An interesting observation was made by Timothy on Slashdot recently. Have you noticed that for the first time, the next big thing in the music industry is NOT better quality but better mobility? In the past, the next big thing in music has always been more Hi-Fi, better sound, higher fidelity. Now the future is mp3, which is poorer quality than the current CDs, but is a whole lot easier, more mobile, and more convenient.
Can we learn something from the music industry about using technology in education? I think we can. I think we often think we need BETTER technology, MORE RAM, MORE memory, FASTER processors, the MOST RECENT softwares, BIGGEST upgrades, and so on and so forth. Many times teachers complain that they can't integrate technology into their teaching because their school doesn't have enough money. But it seems that the technologies that sometimes make the biggest impacts on education are the small ones that are so ubiquitous, so transparent, so assimilated into our society that everybody already has these technologies and knows how to use them.
For example, which technologies are used the most in education today? Video. Internet. Audio. Word processing. Why? Because these are easy technologies to use and most students already know how to use them so we don't have to teach them.
What will be the easy, simple, and everybody-has-one technology of tomorrow? Can we start planning how to use those technologies in the schools?
This also ties back into our laptop discussion we had last week. Many students posted that having laptops for every student was a bad idea because of cost factors. So what kinds of technologies are so cheap, simple, and available to everyone that we CAN expect most students to already have them and to know how to use them?
