Technology, learning, and free will

I have not yet shared with you the piece I contributed to Teaching with Technology, the book that has been featured on the right sidebar for the past four months. Here it is: Technology, learning, and free will.

This essay is an extension of one of the earliest posts on the NspireD2 blog, Down with technological determinism. It describes the belief, simply stated, that technology X will inherently yield result Y. My two favorite examples of this fallacy are the popular ideas that (a) clickers automatically make a class engaging and (b) PowerPoint is always boring.

Just yesterday I read an article that seemed to say that BYOD was going to change education. Put powerful technology in the classroom and everything will get better. What about the computers we’ve had for thirty years?

What really matters are the ways we employ technology. If we turn around and use the new tools to teach and learn in the old ways, then little will change.