Technology as nostalgia

This is a challenging blog post "Wheel or Carousel?"

The sentiment in the video clip in the post is powerful and honest, and I've used it in a presentation to the staff.

It’s often easy to sell technology as ‘new’ even when it’s a re-invention; always calming the ‘itch’ to improve learning and teaching for the present, at least until something else comes along.

Yet the excitement of learning remains the same, a constant that we try to re-capture. We can often remember the thrill of learning something, re-capturing that feeling albeit briefly, on the faces of students when we see them grasp a concept or idea we are trying to get to them to understand.

It’s grasping the nostalgia of how learning takes place: constructionism, experimentation, trial and error etc, and relating a technology to these forces that makes it powerful and relevant. When a teacher says, “I just don’t get it”, they’re often seeing the wheel, not the carousel.

As I prepare for uLearn10 - I realise again how much I need to keep focusing on the how learning takes place, not just the "ooh, ahh" of technology. How do I make ICT relevant in my practice - in my school's systems - in my classroom - to and alongside other colleagues.