National Educational Technology Plan - more stuff?

The National Educational Technology Plan focuses on the following areas:

Learning: Enabling unprecedented access to high-quality learning experiences. Everyone, including English Language Learners and students with disabilities, should have increased access to meaningful, well designed and readily available learning experiences, throughout their lives.

Assessment: Measuring what matters and providing the information that enables continuous improvement processes at all levels of the education system. Students, teachers, parents and administrators should have access to the kinds of data that can enable better instructional decisions and provision of educational resources.

Teaching: New ways to support those who support learning. Technology can enable mentors, coaches, and peers to better support learning both in and out of school. Teachers can benefit from resources provided through technology and from anytime/anywhere professional interactions, including collaborations to share and refine effective techniques and resources.

Productivity: Redesigning systems and processes to free up education system resources to support learning. In an era of scarce resources, education systems need to take advantage of new technological and content solutions to reduce spending tied to inefficient systems and processes. This effort includes more effective approaches to education R&D to increase the pace of innovation and the scaling of effective practices

(source)

I’ve got no quibble these lofty goals. My three faithful readers have seen me write “if you stick a kid in front of a computer for an hour, and expect something magic to happen, you are going to be disappointed” ad naseum.  I’ve decided to adopt a new mantra - “it’s about the HOW not the WHAT”.

I’ll write more about this, but for now, it looks like the plan is about a whole lot of STUFF.  It looks like we are focusing on WHAT and not HOW.  I’ve used text-based games in my classroom to motivate and excite kids - text based games, circa 1983! But there seems to be this zeitgeist that says: if we get this NEW SHINY THING THAT BLINKS it will solve all of our educational problems and make us more productive in the 21st century.  The report has sections called exemplary cases that are all written like advertisements for educational technology products. 

What is it about the HOW of educational technology?

1. the right support
2. the right teaching (assessment is part of teaching, by the way)
3. the right technology

Good teaching is good teaching is good teaching.

On 21 December 2009, Tom Hoffman inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Yes… this plan, like many similar ones, seems to duck the question of what we should expect from the technology itself.  What our *technology* strategy should be.  While at the same time, being quite confident and boosterish about “technology.” 

Nobody wants to confront the fact that we’ve suffered from a lot of bad technology in education (did anyone working on this report personally clean out a school’s worth of spyware five years ago, or argue with Dell reps about hundreds of otherboards with swollen capacitors? I doubt it…), and if we don’t, we’ll continue to get inadequate solutions.