Over the weekend, I have been doing a bit of surfing to see what education related articles are online. My main reason was that the school year is about to start (actually it has started in some colleges last week and even for K-12 in a few states…). I found a link on the blog FreeTech4Teachers which connected me to a Boston Globe article covering the Burlington High School (and its principal). In any case, the crux of these articles was the seemingly unending debate about whether to allow students to bring various kinds of electronics into schools (read: cell phones in schools…).

This debate has been going on for years, and as with the music recording industries attempts to quash file sharing (MP3’s), it appears to me to be an argument in which school administrators attempting to ‘control’ this emerging societal norm are slowly losing.

In this article Patrick Larkin (Principal of the Burlington High School) had an interesting quote:

When asked about the misuses of technology, such as cheating or spending class time texting or surfing, he replied:

“If they want to cheat, they’re going to cheat,’’ Larkin said, “with technology or anything else.’’ He said he doesn’t see much difference between this and the old scourge of teachers — note passing. “We’ve had no problem with note passing the last few years . . . I wonder why . . . they’re texting!’’ he said.

I found this point to be very clarifying, in that ‘new technology’ is not some monolithically huge change in how we conduct our lives, tech represents merely some new tools which are increasingly important to our lives (for good or ill…).

This apparently newfound perspective is one I would wish would get some more coverage, especially since there seems to be a sort of digital divide going on in most schools. I read quite a number of education related blogs, and almost all of them are created and maintained by only a few parts of the education industries community.

I see posts on some of these blogs trying to proselytize the notion that by merely using some obscure form of new technology, that their students will be able to…create better subtitles in their video projects, or some other breathless paean to the wonders of the new world.

As a portion of the whole education community, these sorts of posts have their rightful place, but (ironically enough), there would seem to be a dearth of contrary opinions (i.e. the opinions of those who are not as web centric in their affiliations). I am still wondering how we can ‘fix’ this lack of input into the larger online community…

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