If you had to teach a class with just paper and pen, you could do it, and your students could learn just fine. Substituting a computer for paper and pen doesn’t change anything.

Instead, find a way to motivate all the kids to learn. Nothing about computers is motivational. It eases the exploitation of information provided the exploiter is motivated to do so.

Since reading is much more difficult on screen, how will putting more content on a screen motivate kids?

I have a blog site and have used it for a year as a teaching tool. I saw the need when students were afraid to use email which is something I also require. The blogging has achieved it’s goal so now I have them building digital story boards using Blooms Taxonomy, digital stories for language development, powerpoint assessment games, and they have to blog weekly. I teach Edcuation courses, not computer classes. Blogging allows me to go beyond the time in class but more importantly, they need to know how to teach in this modern age because by the time they are certified, I see books being replaced with laptops.

I want my future teachers to be better prepared so they can “lead” with success.

The question of where technology is “leading” us is one that is very interesting, because I for one don’t like to think that I’m being lead anywhere. Maybe I’m being naive about that. Who knows?

We lack consensus – not only for technology – but for our vision of schooling
And what about our vision of freedom? Like you wrote, some people use it to fly to new horizons, and others use it to make better bars on the windows.

Something that occurred to me recently, and I’m not sure it’s relevant here, is the speed of interconnectivity. I discovered blogging nearly 3 years ago. I discovered RSS 1 year ago. After that came Flickr, tagging, wikis, podcasting. Most of my teaching colleagues had no idea about any of it. My closest colleague who spends quite a bit of time online and doing email told me he had never heard of blogging till I told him, and probably would have gone on not knowing about it for a long time. The other day I attended an FD forum locally. All in Japanese. The plenary speaker is talking about the half-life of knowledge (which I’d just read about on George Siemens’ site a few weeks previously), and the new “knowledge age” or information age where knowledge itself has a market value, and what this implies for education, particularly for pedagogical practice. I just read about Web2.0 a couple of months ago. At the conference, I attend a presentation on Web2.0. Things are happening fast, and the interconnectivity means that it is taking a lot less time for people to get onto the same page with each other, because they are sharing a lot of the same reading and conversations. And the pace of interconnectivity is speeding up. Before attending this conference, I had no real idea of the extent to which these new ideas (social software, etc) had penetrated Japanese education. I discovered that they have penetrated further than I thought, and much of that penetration has been very recent. In other words, the time lag between when things happen in the States and when they happen in Japan is decreasing and I’m sure part of that reason is the interconnectivity of Web2.0. Not everyone wants to get on board (“Why would anyone want to do that?”), but those that do are having an effect on everyone, even on those that don’t. Will it be possible for the whole wired planet to be on the same page within 24 hours? I find that possibility very exciting. And as to “why anyone would want that”, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.