Cindy and I end up working together on many committees. People seem to think we should agree on most things and seem a little surprised when we get into “discussions.” When Cindy is in “discussion mode” she talks louder. I tend to take a more logical approach, but friends claim I wave my arms about more than usual.
One of the issues we discuss is the need for a book in the “Technology for Teachers” course. Since I am more of the writer in our partnership, my position is predictable. Cindy feels projects and the web are a sufficient combination. I argue for students experiencing multiple perspectives (the instructor’s and the author’s) and for the structure that a book provides.
We do agree that a book is not sufficient to convey what students need to know about technology, but could probably agree on some type of hybrid of web resources and a book.
An issue that does bother me about using a book to teach about technology is the speed with which the field moves relative to the time it takes to prepare, distribute and cycle through an edition of a book. I happen to be preparing a page for the web site summarizing some of the recent books/studies evaluating the connection between technology and educational reform (e.g., Cuban). The last book I comment on is Schofield and Davidson’s Bringing the Internet to School. This is a 2002 copyright and has been very positively reviewed. I agree that it is very well written and does provide some great insights into how the social context of schools influence how things do or do not change.
One of the major considerations in the book is the possibility that technology will encourage educational reform. The book studies a large school district as it reacts to a large grant making available resources for Internet activities. When I noticed that the study ran from 1993 to 1998, I began to consider some of the conclusions more carefully. Opportunities that are now fairly commonplace — high speed access in classrooms, carts of computers with wireless access that can be wheeled into individual classrooms, quality search engines, firewalls and content screening, student to computer ratio — would possibly result in very different experiences than those described by the authors. Some of the most basic findings in this 2002 publication may no longer be relevant in many districts. How would a student reading this book differentiate the conclusions that have some permanence from those that were resource related and are no longer valid? Talk about critical thinking and information literacy.
My point – any book addressing technology needs a linked and frequently updated web site.
