I had a conversation yesterday with a fellow (? Hoffman) in the Open Source Playground, a representative of the Indiana Department of Education. Indiana is well into a 1:1 program (Indiana’s Open Source Experiment), where they are using Open Source solutions to more affordably (and perhaps more authentically) put digital networked content in the hands of their students.
We were talking about some of the affects of ubiquitous access to computers and the Internet, and he mentioned in one of his anecdotes, that students were “using their teachers.” It wasn’t intended as one of those “bang” statements. It was just a turn of phrase that came out. But it stuck me pretty dramatically as a contradiction of our usual sense of teaching being something that teachers do to their students. Here, the implication is that students, rather than being taught to, were using teachers, presumably as a resource to accomplish something.
Not sure if that was actually the case, but the turn of phrase came from somewhere.
If we are being “used”, doesn’t that imply the students are creating their own learning? I’m not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing.