Thursday, July 20, 2006
Listening to Ray Kurzweil was mind-blowing to say the least. I've listened to various futurists before, but none have made the sense or had the credibility of Dr. Kurzweil. A few points that Dr. Kurzweil mentioned which stood out for me were:
Charmaine Brooks - The State of ICT
One thing that surprised me was the statistic that school jurisdiction leaders display a very wide range of skills, beliefs, and practices around supporting ICT. With such varying leadership styles and 'beliefs', this seems to me problematic in terms of province-wide improvement with technology use. The question "How do we measure the influence of information and communication technology on student learning?" was asked, and answers varied widely around the room. My feeling is that asking this question is the wrong approach, just like asking the health care industry whether MRI machines affect patient health. Just as the focus of healthcare is on improving the health of its patience, the focus of schools is to improve student learning. We don't learn about health by studying how medical technology works - we use medical technology because it is a way to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare system. The core of healthcare is doctors who understand how to make people healthy, and the medical technology developed and used is driven from that need. In the same way, the core of education is learning, and once our teachers have a strong understanding of effective learning and teaching practices, and believe that their actions must with their students must reflect best learning practices, I believe they will chose the aspects of technology that best leverage learning. I wait longingly for this day when teacher PD with technology is driven by their need to improve the learning across their subject areas and not by a desire to 'cover' a separate ICT curriculum.
- The Paradigm shift rate is growing and will double in the next 10 years - the question I have is whether the rate of adoption of these paradigms is growing at the same rate, or will the 'knowledge divide' grow even more?
- Cost of technology dropping (hardware, not overall cost of technology including support), performance rising - this makes sense, although I was somewhat surprised to hear that desktop computers will disappear by 2010
- Miniaturization is also a trend leading toward nanotechnology (MEMS - MicroElectronic Mechanical Systems) - fascinating animation of the oxygen-releasing nanobot in the bloodstream!
- Technology will emulate human thinking by 2020 - Reverse engineering of the brain has already begun (scary thought - will 'smart' machines consider humans a threat to the earth, given our not-so-ecologically-friendly ways?)
- IT will make up a major part of the economy by 2020 - this was surprising to me given the stock market's boom & bust with technology a few years back.
- The next shift in educational technology will be virtual reality - move toward online education - transactional distance will reduce due to this 'feeling' of being together virtually; as we add nonbiological materials to our brains, we'll be able to upload skills & knowledge. This is consistent with a lot of the educational simulations we saw last week with science and math.
- The role of the teacher as mentor and guide will still be needed - this is comforting, but by no means should we as educators remain complacent about our roles. I still feel a huge mindshift is needed with how we teach and how our students learn.
Charmaine Brooks - The State of ICT
One thing that surprised me was the statistic that school jurisdiction leaders display a very wide range of skills, beliefs, and practices around supporting ICT. With such varying leadership styles and 'beliefs', this seems to me problematic in terms of province-wide improvement with technology use. The question "How do we measure the influence of information and communication technology on student learning?" was asked, and answers varied widely around the room. My feeling is that asking this question is the wrong approach, just like asking the health care industry whether MRI machines affect patient health. Just as the focus of healthcare is on improving the health of its patience, the focus of schools is to improve student learning. We don't learn about health by studying how medical technology works - we use medical technology because it is a way to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare system. The core of healthcare is doctors who understand how to make people healthy, and the medical technology developed and used is driven from that need. In the same way, the core of education is learning, and once our teachers have a strong understanding of effective learning and teaching practices, and believe that their actions must with their students must reflect best learning practices, I believe they will chose the aspects of technology that best leverage learning. I wait longingly for this day when teacher PD with technology is driven by their need to improve the learning across their subject areas and not by a desire to 'cover' a separate ICT curriculum.
# posted by Danny Maas : 2:47 PM
