Dealing with Change

“Everything is Changing,” by amanki

WordPress just unleashed a new interface – WordPress 2.7. It features a completely redesigned dashboard that took all of the familiar old buttons and boxes and moved them, recolored them, and sometimes even renamed them. It’s a nice looking redesign and everything I’ve heard suggests that it will end up being a much more efficient design. Even so, it caught me off guard when I couldn’t find the button to create a new post right away.

As many things do, this got me thinking: how well do educators deal with change? Do I handle it well, or do we react like the woman in the photograph (a great image, I must say)?

Of all the skills we try to teach, this strikes me as the most critical for success in the 21st century – to adapt when we are confronted by change. It is difficult for me as a building technology leader to see teachers struggling to complete even basic computer tasks like opening up their email. While it would be easy for me to be critical, I wonder how I will handle the next big shift in education. Will I be able to learn how to use the next piece of state-of-the-art technology? Or will I see it as just a fad? If adabtability and flexibility are so important for us now, imagine how important it will be for our students in 20 or 30 years when the world is changing even faster.

This is why I firmly believe that our greatest goal should be to teach our students how to learn. We must help them develop an intellectual curiosity about the world around them; help them grow into being lifelong learners.

The Curse of Web 2.0

Read an interesting feed from ReadWriteWeb this morning. It sums up some issues from the “Web 2.0 Expo” that took place last week, the main one being the general irrelevance of Web 2.0 in the “big picture.” It also links several articles and blogs that have discussed the same topic: that Web 2.0 will go extinct because it is essentially meaningless. Most of the Web 2.0 tools that get talked about are things like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and so on – all of which are great for socializing and networking, but do not purport to solve even small problems, much less the “big” problems we face in the world.

My thoughts upon reading this were fairly simple: that sounds like a perfect reflection of the students I see in my classes – they are completely engrossed in the meaningless drivel that is Web 2.0 and have no sense of the broader world. While I respect and appreciate the students in my classes, I am overwhelmed by the sense that the important things in their lives are shoes, clothes, music, movies, friends, boy/girl relationships, and complaining about teachers. Not surprisingly, these are the things that are wildly popular within Web 2.0.

What we don’t see enough of are sites that get students to interact with peers both here and around the world in solving big problems and talking about big issues. As I understand it, however, this is the developing trend: turning social networking and similar services into tools that will help change the world and the way we understand the world. When I think about that, I get excited at the thought, and I get excited about the kinds of students that could be in my class. At the same time, however, I am saddened that an entire generation is currently enslaved by the materialistic nature of Web 2.0 and its offspring.

Hopefully we can still do something to change that.