The avowed theme of Karen Lirenman’s presentation was iPad apps, but in practice she spoke more generally about the uses of technology in the classroom. I suspect that this was a more useful approach than a list of apps would have been. A lot of what was covered is fairly familiar ground by this point, but there were some valuable takeaways and I appreciated that the audience was given a chance to discuss amongst itself. Breaks for discussion helped ameliorate the negative effect of telepresentations on my attention span, a fact which has softened my attitude towards multi-access modality a little. Exeriencing MAM as less of a lecture and more of a collaborative exercise makes it seem more like a potentially productive approach.

Turning to the content of the presentation, I’m reluctant to fully agree with what I understood to be the presenter’s point about technology serving as an access point for all students. It seemed to me that she was suggesting that technology benefited every student as an entry point, which I would disagree with. For some students, technology represents just another learning hurdle on the way to content and competencies. I would, however, agree that technology is a way of ensuring that every student has an access point. That is to say, it won’t help every student, but it can help those who are at a disadvantage (eg. hearing/speech difficulties) access the class on a footing equal to that of their peers.

At points, the effect of technology on education was overstated. Technology does indeed open up the possibility of learning in different ways and offer an alternative to textbook learning. It would be wrong, though, to suggest that only technology can do this. Indeed, textbook learning is itself a comparatively recent innovation when measured against the stretch of time over which humans have been learning, a strange deviation from natural pedagogies that was made possible with the technology of the printing press and bookbinding. This may be just nitpicking on my part but I feel it’s important to not overstate the power and novelty of new approaches lest they come to be overapplied as cure-alls. I think Karen Lirenman would agree with me here in light of her cautioning against the use of technology for worksheet tasks that could be done just as well on paper. It was refreshing to hear someone acknowledge that technology, while useful, has a place and time in education that is not everywhere and always. I found that our previous presentation on iPads and apps tracked towards this latter camp a little too much for my tastes, and it’s good to see a more restrained approach to and assessment of eduational technology and its benefits.

A final critique before I move on to a closing summary of points that resonated with me: learning styles. The presenter made an (admittedly passing) reference to technology as a way to cater to different learning styles. I have to mention here that the scientific consensus is currently that learning styles are largely a myth and that it is the same good learning and study habits that benefit everyone. Is relying on technology to engage students according to their stated interests or preferences doing them a disservice by taking the emphasis off of less trendy but more empirically supported study skills that would improve their learning.

I conclude this post now with a summary of the concepts I found most interesting.

The difference between technology being used for consumption and creativity is one of those concepts that becomes a no-brainer as soon as it’s spelled out, and I can’t help but wonder why it never occurred to me to think in those terms. Thanks to Ms. Linerman for introducing a clearcut way to distinguish between how technology should be used in the classroom and how most students (and probably , lets be honest, teacher candidates) use it at home.

The reality of language acquisition is that everyone’s receptive vocabulary is more advanced than their productive vocabulary. Thanks to our presenter for the reminder that oral production outpaces written production in many people (all of them? I certainly feel like I write write more coherently than I speak.), and thus that recording devices are a great resource which allow students to speak their reports without exhausting the teacher’s time and ability to comprehend.

Technology puts students in touch with the world. Yep. Lots of great examples given: reaching out to authors, crowdsourcing the answers to scientific inquiries, exploring far away places. One can easily imagine setting up a realtime penpal network with an affiliated school elsewhere in the world.

Informed consent and the teaching of responsible digital citizenship as prerequisites: agreed.