Learning through digital tools

I am not a teacher in it’s traditional and commonly understood sense but have I taught? Yes. Foremost and more importantly I have taught myself a plethora of information and skills. I tend to think that I have been successful to a good extent in retaining what I learned. Technology played a vital role in my learning process even though I am a child of 20th century but my quest and thirst for knowledge found no hinderance in jumping from libraries to computers to Internet and from books to software to apps and websites! I made it through this journey successfully and mostly on my own when it comes to understanding and deploying technology to complete my tasks and achieve the intended goals.

Today, I rely on technology as my most important communication tool to keep me in touch with my loved ones. I rely on technology to organise my life, arrange my travels, seek knowledge on new things which I come across. I have myself as a good example to use when I do get a chance to teach someone. I am often delivering teacher training or being asked to take and cover classes for high school students when they are in their course units relevant to my experiences and expertise.

While I coach I always refer to technology in the way I experienced it in my own learning experiences. I believe in fundamentals. I am always stressing on ‘understanding the basics’ which I believe help us in adapting and connecting to any new methods of learning specially when it comes to technology. My philosophy in adaptation of technology for learning was strengthened by attending the sessions of Alan November in one of the conferences. Technology is only but an improved and faster means we, humans, have developed to assist us in processing information we collect, analyse, store and share. All the new learning methods and models are devised to help us and young learners understand the ways to feel comfortable with and adapt technology to aid our personal learning journeys.

Blooms and SAMR

I have come across, read about and understand these terms. I hear them in the conferences I attend, from the ‘technology’ teachers or ‘coaches’ as they are now starting to be called and it all brings me back to the same question: Why all these new terms to explain the same old quest and thirst for excelling in gathering, understanding and sharing the knowledge about what is around us.

• How do these terms help us?
• Does following these learning models make an average learner an outstanding one?
• Do they improve learning?

… so many questions come up in my mind and I seek their answers. I am sure many educators and even those who are not in the ‘business’ of education have these questions. After all these questions are linked to survival of humanity. Aren’t they? For me they are. What do you think?

I feel the need to reconnect to the concept of 21st century learning as mentioned in my first post: Does that mean learning through technology or shall it represent all of today’s ‘different’ ways of seeking and gaining knowledge? I tend to lean towards the later.

I see technology in abundant use in schools today, specially those serving the influential parts of our societies. Then there are those where ‘traditional’ methods of learning are still in full swing oblivious to the rapidly expanding  technological evolution all around us. I may say there is a ‘disconnect’ between technology and education in a lot of schools around the world. In my country of origin I have yet to see a relevant example where technology has been incorporated in everyday scholastic learning. There seems to be absolutely no need of technology to ‘disrupt’ the way things have been done. After all same results, or even better in some cases, are being produced so why bother!

This touches upon the line of my inquiry for this course. Is technology the only or the ‘best’ modern way of obtaining knowledge and help us learning? The answer becomes more any more clear to me as I look around myself and analyse the information I obtain.

Technology, Communication and Information

Technology has been, from it’s inception, used primarily to develop new ways to communicate the information we acquire. It was true for books (publishing) and continues in forms of electrical and electronic methods. After all computers also speak a language and transfer ‘information’ we call data. I think that we, humans, created technology to mimic our own self. A brain which can compute, memory where information can be stored, ‘share’ information through ‘languages’ – we even call them ‘languages’. Cameras and microphones to provide the input, output, screen which perform the same functions as our face and hands i.e. express and provide information to the one we interact with. Technology is human creativity stretched further. A religious text comes to mind: ‘God created man in His own image’! and so did man when imagining and inventing computational technology. Here lies our intimate connection to technology. We shouldn’t loose this connection and ‘purpose’. Information and Communication Technology was created to assist us in the quest to seek and share knowledge, and it exists to act as an extension to ourselves. It mimics all the human functions – and we continue to improve the technology to compute more and faster, store more, over longer periods of time and share the knowledge with each other.

I also see fear in adaption of technology. This is often talked about in schools and educational circles. More terms were coined: ‘flipped classroom’, ‘blended learning’ to assist us in combating these fears and bringing this ‘new human clone’ into the methods of learning. So, can technology take the role of an educator? is it just like a human but simply on super steroids? and if yes then what is the role of a ‘teacher’ in today’s world.

21st Century Learning

This word had me search the net to find it’s true meaning. I was unable to grasp the meaning of it in it’s true sense as the creator of the word intended. Did he really mean learning through technology? or he meant to grasp all the new ways in which we learn today? What does it really mean?

Looking up 21st Century on Wikipedia tells me that it started on 1st January 2001 and will end on December 31st 2100! Will we still be calling it 21st century learning on December 30th 2100? My wild guess is… ‘NO’.

We, humans, are clever at coining new terms to express ourselves or, as I find in this case, to prove that we understand and are in ‘tune’ with the modernisation of our times. Prove to who? I wonder!

Coming back to the term 21st century learning and my understanding of it. In my honest opinion learning has been based, from the beginning of times till today, on the same deeply engrained human natures of curiousness, exploration and a desire to know the world around us. We, humans, created, languages to communicate with each other, sciences to explore the world around us, history and geography to record our findings and experiences, religions to try and give some meaning to what we cannot explain or understand. In the context of ‘learning’ or as I prefer to put it ‘acquiring knowledge’ we have gained a wealth of knowledge about our surroundings and technology, for me, is only another way we have advanced the means and ways to fulfil our ancient thirst for ‘knowledge’ and in doing this, my concern is, we have lost and are continuously loosing some of our inherent human skills: ability to store information in our brains, perform extremely complex tasks such as analysing data to extract information in order to obtain results, and most of all respecting and fulfilling our most basic human need – the human touch.

In this set of blog posts for course 1 of my COETAIL journey I would like to explore the ways in technology can be used not only to enhance learning but also to assist in maintaining our human nature to its true self. After all, it is those qualities which brought about this technological revolution. I, for myself, want to make sure that technology does not rip apart the most important quality of a human being i.e. thirst for knowledge.