Tablets Transforming Education, Teaching, and Learning
Why will the highly anticipated Apple tablet – suspected to be called iSlate – transform the brick and mortar classroom as well as the way teachers interact with students? Will learning be affected? Will learning improve? Will the improvement be worth the investment of time and money required to adopt and adapt to the new technologies with which we will shortly collide?
Those who resist the forthcoming changes will find it difficult to adapt and adopt. Those who embrace the changes will discover new opportunities to engage and learn both individually and collaboratively. Society always merges with its adopted technologies. The coming innovations are reflective of our desire to connect to others more deeply. The social web has demonstrated this phenomenon. It should come as no surprise really.
The way we connect is visually via gestures and verbally via voice and text. Therefore our innovations should enable and empower these modes of communication and connection. Furthermore, our minds store, organize, archive, reflect, and recall images and sounds and we our technologies should extend such practices. The iPhone transformed the way we interact with external devices. The 100,000 plus crowd-sourced applications extend our own physical presence into the Cloud wherein we can now share and comment beyond the previously limiting space-time restrictions.
The more natural our interaction with devices that grant us access to information, the better our chances of deep learning. The past couple of decades, we have struggled with shallow learning when it comes to technology in the classroom. What I mean to say is, we taught interim skills like keyboarding because that skill allowed us to interact with the information storage device.
Now, as devices become more naturally innate to human gesture and experience, we will be able to return to learning the deeper skill set of critical thinking. Learning how to learn will not require preemptive and intermediary exercises in hardware and software interaction. Rather, information will be directly accessible to all in a more assimilable form. Teachers will be able to focus on the curriculum to be taught and students will be able to focus on the knowledge to be gained.
However, as I noted at the beginning, will this change be resisted or embraced by educators and the educational institution? Personally, I don't believe the institution has a choice. But if it resists, the cost in time and money will be felt by increasingly strained budgets. There's a real opportunity for schools to save both and improve learning exponentially. Embracing the change is a win-win for all. (posted 1/22/10)
