I really enjoyed Bonnies’s point that, “instead, the whole construct of the classroom is becoming increasingly obsolete and removed from not only the technologies but the entire skill set required by the working world. sitting quietly in your desk and waiting to be asked to speak looks not so hot on the resume, these days. the emperor is naked, and the students are starting to notice.”

This has been my issue for a long time now, and perhaps the prime reason why we are giving our boys the option of homeschooling. We are in a time of immense change, and not just at school.

do we blame the technology or the classroom?

How do you take what is becomming such a “necessary” device in our lives and prevent it from being a distraction? As a technology teacher I would love to be able to harness the excitement surrounding these devices and integrate them into lessons. I would love to expand on how these devices work and explore their hardware and software. My computer science students still think I’m kidding when I tell them programming for cell phones is a booming career. They don’t know anything about what is behind them, only how to use them. However, this is probably not something I will be able to explore within the confines of my school walls anytime soon because cell phones are “bad”.

Yes, we have been left behind. I say let’s get our phones out and make educational friends with them.

and yet, i can completely understand how, for individual teachers trying to do their best in a particular classroom with particular subject material, the presence of cellphones or “two way communication devices” can be at best, distracting. i’ve always been hostile to phones in my classrooms…but not necessarily to the forms of communication they represent. that’s what i’m wondering about in the Milwaukee situation. in banning the devices, what are they assuming the impact will be in the classroom? simply more focused students with less instant messaging going on, or are they hoping for a paradigm re-set entirely?

i think the students left us a lot of us behind awhile ago. and as long as we expect to be the knowers in an old-school model of learning, we’ll never get back into the conversation again.

If it makes anyone feel better, those of us in higher education are also being left behind. Three years after it was founded, we’re still trying to figure out this Facebook thing that rules our undergraduates’ lives. Laptop computers are still fascinating objects of dubious educational value for some of us.

I fear that many of us who are trying to teach and mentor young people simply don’t possess the literacies we should be teaching them. We don’t understand, participate in, or often acknowledge the media with which and the environments in which our students are living their lives. It’s difficult to know if those media and environments are lasting, ephemeral, or somewhere in between, but that knowledge of them appears to be limited to youths, those who want to remain young, and those who study the youths makes things very, very difficult for all of us.

I, of course, am “hip” and “down with” much of the new technology – it’s everyone else that I’m worried about!