Evaluation of Educational Technology

In one of the most famous paintings in Western culture -- Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling -- God reaches out to touch the finger of Adam. The artist implies that with this contact, the human adventure began. The viewer's eye jumps across the small but significant gap between God's finger and Adam's. To make the journey across the small break between their fingers is to recapture the leap across the immense chasm crossed by our upright ancestors in the distant past -- from concrete to abstract thinking -- a leap that transformed them into us.

Today we are at a similar juncture. The gap between the fingers represents the gulf between the classroom of today and learning tomorrow. The gesture urges us to take a visual leap of faith in the direction of change. Are we ready for the journey? Do we have the strength, fortitude and technical support for a steep, ever changing and demanding learning curve?

We have a difficult time with change and when something new comes along we tend to look at it with traditional eyes and try to understand it by referencing it to things we know and understand. The way we use language explicates our adaptability or lack of it. We still use the term sunrise today when clearly we know the sun doesn't rise. When Ford first produced the automobile, it was referred to as a "horseless carriage." It was and is logical, but the language wrapped around something unknown, comforting us but simultaneously limiting our ability to see and or understand the implications and capabilities of the new technology. The technology was new, unknown and scary. We were able to adapt to it by referencing it to something we knew.

However, that which enabled us to adjust and assimilate the technology was the very same thing which initially prevented us from maximizing the tool.

Arthur Godfrey, one of the great old time radio personalities on the cusp of moving from radio to TV, use to hold up a box of Lipton Tea in front of the new TV camera. He would go into a commercial gesturing, "I'm holding here in my hand ( and pointing to the item in his hand) a box of Lipton Tea. ...." The TV audience knew what he was holding because, unlike the radio audience, they could see Arthur and see the product. They didn't have to be told what Arthur was holding. Arthur's script writers were still writing for radio and failed to capture the capabilities of the new medium. It takes time and understanding to adjust to the paradigm shift.

We are like Arthur Godfrey and the band of folks looking at the automobile as a horseless carriage.

And yet we are told that within 5 years, according to Forreser research, 92 percent of US online users will communicate via pipe-hogging" personal rich media" - voice-image- and video-based messaging.

"Fairleigh Dickenson University got a new president last fall, and one of his first orders of business was to decree that, starting in the fall, all FDU undergraduates must take at least one course via distance learning each year. The intent, says president J. Michael Adams, is to ensure that the university's students are "global scholars" equipped with the skills to use the internet for learning as well as for research and commerce." On Campus. February 2001. 7.

How do we maximize this new tool....the computer...so that we are not like Arthur Godfrey or those horseless carriage linguists?

If we use it for drill and practice or mind numbing busy work, we will fail to exploit the tool's capabilities.

A Few Quick Bits

Richard Lanham, author of The Electronic Word, wrote about change in society:

"Many areas of endeavor in America pressured by technological changes have already had to decide what business they were really in, and those making the narrow choice have usually not fared well. The railroads had to decide whether they were in the transportation business or the railroad business; they chose the latter and failed. Newspapers had to decide if they were in the information business or only the newspaper business; most who chose the newspaper business are no longer in it."

In The Alphabet and the Goddess, Leonard Shlain states that "The new technology introduced the possibility of universal literacy. A radical new communication technology would so change cultural perceptions that the first people to realize it would introduce fundamental features underpinning Western civilization." He was talking about the effect of the alphabet; we are talking about the WWW, but the impact is potentially greater.

The knowledge construction process is produced by a dissonance between what is known and what is observed in the world.

Meaning making often starts with a problem, a question, a discrepant an inexplicable event, a curiosity, wonderment, or puzzlement.

Resolving dissonance ensures some ownership of the ideas and the problem.

The ownership makes what is learned (the knowledge that is constructed ) more relevant, important and meaningful to the learner.

Technologies are more effective when used as tools to construct knowledge.

Technology is a tool to think and learn with.

Teaching, Socrates tells us, is not only a process of imparting knowledge, because the learner cannot know what the teacher knows and what the teacher knows cannot be transferred to the learner.

Teaching is a process of helping learners to construct their own meaning from the experiences they have.

Using information to be remembered in a creative, constructive, and meaningful way vastly increases memory of that information at a later time.

Finally...... knowledge construction results from activity.

Bits like these goad me into taking the leap into the vast gap between the fingers.