In the reading Of Luddites, Learning and Life I did not find Neil Postman to be anti-technology based so much as anti-change for change sake.
About ten years ago I worked for a Aerospace company. New management came in and ushered in a new way to approach employee -manager relations and increase efficiency and productivity in one neat innovative package. Kaizen was the way to bring our UAW employees and management together as a team. You can Google Kaizen for details. It is a very task oriented management method designed to give one in the process absolute power as a team to streamline a process to it's ultimate efficiency. Then a new group of employees are chosen and they evaluate either the same issue of another issue of their choosing and improve upon that goal. Each team has absolute power to change what they see fit. After a few Kaizens the unofficial motto of the participants became he who Kaizens last wins. The ultimate goal was lost on the masses. Many times it was change for change sake. This is brought to light by Neil Postmans example of his attempt to purchase a Honda Accord which only came equipped with cruise control and power windows.
Five years ago I was privileged to be hired to begin a program that would allow secondary students a chance to recover credits through an online classroom program. This was an inner-city program designed for "at risk youth". The students came to me after having failed a specific subject (or two or three) and through the magic of the computer were allowed to redeem themselves in order to obtain their high school diploma.
When I was asked by friends and colleagues what my latest venture was and I explained, their comment was almost always the same. Well that should be easy for the students since kids these days know all about computers and are on them all the time. This statement I found to be a logical fallacy. The students that I worked with did not have access to computers either at school or home and the limited exposure that they did have was in emailing. LOL
I found the statement by Chalres Reigeluth that technology has had minimal impact on K-12 education very insightful and not at all main stream. It seems to be a little know fact that many of our K-12 students are virtually computer illiterate. Technology is making its headway's but it does have far to go.
Oshkosh Airventure camping
We all have the same amount of hours in a day. It's what we do with them that sets us apart.
