesty. Pretty soon, we'd crack the keys to thermonuclear passwords across the globe with our sweaty South Texas fingers.

But I can’t quite remember what sort of math we actually performed in that computer class. I think it was thrilling enough to sit near the TRASH-80, as my friends had lovingly dubbed it. And then there was the momentous experience of actually sitting down at the computer for the first time, flipping the thick, heavy power switch with a reverberating thud and feeling that good, solid Radio Shack housing shudder with life.

Beyond that, the blinking, grainy cursor-dot didn’t exactly bring learning to life or take me to new pedagogical vistas. At least, the promise of a hi-tech future was something to look forward to, though all we did, really, was train in BASIC programming. What the hell did we learn? I have no idea, and I don’t have much need these days for TRS-80-assisted math. I wonder if the whole point of the class was to start the eventual, lurching process of introducing technology into the classroom and thus to bring students into a sense of what the future held.

I’ll give my high-school education the benefit of the doubt, even though I remember little from that class except for my fear of the big, orange button on the TRS-80 keyboard — there for any random joker to push and so wipe the entire screen CLEAR of all work. It was like a nuclear RE-SET button, and it haunted my nightmares.

At best, this limited experience means I am biased against technology in the classroom. At worst, this means I am one of the ignorant, old-fashioned educators who will be swept away when the Tech Revolution comes. Yes, of course: When the Tech Revolution comes, it will feature interactive streaming audio and video, whereas my teaching will be the equivalent of a TRS-80 hooked up to a dot-matrix industrial printer powered by an electrical current created by hamsters in an exercise wheel.

At least, that’s how I’ve come to feel at Truman College, where the introduction of studio classrooms has lodged challenges willy-nilly against dominant paradigms of college instruction. And so, I should probably admit my beginning assumptions for this course: As a pragmatist, I am ready to use any tool relevant to and useful in the classroom, to help enhance the learning experience and achieve the goals of any given course. Moreover, as a relatively new teacher, with roughly three years of teaching under my belt, I recognize and embrace my clean slate of experience. These starting points help keep me focused in developing and improving as a teacher, while keeping my ideas and attitude loose enough to be open to new approaches. Nonetheless, I am skeptical and conservative about radical departures from my own educational experience, which was largely free of technology and based mostly in standard lectures and discussions, especially in college.

My dearest and most exciting memories of college in particular remain the colloquia, seminars, and conferences that stoked intellectual flames and the imagination. These moments had nothing to do with technology, and so I feel that the burden of proof rests in technology to prove its worth for the classroom, especially in the disciplines of the humanities.

And yet I’m ready to find new ways of going about teaching, just as my students surely are ready for new approaches to learning. No, I don’t want to be the TRS-80 of teachers. But even so, I don’t want the dread of the metaphoric orange CLEAR button and all its doom to distract my classes from the central pursuit of college: intellectual life.

Or, as I put it in class sometimes, "I'd love to show you how to use a computer, really I would, but I sorta' have to teach literature and writing sometime in this semester, you know? Can we talk about lit now?"

Posted by Benjamin at June 13, 2006 02:19 PM