Ideas Worth Spreading?

After watching the “TED ideas worth spreading” video, I had mixed feelings. Part of me was intrigued by what I had just seen--video recordings of groups of lower income children in a typically technologically inaccessible region of the world, working together to figure-out how to use a computer and the internet in the streets of Bombay. But another part of me cringed when I heard the researcher recount how the children were forced to lose their heavy accents in order for the “text-to-speech” software to work for them. He said that “they all started sounding like Jimmy Stewart”. In essence, the children had to change themselves in order to fit the machine. This brings up issues of diversity and dominant culture influence.

I can appreciate the fact that groups of four students were able to share one computer and learned how to use the technology from each other. That knowledge would be beneficial in school districts who lack funding to provide more than one computer for each classroom or technology training to their students--or even their teachers. However, I wonder how easily this could be integrated into a society that is all about independence and “me, me, me!” Would American students be willing to share? That remains to be seen.

The fact that students were left to their own devices to figure out the technology and could roam the internet at will--and unsupervised--also made me uneasy. Don’t get me wrong, I love to browse the internet, and I love figuring things out on my own, but I also know not to click on certain sites, pop-up ads, and whatever else that could be potentially dangerous out there in cyber space. Children do not always have that self-control or prior knowledge to guide them and they can be inadvertently directed to inappropriate websites with a click of a mouse. At this point, I would say that the role of the teacher would be to facilitate students’ internet literacy and etiquette.

I have also witnessed my students on countless occasions believing everything they read online, and hearing them say, “If there’s stuff on Google, why do we need to stuff it into our heads?” (just as the American students said in the video). Here, too, lessons on the validity of resources found on the internet would have to be integrated into a curriculum, as well as continually questioning and discussing what “deep learning” really is.