1. Google Wave is a pre-release product demo and yet, at this early point, you’re crediting it with everything but resurrecting John Dewey and bringing about the Singularity. Don’t our students deserve more pragmatism than that? Don’t our classroom teachers deserve more restraint?

2. We can expect a needlessly messy transition into the future of edtech if we reject every underpinning from the past. I would still like to understand how you think the fundamentals of cinema communication (for example) have changed in the past several centuries. I would like to know how that short story you linked up reflects the “cybernetically enhanced human condition.” Or how it advances in any appreciable way on the short fiction of Hemingway c. 1927.

Absent any satisfying answers to these questions, it makes sense to me to retain a few people who understand these media while at the same time promoting the technology changing around them.

Dan:The rhythms of editing, the structure of a story, the establishment of character, the persuasive essay, none of that has changed in centuries. (Millenia?)

I disagree. We are seeing wholesale changes in the way information is being processed, in the volumes of information that we all have to process, and in the very manipulation of information. It is only in schools that we see teachers making the claim that there’s a ‘right’ way to do such and such. In the real world, everything is being re-invented and often. And few things are sacred or fixed.

For example, check out Google’s latest announcement; Waves. This is a technology that obsoletes and reinvents email, documents, language processing, editing and collaborative information sharing that is human language neutral (And more).

And it takes no genius to see that teaching and learning will never be the same as well.

http://tinyurl.com/GoogleWaveIntro

Another example is the reinvention of tabs from the traditional typewriter convention to an intelligent digital alternative.

http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/

Or this short story:

http://imgur.com/9on89.jpg

The problem with educators is that they were taught and believe that being slow and methodical and putting together five year plans is the way things work. That’s way not true anymore.

The point you may be missing is that I agree with you in that “we shouldn’t expect our teachers to be experts in every tool”. In fact I don’t think experts are what we want at all. We need teachers smart enough to move with the times and the technology by freeing themselves of the idea that the schools can afford training that doesn’t exist, tools that teachers need to be aware of because the kids are using them, and so on.

Teachers need to know lots of tools but not necessarily every tool within a genre (say, movie-making). You are correct it is not about the tool but it very much is dependent on using a tool rather than not.

The human condition is cybernetically enhanced, like it or not. To deny kids this extension of the human experience is unforgivable.

Frank: The mediums change far too frequently to waste your time [mastering the media].

This isn’t true. The tools for realizing the media have changed (cave drawings, hieroglyphs, quill pens, movable type, blogging, etc.) but the media, themselves, have not. The rhythms of editing, the structure of a story, the establishment of character, the persuasive essay, none of that has changed in centuries. (Millenia?) Edubloggers, meanwhile, fawn over new tools for realizing ancient media which they do not understand and, off all available evidence, have little interest in understanding.

Frank: The mantra is learn what you need for NOW and let it go – chances are it will change by the time you need or use it again.

Don’t misunderstand me. I agree with much of your assessment of how learning, technology, and creation are changing, but this is too much.

What’s needed NOW are people who can communicate clearly across a variety of mediums, using any available tool. I’m very interested in how clear cinematic communication has changed since The Jazz Singer first deployed synchronized music and dialogue in 1927.

We shouldn’t expect our teachers to be experts in every tool (Final Cut Pro, iMovie, AfterEffects, Maya, Blender, etc.) but media expertise isn’t just another desirable characteristic in a media teacher, it’s essential.

I think you are misunderstanding what is happening in the relationship between technology and humans and education.

First, a teacher’s true job (not the NCLB agenda) is to nurture the child’s learning ability and skills. The idea that the teacher should master every medium is last century’s paradigm.

The mediums change far too frequently to waste your time. But this doesn’t mean that you should bury your head in the sand or throw up your arms in despair. If a student knows more than you then learn from them and let them teach others.

Teachers need to be learners themselves and learning today is not at all about memorizing facts but about skimming, assimilating, and re-evaluating information *all the time*.

These days the technologists who remain vital are not experts and not generalists but rather techo-existentialists. The mantra is learn what you need for NOW and let it go – chances are it will change by the time you need or use it again.

So teachers – instead of teaching to tests – need to become multi-media experimenters. They need to demonstrate how the raw becomes cooked so that the learning process is exercised in ways that promote continuous improvement and sophistication of thought and taste.

A few years ago I encouraged our teaching staff to start blogging about what their classes were doing. I was told that they weren’t “trained”. I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Do you know English, how to type, and how to get to a blogging url? – What do you think you’ll be doing, preparing for a spacewalk?”

This idea that there’s a right way to create content is so wrong that I don’t know where to start. Our times require teachers who are self-propelled learners – not sheep or 20th century union belligerents.

Not only has the democratization of media content improved the availability of information and media, it changes the definitions of quality, ownership, art, and intelligence itself. And that will happen with your students as well. They will redefine the standards by their own experimentation.

