If You Can’t Beat Cellphones, Join Them!

Last Friday I ventured onto a public high school campus and spent the day with a junior student named Monique. If my experience had been video recorded, you could assume it was the 90’s or 80’s because the day completely lacked in technology.

Throughout the entire day, technology was only used once: a “video projector” during Pre-Calc. For those of you who have not been in a classroom in the past decade, this is an updated version of the old style overhead which used photocopied “transparencies” you could write on with special markers. The video overheads are literally a video camera which projects the image onto the wall. In the Pre-Calc class, the teacher was able to place the math textbook directly under the camera to project the page onto the wall. He also demonstrated how to plug mathematical equations into a calculator by placing it directly under the camera.

Technology & the 21st Century Classroom

Part 1

It’s a typical day at an American high school campus. Groups of students walk around wearing earbuds, or sneaking looks at their personal digital assistant (PDA), formally known as the cell phone. They check their Facebook and Twitter pages, they send off a dozen text messages, they blog, and they read updates on their favorite musical group, all in less than a few minutes. However, it is inaccurate to say that all students are “plugged in.” A typical day in an impoverished high school would not the same level of technology use. The digital divide is real and it is an issue educators must mindfully consider. By prohibiting technology educators miss opportunities to model their practices and teach context-specific skills. Furthermore, the students who do not have access to technology at home are completely cut off from learning these necessary skills needed to operate in the 21^st century global marketplace. It is because of this digital divide that educators must accept students’ use of technology. Educators should also work for funding to make technology available to all students, and find ways to implement all forms of technology into the classroom.

Beggar Robot

The Future of Education in the Flat World

I have been reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century and it has got me thinking a lot about the future of education.

The main thesis of Friedman’s book is that times have changed, are changing, and will continue to change drastically. We are living in a “flat” world where technology and communication has dramatically changed the way we live our lives. We live in a world where we can outsource work to India to save our company money, which consequences in a percentage of lower-end jobs being cut from the work field. Friedman argues that in this flat world, to be employable we must become “untouchables.” He explains:

“The way I like to think about this for our society as a whole is that every person should figure out how to make himself or herself into an untouchable. That’s right. When the world goes flat, the caste system gets turned upside down. In India untouchables may be the lowest social class, but in a flat world everyone should want to be an untouchable. Untouchables, in my lexicon, are people whose jobs cannot be outsourced.“

Friedman places these “untouchables” into four categories: special (Such as famous Hollywood stars or big namers like Bill Gates); specialized (This includes knowledge workers-lawyers, brain-surgeons, software engineers); anchored (Jobs which must be done in a specific place-waitresses, nurses, electricians); and lastly, really adaptable (Employees who constantly are learning and improving upon their skills to become more of an expert and less mediocre). In this new flat world, mediocrity is the kiss of death.

Now that so many of the lower paid and low-skilled jobs have vanished in America due to outsourcing, the bar has been significantly raised for Americans seeking work. Friedman argues that in this new flat world, higher education is not an option anymore. A college degree is needed now because jobs require a much higher level of skill than they did before we entered the twenty-first century. He suggests that all citizens should be offered at least two years of a college education in order to level the playing field. If we do not make college available to all (like we once did with mandating the high school years of education), then only the privileged and wealthy will get the education needed for the well-paying jobs of the future. If the level of education needed to become employed has been upped, so must the mandatory schooling of the American people.

Friedman has made me think about education in a very different light. I once thought that not all people were “college people,” and not all people should go to college. This was based on my experience with many college freshmen who seemed to be at university because it delayed their adulthood for another four years, or because their parents made them, or because it was expected of them. Now I see that college must be the end goal for all high school students. If these students want to compete in the global economy and someday land a good job and live a comfortable life, they have no choice but to go to college. But this leads us to a terrible conundrum-how do the underprivileged and poor make it to this step? And how do we make those who do make it to college see how important their higher education is for their future?

Getting a college degree is already becoming a norm in our society, and maybe this is not such a bad thing. We are living longer, and our careers are lasting longer than ever before. Higher education leads to longer and happier lives, and is a direct deterrent to crime (and in a country where 1 in 10 US citizens are imprisoned, perhaps more education is really what we need). But we need support-from our government-to make it possible for all to attend college. And professors and teachers need to work to illuminate the importance of their subject matter. Why is what you are teaching important in the 21^st century? Are you teaching your students the skills they will need to survive in the global economy and in the flat world?

And this leads me to the subject of technology and the use of it. Technology must not be the enemy inside the classroom. Technology is the future, it is the now, and it will make today’s students able to compete for jobs and survive in the uncertain job field of the future.

The Third Generation

“There is something about post-World War II America that reminds me of the classic wealthy family that by the third generation starts to squander its wealth. The members of the first generation are nose-to-the-grindstone innovators; the second generation holds it all together; then their kids come along and get fat, dumb, lazy and slowly squander it all. I know that is both overly harsh and a gross generalization, but there is, nevertheless, some truth in it. American society started to coast in the 1990s, when our third postwar generation came of age. The dot-com boom left too many people with the impression that they could get rich without investing in hard work. All it took was an MBA and a quick IPO, or one NBA contract, and you were set for life. But while we were admiring the flat world we had created, a lot of people in India, China, and Eastern Europe were busy figuring out how to take advantage of it. Lucky for us, we were the only economy standing after World War II, and we had no serious competition for forty years. That gave us a huge head of steam but also a huge sense of entitlement and complacency–not to mention a certain tendency in recent years to extol consumption over hard work, investment, and long-term thinking. When we got hit with 9/11, it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to summon the nation to sacrifice, to address some of its pressing fiscal, energy, science, and education shortfalls–all the things that we had let slide. But our president did not summon us to sacrifice. He summoned us to go shopping.”

– Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Jenifer Fox: Our Education System Needs Transcendence, Not Fixing

“The secondary school environment in the United States and throughout the world is flawed because it is focused on achievement over relevant and meaningful learning. Having a 4.0 grade point average or perfect scores on standardized tests doesn’t define who a child is or who he is able to become. Children yearn to be more than a list of achievements and scores; they desire relevance. Unfortunately, our schools do not provide them with the things they truly need to discover success in their lives.”

More…..

Thomas L. Friedman: The Other Side of Outsourcing

Did You Know? (v. 3.0)

Life Disintegrating

Koyaanisqatsi. The perfect word to describe life for Americans in this, the 21^st century. Koyaanisqatsi. Life in turmoil. Life unbalanced. Life disintegrating. Koyaanisqatsil; derives from the Hopi language. Koyaanisqatsi: the name of a 1982 visual-musical poetic film by Godfrey Reggio, Philip Glass, and Ron Fricke. (A prophetic warning of days to come?) A film connecting the dots between technology and the destruction of our bloodline, our life. This film, made in the dawn of the rise of glutinous American consumerism, before being green was the cool thing, peels back the layers and slows down—this world we live in, all beautiful and destructive and chaotic and horrible and completely astonishing. Chaos. Chaos.

Koyaanisqatsi: a state of life that calls for another way of living.

Is it too late?

Are we turning into robots, or have we just gone crazy?

I walked by a girl who was laughing at nothing and was talking to herself energetically. Oh wait, I thought to myself, she’s not crazy; she is just hooked in with a piece of plastic and metal clipped to her ear. Call me crazy but I think that is crazier than being crazy.