Did I Say That?

My Article in NZ Interface Magazine

Those of you who know me, can probably see me cringe, when I glance at a magazine article headed with “If you can’t Use Technology Get Out of Teaching!” And then I see that I’m quoted all over the article.  It is published in NZ Interface, a New Zealand education technology publication that I have followed since first working in that magnificent country several years ago.

Of course there’s not a thing wrong with the title. After all, I’ve frequently claimed that a teacher who is not using contemporary information and communication technologies is not doing his job, even though he may be a good teacher. But I would focus on the information and communications part, and ignore, as much as possible, the “T” word.

I’m pretty pleased with the article itself. I remember being interviewed by Greg Adams, the editor of the magazine, a few months ago when I was speaking at an administrators’ conference in North Palmerston, NZ. The article seems to be pretty much a word-for-word of my responses — being aware that it was the end of a very long day of presenting after a very long day of flying across about eleven time zones.

Christina’s Twitter Post

But the my finding of this article, I think, further demonstrates my point. Yesterday morning, with about five minutes before my pickup, here in Lethbridge Alberta, I popped over to Tweetdeck to post a short statement of my location and mood, only to find a hyperlink to the article in my “mentions” column (column in Tweetdeck of tweets with my name in them).

It was a tweet from Christina Löfving, a retweet (RT) from Stephan Pålsson. You’ll notice that she’s from one of those countries that over uses dots in their language. Checking her Twitter profile, I discovered that Christina is an ed tech’er from Sweden, Stenungsund to be precise, and she has a blog called IT-Mamman (IT-Mother).

Stephan has run a company, HyperFinder, since 2001, focusing on news coverage, journalism and social analysis. He says in his Protopage profile — in Swedish.

Framför allt arbetar jag med hur IT- och samhällsutvecklingen skapar nya möjligheter för undervisning och lärande, i och utanför det formella utbildningssystemet.

Translated by Google to read…

Above all, I am working on how IT and social change creates new opportunities for teaching and learning, in and outside the formal education system.

My point is that during this five minutes of investigating this newly found (directed to) article including my ideas, published in New Zealand, I never once thought “Technology.”  I was not working with technology. I wasn’t thinking about technology. I was working with information, tracking its flow through its avenues of communication.  I was concerned about the behavior of information.

I probably wouldn’t say, “If you can’t use technology get out of teaching!” But I’d gladly say, “If you’re not teaching within a contemporary information landscape (networked, digital, abundant information), you’d probably have a pretty hard time finding another profession that doesn’t. But the last thing you should be doing is preparing children for their future.