Papert introduces
the idea of not only improving the ‘educational stagecoach’ but reinventing it,
evolving it into a 21st century jet plane. The article reflects upon
technology in schools and how the educational industry has limited short-term
goals for today’s classrooms and only focuses on improvement to the existing
practices and teaching basic forms of computer literacy and fluency that will
be required in the workplace… Papert stresses that schools only improve rather then utilise the
possibilities for changing the system that today’s technology allows for and
that if we don’t break the mould then this phenomena will remain constant.
As much as I
love my long division, Papert reinforces that the content and subject
frameworks that we pre-service teachers know today will be gone tomorrow. I can
only concur that though maths skills (including long division) are important,
it is impractical in the age of the calculator and in fact, I distinctly
remember thinking when I was a young student (a thousand years ago) why did we
have to know this stuff when I could just turn to a calculator for my
answers? Instead Papert divulges that we
need to be focusing on more problem solving skills as well as the ‘new basic’
skills like entrepreneurial thinking and project management which do sound all
very exciting but how?
The article
continues, describing the many aspect of what we perceive as a school that is
modelled on the teaching model created in the last century, will be warped to
mean and be something entirely different. With segregated classes, traditional
teaching pedagogies and ‘the line between
home-learning, school-learning and work will be blurred, perhaps abolished’.
It is awesome just imagining the teaching revolution that is happening right as
I type… and it has only begun.
Papert,
S. (2004). ‘Technology in Schools: To
Support the System or Render it Obsolete’. Retrieved from the Milken Family
Foundation website on 29th May 2011 from http://www.mff.org/edtech/article.taf?_function=detail&Content_uid1=106
Thank
you Flickrcc…
Image: 'Breakout'
Image: 'Numbers of
efficiancy'
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