Picture source: Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources
The Times Educational Supplement's coverage of a recent talk by Professor Yong Zhao, Director of the Centre for Teaching and Technology and US-China Centre for Research on Educational Excellence at Michigan State University, to the UK's Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Conference, had the strap line: "Technology is triggering teachers' survival instincts, warn US academics". The TES reports that Zhao's talk was received in frosty silence and with much shaking of heads. According to the TES, Zhao:
"believes that computers are like an invading species in schools. Survival of the fittest will dictate whether they are ousted, establish an uncomfortably equilibrium with the existing species (teachers, apparently) or replace them. "
I was not at the talk, but my guess is that this 1 hour video [100 MB MP4] of a wide-ranging, perceptive, and internationally well-informed talk by Yong Zhao given earlier in the year covers the same ground, as does this 2003 PDF of a paper by Yong Zhao and Kenneth Frank. What I found striking about the talk is the way Zhao pulls in data about educational use of ICT from across the world, and draws out similarities in the (failed) approaches of different OECD countries (including the large amount of funding poured wastefully into ICT spending in schools) over the last 10 years. Zhao's comments on the difficulties of innovation, and the "normal fact" that technology-as-innovation (new unreliable complicated system) fails, whilst technology-as-appliance (e.g. iPOD) are also interesting. His subsequent analysis, in which he views technology innovation and its spread and embedding from an ecological perspective, though much more contentious, provides plenty of "aha!" insights. Watching this will be an hour well-spent.
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