Weisman, Volti, Teich, LAI 525, and Me

This semester the 10 of us talked about a lot of issues involving technology and society, and every week we were able to relate our discussion back to education.  Technology has so many implications for us as teachers, our students, and our education system as a whole.  While reading the World Without Us, I was able to find many similarities to the other readings we have done this semester.  One of the overwhelming themes of The World Without Us is "the profusion of life owes much to all that is dead."  (Weisman, 2007)  Technology works along very similar ideas.  Robert Pool's essay, How Society Shapes Technology, book has a prime example of one technology thriving after another has been "killed"  Pool talks about the internal combustion engine and the steam powered engines.  Both engines had their positives and negative attributes, yet the combustion engines won the technological race in the end.  "Experts then and now have called it a draw-- the "better" technology was mostly a matter of opinion.  Instead , the steamers were killed of by several factors that had little or nothing to do with their engineering merits."  (Teich, 2006)  Volti also speaks to the ways in which technology is fueled by the change or destruction of ways we did things in the past.  New technologies almost always push either a way of life, or way a society functions out of the way in order to become successful.  "Technological change is often a subversive process that results in the modification or destruction of established social roles, relationships, and values...The disruptive effects of technological change can readily be seen in the economic realm, where new technologies can lead to the destruction of obsolete firms..." (Volti, 2009)  This theme can also be observed in our classrooms, although as we discussed the infiltration of technology into the world of education has been much slower.  None the less there are examples of technology in our classrooms making other modes of instruction or tools obsolete.  The classroom set of encyclopedias is not a common site anymore.  Information can become obsolete over night, making traditional print a dated source.  Classrooms of kids are now turning to the internet for information when they research.  For this reason, libraries have had to change the way they do business as well.  Many now have subscriptions to online journals, newsletters, newspapers, and databases.  The traditional card catalog is also fading out, as more and more people turn to computer search engines to find the resources they need.    Technologies like chalk boards are slowly being replaced by white boards, which are slowly being replaced by smart boards.  Over head projectors with transparencies are being thrown aside for projectors that are connected to computers.  Traditional paper assignments are now being completed online, and submitted to the teachers already graded by a computer program.  Some of the new technologies we are using in the classroom have proven themselves superior to the ones they have replaced, however some are still up for debate.  Regardless, just like in nature, some things have to die off or fade out for newer better things to evolve into the system.  In the end each system has it's own game of survival of the fittest.