Using Technology to Create a New Paradigm for a Learner-Centered Educational Experience

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Summer, 2000 by Phillip Harris, Michael F. Sullivan

"Only the educated are free." * Epictetus, Discourses (2nd Century)

We are on the edge of a new century--a phrase, admittedly, that has been greatly overused. Every age has conditions of life that determine how people work and spend their leisure time. Such activities change slowly, as those life conditions change, and sometimes the change is so slow as to be almost imperceptible. Today, for example, there are thousands of clubs and lodges that are disappearing because people no longer spend their free time there. Lodges, being private organizations, must respond to these changes, eventually closing when membership declines. Public institutions, on the other hand, are not forced to change quite as directly. In fact, public agencies often continue unchanged even as society changes.

A LIFE OF CONSTANCY AND ROUTINE

We are also on the edge of reinventing our nation's public educational opportunities--another phrase that has been overused without much reinvention of education actually taking place. Because schools, for the most part, are public agencies, they are bureaucratic institutions reluctant to change. Indeed, they have not changed noticeably in the last 50 years, even though our society has changed greatly in that span of time.

The last change occurred when the public realized that the automobile, invented 40 years earlier, made it practical to close one-room schoolhouses and to bus students to larger schools that provided untold advantages. With enough students at each grade level, one teacher, lecturing to 30 or so students and assigning readings from textbooks, became the norm. These group instructional practices were established when people attended lectures as a form of entertainment, reading was the only form of mass communication, and therefore these activities were the only practical forms of communication and instruction. And yet, this model remains the norm today.

Students in the first part of the 20th Century had very definite life expectations: they would become farmers or factory workers; a very few would attend universities to prepare for professional positions. And the public schools had a clear mission: to provide students with the skills and discipline needed to live a life of constancy and routine.

Schools still provide students with those skills and discipline. They may even be doing it better than ever, with increasing attention to standards and assessment. But today's students will not work in factories or on farms and will require a different set of skills and discipline. They will work in settings that are technology dependent, they will work in teams, they will have to learn new skills, and they will change jobs frequently. The routine of school, with the focus on listening and reading homogenized material written years earlier, drives many students to despair and leaves many parents frustrated. Both parents and students know that completion of 13 years of this type of study just prepares kids to compete with dropouts for low-end service jobs. Only those who pursue additional training can hope to fulfill the American dream. In fact, a dropout who is certified or trained in a technical field is much more likely to succeed than a high school graduate who possesses no particular skills.

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMS THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

There is good news. The technology revolution now in process brings with it the first major opportunity to rethink fundamentally how and what defines education and who controls access to it. We have spent the past ten years bringing our nation's schools on line in order to begin the task of developing computer literacy. But literacy is no longer the goal that should be our focus. We need to utilize this significant tool to recreate what children in the 21st Century will need to know and be able to do, as well as when and where they can and will do it.

The technological revolution can be used to reframe the very nature of the educational experience, for the barriers we often faced in the past are no longer barriers, and students no longer have to be bound by time and place to learn. The tremendous technology potential will only be realized if we can create a new vision of how technology will change the way we define teaching and how we believe learning can take place.

Unfortunately, the past decade has produced few models of technology use that reflect a reconceptualization of this learning experience. As we look to the future, we must attempt to envision what technology can do to create an educational experience never before seen or experienced.

The effort of the past ten years and for the foreseeable future will be to retrofit technology to existing structures. This is a very necessary step. But while this is taking place, we need to spend time and creative energy in designing new educational experiences. There are numerous ways technology can be of use to expand opportunities and to improve teacher productivity and student learning. Designing a new system of education with technology as an integral part would likely result in a system vastly different from that of the present.