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.