What we take for granted

When Clare Kilbane and I taught 675 last spring we made lists of things we would change if either of us taught the course again. Two things were at the top of the list: "Get everyone's preferred email address up front" and "Use an standard naming convention for papers and documents emailed to the instructors". As Bobby Burns said (if his English was a bit more up to date), "The best laid plans of....". Technology is wondrous when it matches our needs and understanding. When there is a disconnect there is frustration and a tendency to revert to older ways of doing things. Some of us are gifted with super/sub-human patience (depends on you point of view whether you consider patience a higher order skill or just dumb laziness). At any rate, we take for granted things like light switches that work almost all the time, toasters that toast all the time, refrigerators that are remarkably reliable, etc. Computers and the internet are not yet at that level of no-brainer take-for-grantedness.

Back in the 80's when I worked for Apple Steve Jobs spoke of the computer as appliance, something that was to become so intuitive that it required no more thought to use than a toaster. While great strides have been taken in that direction we are not much closer to that goal than we were in 1988. The problem is that the toaster was pretty much perfected back in 1950 when the pop-up feature was added. Those geeky guys and gals in Silicon Valley and Calcutta keep adding bells and whistles to the basic computer at an alarming rate. The appliance analogy is no longer appropriate to describe our relationship with technology. The only existing analogy that springs to mind is the old one about changing parts on a flying airplane. "Let's try this new wing design, we'll install it at 30,000 feet over Kansas, piece of cake."

This new analogy requires an even greater tolerance for ambiguity than the significant amount of tolerance good teachers already possess. To make technology work for the good of education we all need to be prepared to fail, to employ vast amounts of trial and error, to re-think, to admit we do not know all the answers, to let some problems rest for a while, to be willing to ask direction even from our students. What we've taken for granted in the past is a world that had a lot of static features. Touchstones and landmarks anchored our thinking about the world and how it works. The rock solid premises in many subject area still hold, what does not hold is who has access to knowledge and how it is passed from person to person. Technology and the Internet have reconfigured the conversations between teachers and student. Content and the keys to knowledge are no longer in the sole possession of teachers. Students can uncover more content in a few minutes than could be 'covered' in a year long course a few years ago. The role of the teacher is becoming, must become that of a provider of order, an asker of significant questions, a skeptic about the provenance of truth, a risk taker, a creative light. In some ways not a lot different that what good teacher s have always done, however, the shift is away from 'knowledge' provider and toward all those other things.

How did we get from email addresses and naming conventions to teaching philosophy? Simple, we (as teacher and students) have got to be willing to try and fail, be problem solvers, sharers of solutions while maintaining some conventions that prevent total chaos.