“Technology is altering (rewiring) our brains. The tools we use define and shape our thinking.”
George Siemens sums up a big 21st century phenomenon with this one-liner. As new technology enters our homes and offices, the way we approach problems is changing. Information is now readily available in a way that it has never been before.
Rote memorization of content is now obsolete. Spending time learning facts and figures that you can access at any point from your smart phone doesn’t make the most logical sense. However, as Seimens states in the Ed Surge article “‘Our Technology Is Our Ideology’: George Siemens on the Future of Digital Learning:
[I’m] worried that, rather than advancing our human potential, many edtech companies and universities are perpetuating the status quo. While machine learning and automation are obviating the need for learners to memorize content and develop routine skills, current edtech solutions still focus on helping learners develop these capabilities, he says.
As we race to modernize education, we have to be careful about what the platforms are teaching us. Are they reinforcing old fashioned notions of education? Or are they “[driving] students to hone their uniquely human traits—the ones that will help them thrive in an increasingly automated world” (McNeal)?
Every platform has an agenda as well. As we have discussed in this course, it’s important to be cognizant of the fact that where we get out information has biases of its own. Or in the case of social media, the platform will advertise to your belief systems to raise its own profit margins. As discussed in the Tristan Harris TED talk, companies use our own brain chemistry to get us to click more, check-in more, and post more.
But these platforms also allow people from different learning communities to come together and share their expertise. The pipelines created for information in these communities allow for people to recognize that information is every-changing and not static. It also empowers people to contribute even in small ways as part of the big picture.
This is the element that I think is important to focus on. The ability for people to access knowledge from experts in a vast learning community is going to drastically open access to information. Things like MOOPs will begin to challenge antiquated notions of the college experience.
As Siemens says ” “If we do things right, we could fix many of the things that are really very wrong with the university system, in that it treats people like objects, not human beings. It pushes us through like an assembly-line model rather than encouraging us to be self-motivated, self-regulated, self-monitoring human beings” (McNeal).