Finding a great, current leadership and technology oriented blog is like Finding Carter [the TV series]. The balance between where we are now and the way we were brought up creates episodes of drama. Blogmaster and educational technology expert Scott McLeod, with his blog titled Dangerously Irrelevant hits his readership with a constant barrage of repent-from-your-old-ways messages, which are difficult to palate, but are also the wake-up calls we all, collectively, need to hear. Change is hard. As McLeod points out in his About Me link, the point of his blog is to make a strong effort to resolve inherent incongruities educators experience when technological and social change makes traditional approaches to learning “dangerously irrelevant.” So then, how will we meet our children’s’ learning needs?
The way I see it, educators are not recognizing Jovans Paradox on a large enough scale. It is the paradox educators need to understand and believe in order to share the full-front embrace educational technology deserves, but slowly, with the help of educational leaders like McCleod, teachers and administrators are figuring it out. In economics, Jovans Paradox is when technological progress increases the efficiency of a resource which, in turn, reduces resource needs. Educators understand that part. Technology is making the information teachers have portioned out over the ages ready and available, but the paradox is that with the increase of knowledge availability and decreased need for teacher-lead knowledge rations, the demand for knowledge has increased, and therefore, the need for teachers as facilitators and guides has dramatically increased. That is what makes traditional approaches to teaching incongruent in today’s society and economy. The paradox is that students need teachers more than ever, but in a new way.
Tech lead Kent Beck, in his book, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, said, “The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn’t change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.”
Coping means more than finding and understanding the cause of our dramatic episodes with technology in education. Coping means applying strategies to change ourselves, and that is why Scott McLeod is pushing so hard. Change is the only relevant way to make a positive difference in education today.