Chapter 5 Technology, Teaching, and Literacies Old and New

This is an interesting, exciting, confusing time for teachers and students. We live in a world defined by technical change and social challenge. Teachers are asked to prepare students for a future world whose citizens will have to combine old and new skills and old and new knowledge in ways we cannot fully imagine. We discuss and debate what and how students should be taught. Computers offer us new teaching tools that change even as we learn to use them. Like any powerful new technology, computers not only help us do things, they change what we do -- they simultaneously offer new ways to teach literacy and redefine what literacy is.

One of our aims in this book has been to identify some basic principles to help chart a path through the hype, reality, and potential of educational technology. We have discussed neurological research on learning and reading at some length because understanding how people learn seems a necessary foundation to understanding how they should be taught. That research has established certain basic facts about the way our brains function that remain important no matter what is being taught or what new technologies become available to help teach it:

Learning is a complex activity cooperatively carried out by systems in the brain that recognize patterns, that develop and exercise skills, and that motivate and organize action.

• Learning a skill requires effort and practice, and exercising a skill does not.
• Every individual learns differently from every other, bringing unique preferences and capabilities to the process.

The fact that these scientific findings confirm what experienced teachers have known for a long time speaks well both for the teachers and the research. Good teachers know how important it is to adjust their teaching to the needs of individual students; they know that teaching works best when they can teach the whole student, offering the right balance of motivation, support, challenge, novelty, familiarity, connection, and independence. In discussing the role of computers in teaching reading, we have emphasized the ways that computers can augment the teacher's ability to give students personalized, responsive, balanced, and varied attention. By identifying flexibility as the defining characteristic of the computer, we accomplish two things. First, we cut through some of the confusion about what this technology in transition is really all about. Computers have been used as calculators, typewriters, fax machines, test givers, printing presses, and drawing tools. Their ability to transform themselves into all those things and many more suggests that the one unique thing computers can do for us is be flexible and help us perform tasks that require adaptation and a large, shifting repertoire of functions and responses. The second point follows from the first. Teaching is all about responsiveness, adaptability, and multiple strategies and resources, so the computer's flexibility -- rather than any one particular feature -- is what gives it so much potential as a teaching tool.