The Widening Gap
I’ve messed around with this technology stuff for a long time. When I started, there was a range of knowledge, with people that knew nothing about personal computers at one end of the range, and people that knew all the state-of-the-art stuff at the other end. Most people were clustered down at the “know nothing” end of the range, but that shifted over time.
The problem is, the other end of the range didn’t stay still. While many people were struggling to get some degree of understanding of personal computers, the top end of the range of knowledge kept moving away from them at a startling pace.
Look at where we are now. We have many teachers that are still off to the side of the curve that indicates some degree of knowledge, but not a lot. At the other end of the curve, we have teachers doing podcasts, running wikis, using classroom weblogs, and who know what else.
The gap between those teachers is gigantic compared to, say, teachers that have learned how to use email and those that haven’t. Frankly, even with my level of experience (messing with this stuff is my full time job, after all), I still haven’t gotten around to learning how to use an RSS feed, much less create my own podcast. (That’s coming, though, if for no other reason than a driving need to keep up. Peer pressure is an ugly thing.) If I think this stuff is arcane, I can understand why a normal person wouldn’t get too excited about it.
That doesn’t negate how exciting some of these new technologies are. I’m just wondering how we support both the normal teacher in using technology well, while still supporting those teachers that are out at the cutting edge. I certainly don’t think we should expect every teacher to create wikis or generate podcasts, at least not without a lot of technical and pedagogical support. Not unless we make the technology a lot easier to use. More on that next time.