Our Thinking Has to Change
by George Couros • • 0 Comments
This is a bit of a rant…
This morning I was pinged on a tweet sharing the article, “Why new technologies could never replace great teaching“. For some reason, I was up early and read the article and then was WIDE AWAKE. Along with the author, I have a strong belief in the teaching profession. That being said, I believe that educators should in many ways be leading the world, not trying to catch up to it. How many businesses look to what education is doing? How often is it the other way around?
One of the quotes from the article really caught my attention:
Put at its simplest, if future models of learning means encouraging young people to spend prolonged periods in front of faceless computer screens, exposed to largely unregulated material in an inherently unsafe environment, then that is clearly not the way forward.
Wow…a lot of assumptions made there. Let’s break it down a bit.
There are a lot of people that are spending a lot of time on computers and connecting with people. It is becoming normal that kids and adults, are using social media to talk to PEOPLE, not simply look at things that can’t interact back. In fact, those people on the other side of the computer actually do have faces, and kids and adults are actually making connections with them. So much in fact in education, that conferences are starting to change their formatting in many places to allow for networking time. Not to create time to connect with people that you don’t know, but to talk to people