The Question of Accessibility

We've all heard the aphorisms.

Technology as being physically present

All great progress is met with resistance at first. People are scared of what they don't know. Societies are always slow to embrace new technology. 

And then there are the more specific indictments.

If a doctor from three hundred years ago time-traveled to here and now, he wouldn't be able to perform medicine at all. But if a teacher time-traveled here, he would be able to walk into a classroom and teach with practically no difference.

But I wonder, when we examine the merits of progress and technology in education, what do we mean by technology exactly? To follow the scenario from above, if an ancient Greek were transported to our age and listened in on our debates over technology, he might assume we were fighting over any given skill. Technology simply means the study of technê— trade or skills or art forms that usually involved hands working with physical substance.

And so when we ask when technology works and when it doesn't, which skills do we mean? What physical substance? Books, pencils, loose leaf paper, and even desks are technology too.

At the risk of being obtuse, I can't help but wonder whether it might be helpful to pinpoint what manifestations of the almost-endless resources surrounding us in our classrooms we are asking about. When we consider the helpfulness of SmartBoards and iPads, are we questioning the physical presence of those iPad on the students' desks, or are we just questioning what skills Steve Jobs' products have made available to students, or do we dig deeper and ponder the meaning of the physical presence of those teknia?

If technology simply meant the skills made available to students through electronic media, we might come up with a chart something like this:

Technology Works

Technology Doesn’t Work

·      When students are presenting visual or auditory projects (PowerPoints, Prezies, videos, photo collections). ·      When students are collaborating on long-term projects of any kind and need more access to each other than during school hours. ·      When students are researching and need both breadth and depth of materials. ·      When students are constructing formal, objective summaries of performance-based activities. ·      When students need to learn the technology-inferface aspects of language.

·      When students are engaging in Think-Pair-Share with a partner. ·      When students are quietly reading. ·      When students are participating in class discussions. ·      When students are working in small groups (tea parties, jigsaws, give one/ give one). ·      When students are freewriting. ·      When unpracticed students need to codeswitch from casual to formal tech use. ·      When students need to move from the research to analysis stage of thinking and writing.

In this paradigm, technology works when it accomplishes a task that needs resources that can't be brought into the classroom without it (like having millions of pages of information available to be researched online) or when using the technology itself is one of the desired skills. It doesn't work when the goal of the activity is for students to problem-solve with each other orally and casually and in the moment or when the social programming involved with technology inhibits creativity (I've heard lots of students of all ages say that it's tempting to delete work that they don't like when working electronically but that it's not so easy when there's a paper trail).

But if technology means something about how a physical environment changes when there are touch screens, monitors, doc cams, and class blogs, maybe the list would include points that answer questions like these:

• How does reading on a screen affect learning differently than reading from a page?

• How does drawing a poster that's hung on a wall affect learning differently than photoshopping an image that's displayed on a screen?

• How does engaging with a classmate face-to-face affect learning differently than creating a comment thread on a blog?

• How does the physical space created by non-digital technology (like books and paper and pens) affect learning differently than the physical space created by SmartBoards, AppleTV, and iPads?

As I learn to create the best learning environment for my students, I am hoping to figure out how to use technology—all of it, not just the kind that plugs into an outlet—to equip my students to engage the world of ideas and the world of physicality equally well.