Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Connected schools, not much blended learning

Scott McLeod shared a great post today that reveals (with text and charts too) how connected US schools are today… and begs the question in my mind, how much has changed (broadly speaking) in the ways students and teachers are learning in our 21st century schools? Sadly, Larry Cuban’s conclusions from“Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom” appear to still ring true for many if not most US schools today: Billions of dollars have been spent on educational technology, but not much has changed instructionally as a result.

Public Schools with Internet Access

This is one of my primary professional passions: To help educators answer the question, “What are you doing with your bandwidth?” As Scott’s post points out, there IS a difference between having an Internet-connected school and Internet-connected classrooms, but according to the NCES report “Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005” he cites:

Only 6% of [US] public school classrooms lack an Internet connection.

This IS a great achievement: US schools are way ahead of many other schools around the world that are not YET “wired.” I think we need to remember, however, that our goal in connecting our schools and classrooms to the information superhighway was not and should not be to simply augment the delivery of transmission-based instructional content to students. If we wanted more robust transmission methods for multimedia content, we could have more affordably purchased a television and a TV connection for each student to watch eight hours a day in school. Sadly, our federal eRate program (in the types of purchases it authorizes for schools) seems to have been built on a transmission-based paradigm of education. I’m glad all our US schools and most US classrooms are “wired” to the Internet, but I am very concerned that many teachers and most administrators seem to not understand (at least at present) the powerful ways that connectivity should be leveraged to increase student engagement and improve learning– and move our assessments of student learning beyond seat time.

We need to recognize that the world and the media/communications technologies multiplying all around us are not only enabling more differentiated RO (read-only) communication methods (i.e. iTunes and U-Verse) but also RW (read-write) communication methods exemplified by blogs, podcasts, and interactive sites/technologies like YouTube and SecondLife. This was a key theme of Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at the Wizards of OS 4 conference in Germany in September. (Over the holiday break, take some time and watch or listen to his preso, it’s well worth the time investment.)

I’m very glad our schools are connected. The question should be posed, however, “Now what?” Really the question should not just be posed at this point, we should have been asking ourselves all along, “Why do we want to wire our schools?” Part of that answer needs to be, so our students can safely, powerfully, and collaboratively participate in RW as well as RO education.

That will be part of the theme in my spotlight address at MacWorld 2007, coming up on January 10th in a few weeks. 😉

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..


Posted

in

, , ,

by

Tags:

Comments

6 responses to “Connected schools, not much blended learning”

  1. Brian Crosby Avatar

    Wes – here’s what I’m doing with my bandwidth right now – exciting stuff:
    http://learningismessy.com/blog/?p=158
    and here
    http://learningismessy.com/blog/?p=159

  2. Scott McLeod Avatar

    Thanks for the link, Wesley. If you liked today’s post, you’ll love tomorrow’s and Wednesday’s too. Stay tuned!

  3. Adam Jackson Avatar

    Macworld Rocks! This is my fifth time and I love it! So much that I throw parties and help out new people. i spend day after day for 90 days leading up to the show browsing blogs and writing those that are going to the show in hope to helpin them out. My site is a good resource for you. I have a first timer’s guide, links to events and after hours affairs and more.

    http://macworld.dailytechtalk.com/

    I’m throwing my yearly party in SF as well. every person wearing a macworld badge is invited

    http://dailytechtalk.com/images/macworld/07/partyflyer.pdf

    my other events are here:
    http://upcoming.org/user/34666/

    hit me up if you have any quesitons
    macworld@dailytechtalk.com

  4. DBragg Avatar
    DBragg

    I am curious how “public school classrooms lack internet connection” is defined. In my public school classroom there is one drop and one computer. It is a teacher station (for myself and the other teacher in the room) and students are not permitted on it but network rules. Is that a connected classroom? It doesn’t meet my defination… I still have to take my students to the computer lab to work on our wiki or blog or research.

  5. Wesley Fryer Avatar

    I think one Internet drop to one computer in the classroom DOES meet the definition of a “connected classroom” for this survey. I agree that is far from an ideal situation, especially when you want multiple students to be accessing and using Internet-based resources. This is the benchmark, however, that I think many people have used for “bridging the digital divide.” It’s a good step, but I agree far from where we need to be with truly “connected classrooms.” It is an equal or perhaps even more difficult challenge to help teachers teach in digitally connected ways using technology– I think the equipment and the actual connections to the Internet are just a small part of the overall recipe for connected learning. This is why I continue to be an advocate for 1:1 learning initiatives. Until each learner has his/her own wireless computing device, I don’t think the digital component to learning can potentially become truly transparent.

  6. […] 原文时间:2006å¹´12月11日链接:Connected schools, not much blended learning作者:Wesley Fryer翻译:HubertHu审校:Danny Yu […]