Delusions of Adequacy

In the on-going drama of my Integrating Technology in the Curriculum class, we must respond to daily journaling questions. Today's question:

"You have used CD's containing 600 megabytes of information on a single topic and the Internet where anyone has worldwide access to information. With these vast resources of information at our fingertips, how will our teaching roles change?"

My answer:

Technology will make only minor changes to the teaching profession until it becomes pervasive in schools. By pervasive, I do not mean each classroom having a computer or even several computers; I mean until Internet connectivity is as common as notebooks or pencils. This means wholly electronic classrooms, or even virtual classrooms far beyond the hobbled, interaction-limited “distance learning” systems in wide use today.

Only when each student has digital textbooks, submits work in electronic formats, and has desktop access to teacher-controlled sources of information, will technology truly have revolutionized the art of teaching.

Until then, teachers will continue to serve in the roles they always have: guides, coaches, models, and sources of information, as well as gatekeepers guiding students in determining what parts of the avalanche of information now available to them are reliable. It is in this final area that teaching will find itself most greatly changed in the foreseeable future: it will no longer be enough merely to teach students to use the card catalogue or the periodical resource guide when the reliability of each source of information must be carefully judged, when entering the word “Jew” in the most common search engine yields sites devoted to hatemongering, and when so much voluble commentary is generated by people with so many axes to grind.

Arguably, I didn't go nearly far enough. A hundred years ago, no one would have predicted the information revolution. Today's predictions are probably as off-base as the art-deco futures of the 1930's. Who knows? In another hundred years, we may be sharing each other's thoughts directly, without the intervention of such a clumsy artifice as language, and teachers will be obsolete.