Technology, Complexity and Education From Education Times, The University of Florida College of Education Magazine What is technology? Technology is the clothespin. Technology is a bicycle chain. Technology is the birth of a new industry that could not have been born without the metal fishhook, or the polished glass mirror, or the transistor, or the liquid crystal display. Technology is applying a new solution to an old problem. Sometimes the new solution is so elegant that people cease to think about the old solution. Sometimes people cling to what they know, to what they have tested, to what has worked for them. Technology is about change. It changes the way we work. It changes the way we communicate. It changes the way we think. Perhaps most importantly, it changes the way we change. Technology challenges us not only to change the way we do things, but to decide whether the way we do things is important to us. It begs us to consider our history, the way things were. It forces us to wonder what we lose when we gain. Perhaps it is technology, or the changes associated with it that make things seem more complicated: more choices, more subsets of choices, more information - always more information. We wonder about the best way to do something rather than how to do something. Our research requires us to filter out vast streams of information rather than to find enough information. It is clear that complexity will play a larger role in our future. How will we handle it? How can we accommodate it into our thinking? How will it affect our systems of values? New forms of communication allow us to interact with complexity in novel ways. While adding several layers of technological complexity in themselves, new media systems also provide us with the means to address complexity in ways never imagined. We can “understand” things using audio, video, simulated animation, extensive written-word references, and nearly immediate polling tools.Yet even with our powerful technologies, we learn that to thoroughly investigate something we often need human cooperation and collaboration. With each new piece of information comes a link to another. We learn so we can learn. As we learn we encounter new ways of learning, new perspectives, new cultures of thought, more diversity, allowing us to build stronger frameworks for our developing ideas. Inquiry incorporates real-time theory testing, building convincing arguments, and communicating with one’s peers using appropriate information channels. More technological skills are required to carry out everyday interactions, but a more sophisticated approach to education is also needed. In our century, mankind took off from a dirt runway in North Carolina and landed on the moon. We have incredible skills and yet we struggle for understanding. While astronauts repair space shuttles above us, parents wonder why their children can’t spell and children wonder why their parents don’t know how to set a wristwatch or record a movie. Our “skill sets” become as varied as our paths to knowledge, as varied as our individual appreciations of what is meaningful. Common sense in one idiom often contradicts common sense in another. So, as humans, we search for a more “common” sense that can successfully accommodate both frames of reference. Simultaneously, as if on cue, we search for human understandings that transcend geographic, cultural, and ethnic boundaries without obliterating them. Our new found ability to communicate with a plethora of cultures shows us the fallacy, or the foolishness, of promoting cultural homogeneity. Diversity and its probabilistic nature adds strength to the search for solutions to increasingly complex human problems. Combined with immediate communication, a range of distributed information sources, and a large group of motivated problem solvers, diverse ideas increase the likelihood of generating appropriate solutions. But where do we get that large, motivated, group of problem solvers? What would they be like? Should they all have learned the same things in school? Should they all have the same skills, the same interests? Should they all be evaluated using the same measuring devices? What would they need to improve their chances of success? Every day, future teachers ask themselves what a good teacher would do, how a good teacher would think about a specific issue. During the same day, good teachers wonder what content they should cover, and which tools and strategies they should favor over others to increase their students’ chances for success. How will they instill in their students the discipline and drive needed to be both independent and collaborative learners? How will they encourage their students to understand the difference between complexity and difficulty, to appreciate the value of diligence, of pure effort? In education, we think a great deal about knowledge and learning, the complexity of the human intellect, and the magnitude of the human spirit.We have chosen an area of study that is highly complex in that it is human. As evolving technologies increase the complexity of the learning process, we continuously strive to promote the dialog between the learner and what is to be learned. We search for relevant context, we evaluate content, and we struggle with evaluation. We incorporate promising new technologies as we address a rapidly expanding and increasingly accessible information base. We wrestle with change in our culture, our institutions, and our profession. Change insists that we learn in order to learn. Throughout the process we are both the educators and the educated, and we are forced to remember the larger complexity Dewey described this way: Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself. |