Can blogs and other community-building Web tools become agents of radical educational change, uprooting decades-old paradigms of teaching and learning that have outlived their effectiveness? That’s the question underlying the discussion—or “distributed conversation”—taking place on a number of tech-oriented teacher blogs.
Literacy teacher-cum-Web enthusiast Doug of Borderland, for one, acknowledges he is doubtful that interactive technology can make immediate inroads into most classrooms. What with accountability and testing requirements, he says, most teachers are too “overloaded with a barrage of demands that limit their openness to new self-selected challenges.”
Plus, he notes, not everyone’s on board with the revolution:
I made a presentation about blogs to a group of teachers last summer. After I talked for probably too long, a woman raised her hand and asked, “Why would anyone want to do this?” I didn’t know what else to say. You either see it, or you don’t. We lack consensus—not only for technology—but for our vision of schooling.
But then, as teachers are fond of saying, there are no dumb questions.
