Context:
This post was constructed on the eve of eTech 2013 in
Columbus, Ohio. In a rare moment of
total solitude, I’m writing while looking out my 7th floor window in
the Hyatt looking at North High Street.
A chance to gaze at the place I called home for 5 years. Like so much else I’ve written recently, this
is again about change….but within the framework of a broader reflection on
nearing the completion of my 40th trip around the sun….
Driving to Columbus this evening I found that my XM radio
had been activated once again for a ‘trial’ period. Flipping through the stations, I landed at the
50’s on 5 station and decided to linger for a bit. As I listened, my mind wandered to how music
changed radically within 10 short years between the 50’s and 60’s. The 70’s saw change take on different forms,
and by the end of the 70’s music was radically different again. The 1980’s carried on the split personality
of the 70’s, with the early half very different from the back half of the
decade. The early 1990’s saw a major
course correction with the direction of rock, an evolution in hip-hop, and the
rise and fall of the boy bands. Having
arrived at the 90’s on 9 channel, I thought again about the 50’s and wondered
what the course of the music industry would have been if there had been a
refusal on the part of the participants to change with the times….
The movie ‘Lincoln’ has once again focused attention on the
era of the 1860’s. Imagine being 5 in
the middle of that decade. Assuming you
lived to an age of 65, think about the ways in which the world changed. Electric lights were invented and began the
process of replacing gas-powered fixtures and revolutionized the way America
worked and played. The telegraph and the
railroads gave way to the telephone and the automobile. Warfare was revolutionized through industrial
era inventions that made the Civil War style of battle unrecognizable for those
who fought in World War I. Air travel,
almost unthinkable in 1865, was old news by the 1920’s. I wonder what happened to people from this
era who were change resistant?
As I near this next phase in my life, I look back and
recognize how fortunate I am to be living at a particular time in the history
of this planet where I can bear witness to the dramatic changes that have
occurred between the close of the 20th century and the early years
of the 21st century. I am
just old enough to remember Pong, and had an Atari 2600 as my first video game
console. In my lifetime, I have had a
reel-to-reel music player (I can still remember the face of Johnny Mathis on
the box cover), a record player, an 8-track player, a cassette player, a cd
player, and a dedicated mp3 player. In
1999 my wife and I drove across the country and camped the National Park
circuit….using pay phones to communicate with home. A year later I bought my wife her first cell
phone, and signed a two-year contract with Airtouch (after a series of M and
A’s the vestiges of this company are now part of Verizon). The phone was the size of your head and had a
one-line screen for numerical input. I
had a T.V. in my room for a bit (hooked up to my Commodore 64). It was a 13-inch black and white with the VHF
and UHF nobs. In 2004 I bought my first
hand held GPS receiver. It did nothing
else but give GPS coordinates. Growing up in New Jersey I was a huge NY
Islanders fan. My best friend at the
time had cable, so I would go to his house to watch the games. We would slide the cable box selector to
Sports Channel (no remote). ESPN had
just recently been started, and there was only 1 channel of it (the whole world
wide leader thing came much later).
We live in a world where the changes have enriched our lives
in many ways. Change does not stand
still, does not take time off, and does not wait for people who are reluctant
to get on board. Change disrupts, causes
pain, is disconcerting, while all the while creating new opportunities for
those who embrace it.
Think back to your first cell phone. Would you want to use it today?
Would you want your doctor to practice medicine on you in
the same way it was practiced in the 1970s?
Would you like to watch T.V. on a state of the art Sony
Trinitron from the mid 1980s?
Do you want your kids taught in the same way that kids have
been taught for the past 125 years?
As educators, we are practicing at an amazing moment in the
history of our civilization. Never
before has it been possible to personalize the experience for every student in
the manner now available through the integration of technology with
instruction. The change this reality is
bringing to education is difficult for many.
Every day I hear fellow professionals lament educational change for its
difficulty, complexity, or the fact that it is change itself. Education is going to look radically
different in five years. The educators
that have a change adverse attitude run the high risk of marginalization or
outright alienation in an era of individualized, self-paced learning.
Our nation needs great teachers; ones who aren’t afraid of
change, and who teach with the passion of an entrepreneur and the creativity of
an indie tech startup. Teachers who
recognize that the future will be radically different from both our past and
our present, and who are willing to re-mix what they do on the fly for the
betterment of their students.
Music did not stand still in the 1950s. Communication technology did not stop
evolving with the telegraph. Medical
advances did not halt with the development of the vaccine for polio. Computer technology did not end with the
release of Windows 3.0 or the first Macintosh.
Educational change, though slower to evolve initially, will
not stop now that the ball is rolling down the hill and the genie is out of the
bottle.
Embrace the change.
Prepare your students for the world they will live in. They will be engaged in ways we can’t imagine
and they will flourish because of it.
