Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Miley Cyrus, the 16 year old actor who is best known to young people as Hannah Montana caused a bit of a stir last week by quitting Twitter by deleting her account. Her response came in a YouTube rap, in which she says she’d started, “living for the moments” and wanted to start “living for people” instead. For her Dunbar’s number has taken its toll. I can sympathise as I’ve also had doubts about my use of Twitter, and its effect for entirely different reasons.

In that earlier post I particularly concentrated on how micro-blogging affects your ability to blog, but had not reached any conclusions on how it affected my own personal learning style. Over the last few weeks, I’ve become a bit clearer on that aspect, with the result that I’m tweeting less and blogging more. Such a conclusion has made me reflect on the way in which we, as educators, need to consider these tools and their use in the classroom. Are we using them to develop certain generic skills (reflective writing, synthesis etc.), ICT skills relevant to the age we live in (working online, information gathering and distribution), or specific subject-related skills eg. writing style development. Pretty basic questions that have been relatively simple to answer when it came to previous adoption of technology in schools ie. when technology was used to replace previous methods. For example, writing with a word-processor, and even the use of calculators, which provoked debate at first, but now is part and parcel of the toolkit.  It’s that human-tool symbiosis, that Richard talks about that both holds us back, but also provides us with this dilemma when it comes to the adoption of new technology, and why its introduction can cause fierce arguments for and against.

Miley’s video is here:

Image credit: Sarah Clarke