Education in the New Millennium
Academic Exchange Quarterly
The following article was published in the Academic Exchange Quarterly during my tenure with the journal as copy editor. Publication information is listed at the end of the essay.
As we enter the new millennium, the face of education is changing. The most noticeable change is the increasing emphasis on technology in the classroom, in particular Internet access. The current generation of students have grown up in a culture immersed in technology, a culture where their attention is constantly under bombardment from television programming, advertising, and impressive (and sometimes not so impressive) multimedia presentations. Jay Bolter (Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing), Myron Tuman (Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age), and others have speculated on the possible impact of this new technological literacy on student learning, citing the expansion of text beyond mere words to include graphics and other multimedia where text is the total sensory experience of knowledge; intertextuality (the shift from individual texts to interconnected texts); and the increasing dependence on collaborative and dialogic approaches to learning, and non_linear and associative modes of reading.
Other changes are occurring as well. Increasingly, business is turning its eye to education as not only a market but a field of enterprise. Companies like Disney, Microsoft, Kaplan, Sylvan, and Educare are moving from the fringes of educational support into the heart of the educational enterprise as primary education providers. As business moves into the educational arena, education reaches out to business, offering on_site training, engaging students in service learning projects, and expanding existing work_shadowing and similar endeavors. In the classroom, schools experiment with modular education, rejecting the "one_size_fits_all" model of traditional education, and seek to tailor education to the individual. And the "traditional classroom" becomes the "virtual classroom" as distance education continues to expand and the Internet brings the world to the desktop.
With all of these changes, it is inevitable that problems arise. Teachers are faced with problems of professional development, needing not only to stay current in their fields but having to master an increasing array of technological resources. Students and teachers must learn to be flexible with technology, learning to use new systems and prepared for the inevitable glitches which occur. Schools find themselves caught in funding dilemmas where sometimes choices must be made between adding new technology or adding teachers (or increasing teacher salaries). As computer systems become increasingly advanced, school administrators are faced with choices between upgrading existing technology or finding alternative methods for maximizing the efficiency of older technology, given limited budgets.
Despite these problems or perhaps because of them, education has never been more exciting or challenging. And there is help available. At the recent National School Boards Association (NSBA) <http://www.nsba.org/> Technology + Learning Conference, a wealth of multimedia, Internet, and other resources were showcased for K_12 educators to review and consider. While the entrance into technology can be expensive, a number of resources are available to schools at no cost. The American School Directory (ASD) <http://www.asd.com> provides an opportunity for every school to have its own web page. Schools need only provide ASD with information about the school (and pictures), and ASD will create a website and host it. At Highwired.net <http://www.highwired.net/>, schools can create their own online newspaper. The U.S. Department of Education website provides a variety of resources to schools including The Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) <http://www.ed.gov/free> which contains learning resources on a variety of topics. Other general teaching and learning resources include TeachersFirst <http://www.teachersfirst.com/>, NoSweat.com, <http://www.nosweat.com>, the National Education Association's helpfromNEA site <http://helpfrom.nea.org>, WebTeacher <http://www.webteacher.org>, and Teachers.net <http://www.teachers.net> (see AEQ Fall 1998, p. 46_53, 88). More specific resources are available as well, including The MainXchange <http://www.mainXchange.com> where students can participate in an online stock market simulation. These are just a few of the resources available.
In addition to free support, a number of companies provide a range of services and resources for educators to purchase. Software education packages exist for every subject. Multimedia development software is available to assist educators in developing their own resources. Some companies provide ways for schools to refurbish and maximize the use of older computers and technology while others provide state_of_the_art new technologies using computers, the Internet, video, and other multimedia. Student records and administrative packages are available. Other companies offer "total solution" packages that include hardware, software, curriculum, training, and technical support. Professional development programs like the Technology in Today's Classroom for Grades K_12 video training series from Canter and Associates Inc.
At the same time, we must be careful, in our enthusiasms for the new opportunities available to us, not to lose touch with the educational values of the past. As I have heard Louie Edmundson say more than once, "When it comes to teaching writing, it is hard to improve on Aristotle." While calculators are a valuable addition to the mathematics classroom, it is a travesty that many of our high school graduates (or for that matter, our elementary and middle school graduates) have not memorized their multiplication tables. I am appalled when I see a cashier at the grocery store attempting to add six and nine on his or her fingers because the register doesn't have a key for adding the cost of a book of postal stamps that I am purchasing. The art of memory is fading from our culture (and has been since the advent of printing, another technological innovation, c.f., Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word). Students are often unable to sustain their attention, limiting their ability to "wade" through a full length novel or work of non_fiction. In a world where stimulation is intense and immediate, our culture is losing the gift for meditation and reflective thought. And the increasing emphasis on collaboration and cooperative effort sometimes minimizes the value of individual effort and self_motivation.
If we are to be successful educators in the new millennium, we must not fear the changes that technology brings, nor can we neglect the lessons we have learned from the past.
Bill Stifler
Copy Editor, AEQ
Academic Exchange Quarterly 2.4 (1998): 4-5.