Educators, still holding on to old practices and struggling to accept digital technologies?

Employers are looking for new skills and traits, influenced by digital technology. Students and most of the rest of the population spend vast amounts of time connected in various ways and yet as Testerman points out in her article “Blended and Hybrid Environments are Driving the New Global Movement in Education” (Testin Tech, June 15 2017)

“Students today are bringing a whole new set of skills to the classroom, yet the classroom is one where teachers ask students to “power-down” when entering it.   Students are ready to learn – at home, on the bus, in the grocery store, in the community, and students can multi-task in part due to the digital world that surrounds them. Unfortunately today for many students, they are in a state of “passivity” with learning. Learning is done to them, not with them. According to Shibley (2014), the influx of technology has not changed this fact yet. Instead of the possibilities opening up, students sit placidly by while instruction is shown to them, instead of engaging with it. She suggests instead that students take “the driver’s wheel” and lead where the content and activities go. This is a change to an instructor’s role in the classroom. “Instead of the teacher being the only one who works with technology to create learning objects, students become creators of learning objects” (Shibley, 2014).”

Why is this? Testerman goes on to say that it is the reason “blended and hybrid environments are driving the new global movement in education.”

The trouble is, as I see it, they aren’t. For some reason much tech is still viewed with suspicion by many teachers, a bit of joke sometimes, and very often still as some sort of ‘bolt on’ to their teaching, definitely an optional extra. Researchers it seems also largely still treat ‘it’ as some entirely separate aspect of learning, when in reality it long ago ceased to be that.

I’m interested in exploring the reasons behind this practitioner resistance and which areas are particularly affected.

REFERENCES

Testerman, K. (2017) “Blended and Hybrid Environments are Driving the New Global Movement in Education”, Testin Tech, [online] Available from: https://kctestandtech.org/2017/06/15/blended-and-hybrid-environments-are-driving-the-new-global-movement-in-education/ (Accessed 24 June 2017).