The Boundaries of Education

I just finished watching David Warlick's presentation at the K12OnlineConference, "Inventing the New Boundaries". If you have a chance to view this presentation, I encourage you do so. He expressed some ideas that I think are relevant to what we do everyday as teachers. In this blog entry, I am go to summarize the ideas that I think are the most important.
First, he discussed how the boundaries of education have changed. Many of these boundaries have been broken down. For example, we are no longer limited to just the resources within our school building. What is the cause for the fall of these boundaries? TECHNOLOGY. We can access information that is housed thousands of miles away with a just few keystrokes. We can collaborate and share resources with other teachers that are all around the world. Technology provides us with a means of global collaboration.
What does this mean for us? Since many boundaries have be broken down, we need new boundaries. We, as educators, now have the responsibility of creating new boundaries. Will education work without boundaries? Probably not. Some aspects of education would still be successful. But, we need to have structure. How do we invent these new boundaries that are necessary? Perhaps, we can work with the students. Maybe, we will create new boundaries just to have them changed again in a few years by a more advanced technology. It is hard to say just exactly what will happen.
This leads into another idea that David discussed during his presentation. He said that we are currently preparing students for a future that we know very little about. Think about this. What do we know of the future. Think back ten years. What did we think then. Were we able to predict what our live are like now. We need to keep this in mind when we decide how we are going to educate our students.
Also, David said that as the nature of information changes, our idea of literacy must change. You can find information on the internet related to just about anything. Before, literacy referred to the ability to read and comprehend. However, now that there are many different sources of information, students must be able to evaluate the sources. Just about anybody can publish information to the internet. When we teach our students to be literate, we must now teach them how to identify which sources are dependable.
David also talked about the idea of the "digital divide". Originally, the phrase "digital divide" refers to people who have regular access to information technology vs those that do not. However, David said that he believes it refers to the people who are connected to a network of other people vs those that are not connected. I believe he is correct. Many people use technology but are still not connected.
Finally, I would like to discuss one more idea that David shared. He suggested that many teachers want the students to be what they want to teach. Basically, he is saying that we want students to adapt to us. Our students have access to technology that keeps them connected to the rest of the world. They learn many things through these connection. How do you think many kids know more about computers than we do? It is because they have these connections. So, it is through these connections that our students learn a lot of things that they feel is relevant to their lives. However, when they walk into the front door of the school, we expect them to sever themselves from these connections.