Yesterday I read with interest Will Richardson’s post Owning the Teaching…and the Learning. Will laments a teacher who told him that she doesn’t see any need to spend more than ten minutes online a day.
“She said that she’s not going to sacrifice the other things that she already does in her life to spend more time on the Internet.”
I meet and work with lots of people who are just like this teacher. In fact I think that possibly a large proportion of the teaching workforce is just like that. Rightly or wrongly, they don’t see the need to get out onto the web and join in the discussion. In fact in the vast majority of the cases, they don’t even know that the discussion is taking place.
Will’s post follows a recent flurry about whether educators should be blogging. This too was an interesting and revealing discussion and one that thankfully wasn’t ‘won’ by the YES brigade.
The interweb has developed alongside the best, the biggest, the most challenging, the most absorbing, the most amazing, the deepest (and yet the most shallow) change that education has faced for decades. It hasn’t been the cause of that change though and we must not forget that.
Those of us who are using the tools and toys that we find out there on the web need to stop talking about the end product and start talking about the reasoning beghind why we are using them. We need to do this for our our own practice as much as we need to do it to show other people.
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