On my way to work I kept on ruminating Bendito Machines. I think these films picture us a situation that has been fading away for some time already.
Tech and particularly edutech has been more or less a monolith, a one-size-fits-all solution. Such was the spirit of the industrial era, and in a similar way has the education itself been organized.
Societies are in a flux: personal virtual networks, information flowing through a multipolar social media, crowdsourcing. Digital cultures have been showing the way, bridging and connecting people and forming new sub cultures.
In education, there's some inertia, but at least from the Finnish perspective, new era has begun. First, schools and teachers were free to organize teaching in the way they saw best for their pupils. Nowadays personalization of learning is high even on the agenda of the national authorities.
Techwise, BYOD/BYOX offers a plentitude of solutions. The attitudes, the norms and the ways work and teaching has been organized in practice are slower to change.
Thank you for this thought-provoking post! Does the proliferation of devices, and personalisation, potentially bring problems of its own? I'm thinking in particular of Pariser's "filter bubble" - http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html - and the questions this raises (for me) for education. Is the teacher's role sometimes/often/always to burst those bubbles? I wonder how this is being addressed in Finland at both policy and practical levels?
VastaaPoistaThanks for your comment! The bubble surely is an issue teachers and learners themselves must take into account. The situation isn't very different from traditional media, though. Most used to read such papers and write letters to such people that didn't disturb the soft and safe bubble. The digital tools provide a different possibility but one has to be interested in taking that step. I find that teachers should strengthen the learner's personal and mental capacity in the sense of Bloom's taxonomy: most precious is to analyze, to evaluate and to create - not to remember or describe like in has been in so many schools.
VastaaPoista