A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer blog!

In future, I will be posting most of my content about learning technology, libraries, and education on my new blog, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. I think that will enable me to focus this blog more on political and environmental issues (although education cannot, of course, be removed completely). In case the name hasn't tipped you off, this month's discussion of Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age will also be moved over there. Hint-hint. Read it...please? Anyway, don't worry, this blog will not be neglected; I'm currently working on a bunch of new posts for you guys. :)

Mapping the Future of Education

Sorry I didn't post yesterday, I've been working on a seriously overdue paper about the Congressional Hearings on the 1938 Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act. I promise, it's waaay more interesting than it sounds. Luckily, when I do goof off, I spend much of my time intrepidly exploring the corners of the intarwebs, seeking treasure for my beloved blog readers. Here's a site that maps predictions of the future forces affecting education in an information-dense, yet intuitive format (with pretty colors!). When you click on one of the colored boxes, it opens up, giving you information about that topic, plus links to "Read a Real-World Application," "Join the Discussion," or "Send Topic to a Colleague." It is rare to see a website that is simultaneously so informative and so well-designed. If you dig ideas about educational innovation, you will dig this site. Kudos to KnowledgeWorks for creating it.

"Gizmo High"...Too High?

I found this article in the Washington Post. It's about a public high school in Northern Virginia where the school system buys so much technology that the teachers complain. First, this is a prime argument for more nationally equal school funding. While the teachers at T.C. Williams complain about too many gizmos, the teachers in nearby DC public schools are lucky if the buildings aren't crumbling and the metal detectors that they do have are working. Second, this seems like less of a problem of too much tech than of badly chosen tech. Technology, like money, isn't something you can throw at a problem in order to solve it. It has to be carefully applied in the right ways, in the right amounts, to the right places.

The school in the article hurried to issue students laptops, and is now "constantly trying to play catch up with the technology." It seems to me that one of the big problems in educational technology is that in many cases, the software simply has not caught up with the hardware, so schools end up buying expensive equipment whose functionality is artificially limited. Even when good software is available, schools often don't know about it. Smart teachers are secure in the fact that any attempt to replace human interaction with technology would be worthless, so their jobs are safe from this new tech. They will respond more positively to technology when they see how it can help their students. And right now, they're just not seeing it.