I’ve been writing a lot about the role of technology in education recently, and have gotten into some very interesting discussions as a result. One of the discussions is about ‘technology for technology’ sake. Most people seem to be against it, I think for some good reasons, but I think it is important to explore the pros and cons by things we can mean when we talk about technology for technology sake.

Let me start off with a few of my thoughts about education. I grew up in Williamstown Massachusetts, home of Williams College, where President Garfield studied. There is a quote attributed to President Garfield saying, "The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." In many ways, this frames much of my thoughts about education. What the school walls are like, or how fancy the pencils are matters little compared to what a good educator brings to the equation.

For me, a good teacher, “places students at the center of the learning environment which uses as many resources as possible, including teachers and textbooks”. If that sounds familiar, it is from a quote from Carol-Ann Haycock about Resource Based Learning and can be found in the Resource Based Learning Policy of the Woodbridge Board of Education.

I am fortunate that my daughter is in the Multi Age Group (MAG) program at Beecher Road School, a program that brings resource based learning alive with an integrated curriculum. This year, my daughter tells me, they are studying water. She is fascinated by it and comes home and tells us about what they’ve been studying. She doesn’t mention the math, English, history, or other curriculum areas that she is learning in. She talks about water, and her math skills and her vocabulary skills excel as a result.

So, with a good teacher, it seems like the next important aspect is a good resource based integrated curriculum. Now, you could approach teaching technology this way, and I think there is a lot of merit to the idea. Students could learn their math, history, vocabulary and many other skills through studying technology. But this isn’t what most people seem to think about when they think about technology for technology sake.

Instead, they may be thinking along the lines of Neil Postman, who does a good job of poking wholes in the ideal of technology for technology sake in his book, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future.

There are problems with the idea of technology for technology sake. The idea that building a better mousetrap will solve whatever problems we face is tempting, but misguided. Yes, technology can be used for good. However, it can also be used for evil. We need to make sure that any technology teaching we do, teaches how to use technology for good.

Yet, I think there is a more fundamental issue. As much as we all may like integrated curricula or courses of study that really can improve our future, more and more I believe that at the earliest grades, we must start teaching technology for technology sake.

When students start school, we teach them about safely getting on and off the bus. We should be teaching our children how to safely get on and off the information super highway. In the classroom, we teach children how to pick up a pencil and make the shapes of letters and numbers. We help them improve their penmanship. Yet we don’t find people suggesting that we shouldn’t teach penmanship for penmanship sake. These days, the ability to type quickly and efficiently on a computer keyboard is as important, if not more important then the ability to write clearly in script was when I was young.

Teaching basic touch-typing is a good start, but I believe there is more technology for technology that should be taught. When I was learning to write, I was given lined paper to help me space my letters in a consistent and appropriate manner. Children today should learn about fonts and colors that are helpful or a hindrance in getting their messages across. Beyond that, there are so many other ways of communicating online.

I’m helping my daughter learn the basics of photo editing. She loves to take the digital camera and take thousands of pictures. With a digital camera, such photography isn’t wasting film, it is simply storing images in a digital format that can be deleted or shared later on. I am spending time helping her become better at deciding which pictures to keep and which to discard. Later, we may move on to other aspects of photo editing as well as editing audio or video. It would seem as if this sort of editing is valuable technology for technology sake.

Then, there is programming. I started my eldest daughters off in programming when they were in kindergarten. We found different versions of the Logo programming language and they had great fun playing with it. They learned about programming and about what goes into a computer program. I often told them that they could play any computer game that they could write. I never held that as a fast rule, but it helped shape their relationship to computer games into something I believe is much more healthy, fun, and productive.

So, should we be teaching technology for technology shape? If we are talking about technology as a topic of study in an integrated curriculum, it makes as much sense as it does to teach about water. If we are talking about some ill thought out techno-utopian ideal, then I sure hope not. Yet if we want our children to succeed in the twenty first century, I believe we need to focus on teaching basic touch typing, editing and programming in ways very similar to how penmanship has been approached.

What do you think?