Chapter I

Focus question: How do technologies create new opportunities for teaching and learning?

Simple: it can eliminate the human element almost entirely. While this carries a negative connotation, such as the fact that we'll stray from the interpersonalness of the classroom, there is also a bright side to this coin. With lectures and discussions streaming real-time on a webcast students who are unable to make it to class can now have access to the classroom via any computer in their house or wherever they may be.

However, with information so widely-available and streaming all day everyday on the internet I can

teachers being displaced or even replaced by computer screens in the future. With all the information you could ever want at the tip of your finger and virtual learning tools where is the need for an actual flesh-and-blood? Couldn't we just code a bot--a virtual teacher that appears right on the screen--to teach every subject? And this bot could have simultaneous access to every yottabyte of information ever known about the subject. It happened in the factories, why couldn't it happen in the classrooms?

Tech Tool: Ultraportable Laptop Computers

It's a short abstract about the benefits of laptops to students and educators. While unarguably a helpful tool, I don't believe they're a necessity. There was a time when teachers carried no short of an entire library in their briefcase. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, most students and teachers have laptops open in class. A pen and paper seem like relics nowadays. Personally, it's not for me. I own a laptop for personal use but don't use it at school and probably never will. For me, the time-honored staples like pen and paper will always have their place.

Reaction:

The introductory chapter was wholly underwhelming. I knew things were off to a bad start right from the get-go. The chapter begins with an uninteresting anecdote about a group of college students working on an assignment for their technology education course. The story centre's around Donasha, Max, and Ava and their poignant discussion about where they fall on the technological spectrum. The story is painfully hackneyed and presents us clichéd stereotypes that we can attach to and suck our opinion out of like some sort of plecostomos from hell. The writing is even worse: simple, dim, unimaginative, and comma-happy. It's almost as if they hired Ernest Hemingway's half-witted, out-of-work cousin to spit this out under duress. Donasha is a bleeding-heart technocentric, a do-gooder and the obvious epitome of the author's themselves. Note that she is given two whole paragraphs for her partisan views while poor Max, the character closest to myself, gets a measly three sentences.

Thankfully, after the abysmal story the chapter reads more or less like a standard college course textbook. On page 8 they present a bell curve of Rogers Innovation Adoption Care and ask you to classify yourself in regard to your interest in using technology in teaching. I chose "Quick to Follow Proven Success," and while I could easily see myself as an innovator in most regards, I’m a luddite at heart.

It wasn't all bad: Page 11 contained an interesting graph on the top five reasons teenagers’ dropout. Surprisingly, laziness was not listed.