Spent a week in Romania at a youth camp. We had plenty of fun with the 65 campers playing soccer and games, hiking and other activities. A good amount of the time was spent singing, listening to messages and discussing in small groups. They would sit attentively for about two and a half hours in the morning and two hours at night. What struck me about this was how well behaved they were because they were engaged and not easily distracted to talk or text or anything else. Oh they had their cell phones and music but didn’t always need to be using it. They were able to show restraint.
Why I am bringing this up is because it was eye opening to me to see youth be engaged in activities and relationship without a constant need for technological support even though it was present. Much of what we are trying to achieve at Full Sail EMDT program is to better train ourselves to design education that utilizes technology more and more to present curriculum. As much as I see this as being necessary in our culture here in America I am not too sure it is necessary in other areas in the world.
With this in mind, I ask the question what if we are becoming too dependent on technology to present an engaging learning environment. What might be some of the down sides to that in the future? Will we create a large gap between our youth and the youth of the rest of the world in their ability to relate to each other? Or will there be ways found to use the technology to bridge the gap? We will need to keep an eye on this and see what develops. Now to look at it from another perspective, four American youths went on the trip also (one being my son) and two of them were able to interact very well with the Romanian youth without the use of technology. The other two stuck together early on and didn’t venture out of their comfort zone until much later in the week after a stern directive by their parents to interact.
So with this said, I think as we pursue the integration of technology to enhance more and more the delivery of education we should make sure that we incorporated a focus of basic human interaction as an underlying goal of the technology use. Making sure we use technology to bring people together instead moving people into seclusion bubbles while people are available around them to interact. We can’t forget this and I think Full Sail’s program does a good job of doing this, but more could be done.
Great question and observation. I think that we're fooling ourselves if we're thinking that all of this technology is going to make us better educators or even be more effective. We use the tech because we are already good, attentive educators who want to meet our students where they are. But using tech in the classroom isn't going to make us any better at teaching than having a good word processor ever made anyone a better writer. And as you've notice, not everyone shares our culture's obsession with tech.
ReplyDelete