Cathy F Thursday, July 20, 2006

Presenter Ray Kurzweil
• I really found the presentation to be interesting and thought provoking. I backed away from the thought of uploading and downloading information to and from our brains. This is scary for mankind in general and if this is the case, what is the role of education in general. If, in the future, we can create a database of learning (or what we want the kids or adults to know) what do we need schools for? Will they simply (or not so simply) be a place to teach the social or analytical part of the curriculum not the math, science or the core subjects. It is a very hard idea to wrap my head around. If, as Ray alluded to, we look at the trends of the past to look toward the future in technology, I ask the question “Is that really the future? Is the job of technology to replace human interaction? What in the past leads us to believe this?”
• An aside note on the process we went through to get to the presentation, I find that teaching and technology is great when everything goes well but can be a time consumer when it does not. Students and instructors need to be more forgiving of the technology and develop the problem solving skills to know when they can fix the problem and when to scrap the idea and move on.
Presenter Charmaine Brooks
• During Charmaine’s talk I found myself writing down questions and comments about the notion of curriculum and the mandatory implementation of ICT (Information and Communication Technology). Most of my thoughts revolved around questioning the reality of the implementation and if it was happening, how it was happening, and how Alberta learning is promoting it. I looked around the room at a number of teachers and administrators and found that none of them had been to any training or workshops on this and I wondered why. If there is no one in this group, then statistically, the odds are that the numbers of people involved is very low, but teachers are expected to blindly do as they are told. I would like to think that the natural progression of education would be to bring what is happening outside the schools, technology wise, into the schools, but what is being done with the training of the teachers in the first place? Are new teachers going to be ready to implement this and are they given the tools to do this? The role of post secondary is huge in relation to curriculum implementation and the changes that technology must bring to teaching and learning and I hope that the institutions are really ready and interested.