Simplifying teacher expertise is no big deal– heck, textbooks are an old tech version of that, saving us all from the trouble of coming up with our own materials. I actually have spent some time thinking about this, resulting in my decision a few years ago to stop using the grammar textbooks my school bought for our classes. I dumped them because they kept my teaching tied to their pace, their ideas, their examples, and their limited practice materials; I decided I would rather take my cue from my students and what they needed and how they could best be helped to understand. Could i have done this when I first started out? Probably not enough hours in the day– and the fact that I can type materials up on a computer and have them printed out on a machine on the other side of the building certainly helps, so I guess I both object to and agree with Arnett’s point.
Or maybe my point is that if you aren’t very careful, labor-saving (or labor-transferring) technology will tell you how to do your job instead of helping you do it.
I do believe that technology will be coming for almost all jobs, including teachers. How soon? It could be 30 years off. Or, it could be 10. Alexa and Siri still can only answers half the time, but they are improving.
Making learning easy may not get the results you desire. In the period of 1920–40 American food manufacturers wanted to reduce the time and effort required to make a cake. They simplified so much the process that the cooks needed to add only water and bake the cake. Unfortunately, the sales of the cake mix…
“And don’t ever imitate anybody,” Hemingway cautioned in his advice to aspiring writers. But in this particular sentiment, the otherwise insightful Nobel laureate seems to have been blind to his own admonition against the dangers of ego, for only the ego can blind an artist to the recognition that all creative work begins with imitation…
In a corner of SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a small, secretive group called Ad Astra is hard at work. These are not the company’s usual rocket scientists. At the direction of Elon Musk, they are tackling ambitious projects involving flamethrowers, robots, nuclear politics, and defeating evil AIs. Those at Ad Astra still find…
With every new year comes new ideas. To get a glimpse into what the next 12 months will hold for everything from professional development to digital learning, and from communication to virtual real… Source: 15 hot edtech trends for 2017 Instead of one person’s opinion, this article lists the responses from several people in the…
Bored to distraction? No wonder I’m so distracted. No wonder we all are. The problem isn’t technology per se, but the expectations it has engendered: a steady stream of entertainment and stimulation. Or, as Bertrand Russell — who lived through the invention of electric lights, radio, and television — put it: “We are less bored than our ancestors were,…
Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook group chat. A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook…
