I’ve had many good conversations with brilliant people during the past two pre-ISTE conference days and any one of them would be worth writing about. The one that keeps whirling around my head tonight is a serendipitous conversation with Don (last name unknown). It started as I was getting ready to say good night to The Kids™ via Google Talk using the iPad.
On a side note, I’ve made an interesting iPad observation. I’ve seen more people using iPads than laptops over the past two days. I would agree wholeheartedly with anyone who says that it is not a laptop replacement, but on the other hand a laptop is not an iPad replacement. There are affordances using the iPad – the weight and size, the simplicity of the interface, the unitasking (which can sometimes be a feature instead of a shortcoming) – that laptops don’t have. but until less than three months ago, we didn’t have iPads (or any other kind of touch interface tablets that may be forthcoming) so laptops were the best approximation we had. My analogy that I tweeted was “Does iPAd replace laptop” is like asking “does Twitter replace blogs” – they resemble each other but they do different things. At one time we used our blogs as a way of twitter like conversation, but once twitter came along we didn’t need to use blogs to do that since twitter did a better job. Similarly laptops don’t need to be our iPad proxies now that we have the actual technology in our hands.
But I digress …
Don asked if I was enjoying my iPad and what sorts of things I used it for. This led us into a discussion of the difficulty of getting teachers to change the way the taught and their concepts of what their job is. I pointed out that just 50 years ago, teachers – indeed the entire education system – embraced and actively pursued change (this is my understanding of it, but correct me if I’m mistaken). Don asked what the catalyst for the change; I said it was a reaction to Sputnik and the shock of suddenly losing hegemony in the area of science research and technology. Then Don asked the question that has been niggling away at me since then – what kind of event would it require to be the Sputnik event for education and teachers today? What needs to happen to catalyze a massive re-evaluation of the role of schools and teachers? Sorry Don, no answers yet but maybe some smart folks might share some ideas with us here. (Yes, that is a massive plea for comments so start sharing some ideas!)