Episode 9.
We like to think we live in some magical age of technology.
Sure, the Industrial Revolution and the more recent information revolution have changed human lives in
important and interesting ways and in my opinion they have improved them.
We must recognize that technology has always been a part of the existence of our species ever since we first evolved.
In his 2010 book The Artificial Ape How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution,
anthropologist Timothy Taylor approached the tautology when he suggested and I quote,
the intelligence that makes us inventive was enabled by inventions. The baby sling, the stone blade, the cooking hearth.
That ends his quote, but then he continued by saying and again quoting, these are not the same as inanimate natural things.
They are artificial and form the non-biological aspect of the artificial ape and that ends the quote.
He reasons that we are who we are because of our relationship with technology and that we cannot be separated from our tools.
Of course Taylor was not the first to make this argument and he won't be the last and he wasn't the last.
Lots of folks have made really convincing arguments that humans and technologies are somehow
brought together and that we really cannot be separated and I find those arguments be quite convincing.
It's also true though that as important as technologies are to us as a species, they are not universally valued.
We all have our preferences and these seem to be shared among our age cohort.
The effect can be seen in many technologies, but probably the most familiar is with our musical tastes.
We all share the same nostalgia for that music that we listened to when we grew up and I think this is true for
lots of other technologies as well.
I call these technologies that we experienced when we were growing up and during our formative years as what I call the natural technologies.
We perceive these to be what everybody should be using and sometimes are wrong.
All technologies are really built on previous technologies.
Even those technologies that we recognize as being disruptive do leverage old tools.
They replace tools they are used to accomplish the same goals or different goals and looking back we can trace the evolution of
at least in my area of interest information technologies to see how advances in hardware and software and how they're used
all improved efficiency and effectiveness and disrupted information and interaction.
Looking forward we can expect to see that the technology will continue to evolve,
but if the last few years with Generative AI is any indication then we cannot predict the paths along which IT will evolve
nor can we predict what their effects will be.
Of course we can only see those paths in the past because we can see things in the past that we can't see in the future.
Back then we didn't know what was going to happen until it happened.
Sometimes pundits don't recognize this, but if you look back and read what folks wrote 40 years ago,
some of it was right, but most of it was way off base.
Now humans we are born into this progression of technologies.
We really can't tell where we land in it, but we land at some point.
And the technologies that we were born into this world and certain technologies dominate in that world.
And those become our natural technology along with those that are our age cohort.
And that determines what we expect all people to value looking back and looking forward.
When we look back all the advances that we see are changes in technology that led to that natural technology that we experienced when we were in our formative years.
And all technologies that follow what we experienced then are perceived to be degradations.
When it comes to IT and schools, that's my field, those natural technologies, whether they be hardware or software approaches to solving problems, become deeply ingrained.
We feel lucky that we came along when we did because we didn't have to deal with the backwards tools and practices of our parents.
But then we see these new fangled tools that they're teaching our children.
And those things are just allowing kids to be lazy and they'll never learn what we did and how we did it.
And that's what's wrong with this world. Consider math and the technologies that we use to form calculations.
Most students learn to use some kind of an algorithm where you stacked numbers on top of each other based on place value and you carried once you needed to in order to get the next place value and things like that.
And folks don't realize that that is as much a technology as a calculator is.
And when we consider the role of the calculator in conversations, we have deeply, deeply filled beliefs about how students should learn math.
And that is, it's not dissimilar. If you look at any other technology, you can find similar conversations and similar debates that are going on in just about every field.
And most adults end up insisting that whatever they were taught, and this seems especially true of math skills, whatever they were taught were what everybody should taught because that is what's natural.
That is what everybody should do and everybody should learn.
But of course, since we learned that stacking algorithm, you know, to calculate has been far more sophisticated.
You know, they graph, they analyze data sets, they complete in moments what it took us minutes or even longer to compute or to graph using the algorithms and the methods that I was taught way back when I was a student.
And for those who do math frequently, a calculator is always at their side.
So, yes, learning those algorithms might have some value, but when it comes time to solve problems and to compute in the real world, we're going to grab a calculator.
And for those who do not, you know, we've got other strategies that we can employ for doing math.
You know, while talking about this is with a colleague at a conference recently, you know, we all agreed that if we come up with a sophisticated calculation that we need to do, and there's not a calculator that's around when we need to do it,
that we all adopt the same strategy. And that is, estimate, get a close answer until we get a calculator.
As educators, I think if we recognize these these this natural technology and this tendency to natural technology, then we can help to frame curriculum and instruction decisions in a much more effective way.
Of course, we have to realize that we are as guilty of, you know, looking at natural technology for what we ought to do as everybody else is, but we have a responsibility as well to help our students to be prepared for their future and not our past.
So, so making technology decisions that appropriately integrate those new technologies and helping students to understand new technologies and how to think with them is an important part of what we do.
And it's been an important part of what teachers have done for generations and generation.
The rate at which these technologies change what we do in classrooms has certainly changed, you know, over the course of the 30 or 40 years that I've been doing this.
For IT leaders in schools, I think it's equally important to understand natural technology. You know, there are going to be educators who come to you who want to hold on to those teaching tools and those teaching technologies that they learned when they were being prepared to be an educator or in their first few years.
You know, I remember one time a teacher came to me and he had this old CD and he asked if the school had a computer that he could use to show it to his classes and, you know, the disc contains some animations of joints.
I think it was, you know, there's 15 second clips of knees with muscles and tendons and cartilage all identified and, you know, they were talking about how things move and it was fine.
I mean, it was, they were drawn pictures. They were really great for the time at which that CD was produced. But it was striking that in the time, the exact moments that that teacher was asking about how do I get this really old set of animations to play on really small screens on, you know, for my students to see.
We looked in the computer room and there were students or biology students who were there and they were, you know, looking at videos of physical therapy for knee injuries and talking about the same stuff that was in that animation.
The students were looking at a real world situation and then we looked over to that one student and he was watching videos of knee operations and that's when we decided it was time to kind of move on, I guess, at least start talking about something else.
But keep this in mind, you know, this whole idea of natural technologies, those technologies that we experienced during our formative years and your formative years are whatever they were, you know, for things like music and what you learn in school.
It's what you learn, you know, when you're in seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth grade, maybe up to a senior in high school. For teachers, it's going to be those things that they learned when they really connected with their craft.
And those are the tools that they want to keep around and we need to keep them around. But we also need to be looking to help folks to develop skills using those new tools, especially the ones that are more effective and more efficient than the ones that they've been using.
Alright folks, thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next podcast.