This week I sat in on the two presentations given by Rich Halverson on : Education, Technology, and Society Speaker Series Center for Instructional Innovation.   Much of his presentation was analyzing how technology does and can influence the way we educate and the way we learn.  Although some of the discussion was giving an overview of various approaches to education currently being used, what I found most interesting was his comment on the way kids and young adults communicate and interact with each other and the world.

You no longer call you friend to make plans to meet, go to the public library to do research, or have to meet up in person to play a game- everything can be done remotely. You what information on a research topic for school, google it. You want to know where your friend is to see if they want to have lunch? Just see what they last tweeted or put on facebook, see if they have checked in somewhere or send a quick text.  Want to get with your friends and play the newest video game? Just get online and talk via your game console or computer.  Basic human interaction is not the same , yet the way we approach the classroom and education is shockingly stagnant.

I believe in much of the traditional concepts utilized ino our public systems, but that is also in part because I do and have succeeded in them.  I am one of the few people I know who prefer the feel and smell of a real book over a kindle, I feel at home in a library and I enjoy the rigor and structures of lecture and tests.  However, my sister, who is only a few years younger than me, although naturally more intelligent, hates the structure of the current system and therefore does not succeed.

Rich mentioned Pinterest and other social apps that have been adopted to share ideas and improve on practices.  These apps are simple and already in place, which I think is the key for any development that relies on collaborations between users.

Many of our workgroups for CURVE could benefit from looking at what is already available and popular and finding ways to integrate our ideas into those systems versus trying to create new ones outsides of them.  One group I am involved in, Atlanta Mass Transit, is taking skills and datasets that are not easily accessible to the public and then presenting them on esri storymaps – a platform that already exists and has proven a user friendly tool, easily shared and easily integrated into social media platforms.

Many times thinking of innovations or educational reform is synonymous with complicated, new systems that are hard to implement and even harder to sustain.  Technology has made the world smaller – you are able to access infinite amounts of data in seconds, communicate with diverse groups of people from around the world (without having to actually travel around the world) and put the traditional idea of educator on its head.  Hopefully, with collaborative programs like CURVE, we will be able to create dialog that will transform the way we approach learning and educating.