December 2007 — Features
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A Movable Feast
And take your information technology people with you. "You definitely want to involve IT in your planning," Johnson says. "The disconnect we see so often is that the IT people don't understand how to teach with technology. Remember, these are the guys who put the computers on the wall. The input from the instructor here is critical. Where are you going to stand and actually teach? How are you going to be able to see these screens, get to those students? These are things that teachers will understand instinctively, but the tech guys will need to be told."
Perhaps the most imposing obstacle to a truly tech-optimized K-12 classroom, says Johnson, is the existing physical infrastructure. "In K-12, you have to contend with legacy architecture, and in many—maybe most—cases, you just have to work with what you've got."
Sanoff actually sees a fixation on technology as another potential obstacle. "We haven't yet come to grips with getting the conventional classroom to work effectively," he says, "and it's unlikely that the technology is going to make a radical difference if we don't use what we understand about the diverse ways in which children learn to create teaching settings that encourage exploration, creativity, and innovation. We're not at that level yet—and the technology is not going to help if the objectives aren't very clear. The truth is, we probably spend too much time and energy looking at new toys as a substitute for addressing some of the most critical issues in education."
Differing with Sanoff, Oblinger insists that technology is now an inextricable part of the classroom design equation, but she agrees that we haven't yet figured out how to optimize it. "We understand now that this is the most connected generation," she says. "What we're just starting to figure out is how that translates into more effective classroom design. The technology is changing, and our notions about what people are comfortable with, technologically, must too shift with it."
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John K. Waters is a freelance writer based in Palo Alto, CA.
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