רק תוסיפו מיים ותערבבו

I’m disturbed by the fascination with connection for connection’s sake that I see in the first few minutes of the video. I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world – just like they do on Facebook or MySpace – and the kids will learn. There’s a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we’ve had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world. Just introducing connection into our schools without a sense of what we want to do when we connect, how it changes things when we do it, and what we gain and lose when we change our schools this way. We have to stop just thinking that the introduction of these tools without an incredible amount of planning and forethought will change anything for the better.

We don’t want to just ape the rest of the world in schools. Schools should remain something different than the lives kids lead outside of school. That’s ok. That’s even good. Because I think much of the input that kids have outside of school (marketing, specifically, I suppose) isn’t a good thing. Schools should be different than that.

Because nowhere in that talk … is there much of an honest discussion of just how hard implementation of these ideas actually is.

Because it is plenty hard… ask SLA teachers… it ain’t easy. And the problem is that our entire structure has to change to make it easier. You can’t teach 150 kids a day this way… you can’t have traditional credit hours… you have to find new ways to look at your classroom. Everything from school design to teacher contracts to class size and teacher load to curriculum and assessment – everything we do in schools – has to be on the table for change if we are to achieve the kind of schools that video is speaking about.

And missing from this conversation is any sort of historical sense of education. The fact is ideas like the ones that Kay and Pink are talking about have been around in schools for a long, long time…. The technology can be transformative, but only when coupled with a sense of where you are going and why.