Teachers have to give up on being judge and jury of quality and learn to become agents of learning development in which the quality of the by-products is secondary to the effect it has in promoting that student’s intellectual, social, and personal development.

For example, I recently was working as a software engineer in a major manufacturing environment and had a conversation with a senior engineer who was shaking his head. He was doing so because the latest CAD/CAM versions no longer relied on uniformly mathematically trained engineers. The program worked better with engineers who were spatially gifted. In other words, sculptors.

These days compilers will gladly swallow really bad programming code and scrub it under the covers to produce world-class compiled code. programs no longer are written for the smartest people, they’re written to accept the flaws of normal people and enhance their productive output.

Education is still selling this “we have to compete globally” nonsense when it no longer matters.

So teachers need to accept their insecurities in not being masters of this stuff and just use it. The stuff knows you don’t know and its okay.

– krasicki

If you are an expert in Algebra only, then how do you connect any of the abstract concepts of mathematics to real world examples? I’m guessing you draw upon your personal experiences, many of which involve things you are not an expert in. For instance using variables to determine batting average doesn’t necessitate that you be an expert in baseball.

I feel like our disagreements on this issue stem more from our personal interpretations of amateurism and expertise. After reading Jason Dyer’s blog article on the same topic, I think I see more where you are coming from. I just don’t think we need to be experts with a technology before we use it as a medium in class. We need to be more cognizant of the purpose of using these mediums and focus not on simply using it, but on what we are using it to achieve. When the video becomes the objective we have lost our direction.

Otherwise this mentality precludes a lot of engaging activities and relegates much of our instruction to paper and pencil work simply because the teacher is not an expert in film making or technology. I see no harm in teaching children the basics and then letting them learn from there.

Given the limited time frame of the typical school year, much of what we teach will necessarily be without great depth. It is largely up to educators (at our level) to stimulate curiosity and to give students the tools to continue their education. We ought not to be expected to be the font of all knowledge, but rather be seen as fellow learners.

Perhaps we just define expertise differently. I am happy to call myself an amateur historian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t describe the overall narrative arc of history and its my amateurism in a variety of other disciplines that enables me to make the connections that make what I teach relevant.

I think you have more of an issue with people who use technology for the sake of using technology, than with techno-amateurs teaching. It’s the amateur thinkers turned educators who attempt to integrate technology without thinking out the implications and objectives we need to worry about.

Using photography in our lesson plans doesn’t require us to be expert photographers. Anyone can click and point a camera. When using it to instruct in our disciplines we should approach it from our own instructional objectives not from those of photography and aesthetics. I don’t need to be an expert photographer to realize that, just an amateur photographer and an expert teacher.

http://numberwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/when-video-is-made-uncritically/

Just because I’m not the English teacher doesn’t mean I should encourage bad writing habits.

D.C.: You keep talking about how the gears operate in the machine as a whole, but that actually requires more than field specialization. That requires big picture thinking which necessitates familiarity with a broad field of disciplines.

Absent any examples, I don’t see how this is true. And certainly not universally true. My ability to explain the overall narrative arc of Algebra (teaching early concepts with an eye for how they’ll pay off with later concepts) is dependent on nothing more than my expertise in Algebra.

Jerram: Isn’t that just P.O.V.?

Yeah, or empathy maybe. Whatever it is, its application certainly isn’t confined to the classroom.

Jerram: Additionally, I don’t know that it is the amateur’s that are creating the target. Doesn’t autodidactology self assumingly prescribe to the notion that it is the individual that creates the bar? Amateurism

You’re right, of course, assuming this is a capable autodidact. I am completely unburdened by any evidence here but I have noticed that when autodidacts cluster in the edublogosphere the standards they set for themselves tend to regress to the mean. This troubles me, though only enough to write this post and not enough to commit to some basic field research. So there ya go.

You keep talking about how the gears operate in the machine as a whole, but that actually requires more than field specialization. That requires big picture thinking which necessitates familiarity with a broad field of disciplines. That leaves little room for expertise in everything. At some point, there is going to be some amateurism.

I don’t need to be a published historian to teach history, but it doesn’t hurt that I can relate the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima with some basic isotope theory in chemistry. I’m no expert in science, but that’s where my amateurism comes in handy.

In the end, isn’t that exactly the idea behind liberal arts education?

Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.

Isn’t that just P.O.V.? :) The ability to see things from someone else’s perspective? Heck, if you can see it, it’s gotta be more likely than not that you can communicate it.

Dan, you’re right on target, but the target is so small. Additionally, I don’t know that it is the amateur’s that are creating the target. Doesn’t autodidactology self assumingly prescribe to the notion that it is the individual that creates the bar? Amateurism as a measurement against self seems like a cop-out in an era of self responsibility.

If nothing else, I’m having fun following the post… :)