Zach Owenby

Nicole has dysentery.

I have spent my adult career in the information technology field, albeit academic information technology, working for both public and private educational institutions. I am a child of the 1980′s, having been amongst the first youth in America with the fortune of computers in the classrooms and technology woven into the instruction. Who can forget Oregon Trail? Number Munchers? Lemonade Stand? Odell Lake? Well perhaps the initial crop of Apple ][ games by MECC were not so much an educational tool as they were an excuse for our teachers to send the class to the library computer lab for an hour so they could have a little quiet time with Mr. Jim Beam or Mrs. Tanqueray in the teacher's lounge.

My hometown population in the early 1980's was somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 inhabitants. While not very large, even by today's standards, our proximity to a large commercial/defense aerospace company and supporting industry I believe contributed to a community that was keen to capitalize on emerging technologies. In fact, the ensuing years have shown a consistent trend for attracting and maintaining a disproportionally large regional commercial and industrial community that was technology-focused and driven. Given that my hometown school district perhaps lacked some of the resources of larger cities, the fact I remember attending classes with an Apple ][ or Macintosh computer in nearly every classroom is, I believe, significant. It might almost seem prophetic then, that one of my first, true, information technology jobs was as a network administrator in the very school district that had been responsible for my primary education.

During my tenure with the district, I was responsible for all administrative and instructional technology systems at three elementary schools (approximately 1,500 students, staff, and faculty, combined). By the mid-to-late 1990's, the technology landscape had changed dramatically. Computers were an order of magnitude more powerful than they had been ten years prior, this new thing called the Internet and the World Wide Web was on everyone's mind, and the home computers, an item once considered a luxury by many so families, had become affordable and commoditized. Parents, many whom were exposed to a personal computer for the first time during an Open House or place of employment, expected there to be a certain ratio of students-to-computers within a school, so local bond elections sought to fund lofty, yet nebulous, Computers In The Classroom® initiatives. Wait, you mean throwing technology at a problem without clear and measurable goals and objectives does not a solution make? I thought technology could solve any problem!

Would you use a hammer to cut a piece of wood? No, because that is not the purpose of the hammer, but rather the purpose of a saw. A hammer is still required when it comes time to nail the pieces of wood cut by the saw together into an object, though. It is the classic situation of using the right tool for the task at hand. In this analogy, use of the classroom computer constituted cutting wood with a hammer since technology forced classroom instruction to adapt to the computer, rather than the computer adapting to the instructional design methodology. That backward approach has led to an industry of so-called educational software challenged to provide valuable, measurable, objective, learning. Unfortunately, creating a better software platform is probably the easy part. Managing the effectiveness of learning by measuring the data is the difficult part.

A article, recently made aware to me by Mark McLaren, titled The first Twitter class talks about University of Washington professor Kathy Gill and her work integrating Twitter into her communications class. With the explosion of social media, finding ways to incorporate these new tools into our daily formal and informal learning has largely been by trial and error, just as it was when I was a child and we received our first Apple ][ or Macintosh. And that is the problem. In the past 20 years, we have been unable to develop a foundation of measurable, objective learning delivered by technology. It is largely up to the individual vendor or even the instructor to define how the learning is measured. Why is it that the American Psychiatric Association can develop a criteria (the DSM-IV) to diagnose the complex human brain, yet a similar set of standard cognitive criteria for learning does not exists (to my knowledge). While I support Kathy Gill and others like her (heck, I’m always one for pushing the boundaries of technology), I remain skeptical until I can see that the proverbial horse is not put before the cart again.