Future Shock Is Here

Many years ago, in a land far away, I was taking a basic sociology class that required that I read the book “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler. One of the premises of the book was to demonstrate that as society moved into the latter half of the twentieth century, it would move faster and change would become more rapid. People would become overwhelmed with change and tend to either reject it or just shut down. I think that I am about there.

I have just returned from a seminar on technology in education, a seminar that has given me pause to think. Most of us tend to relate to the world in the frame of reference that we grew up with or are engaged with as an adult. Adults tend to seriously take to heart lessons and experiences learned in their adolescence. For example, we all remember the songs of our youth, yet are challenged to really listen to what is considered “modern” music twenty years later.

The same is true of technology. To put this into my own personal experience, the year I started kindergarten, our family still had a crank telephone hanging on the wall where you turned the handle and talked to the local operator to have you connected to someone. We were one of maybe the 30% of the households in the community that had a phone. I was in the third grade when John Glenn orbited the earth (this was a big deal, it was broadcast over the school’s pa system and I got to use the pointer on a world map to show the class where the capsule was!!). I was a teenager when man first set foot on the moon. The flight computer on the lunar excursion module (which failed on final approach) was substantial in size, and had less power than the credit card size calculator I carry in my briefcase. In the early 1970’s I almost bought a small calculator that could do the four basic functions and was the size of the laptop that I am now typing this on. Sometime in there the fax machine wowed us. In the 1980’s I was amazed at the speed of the IBM 286 as it calculated insurance policy values in 10 minutes as compared to the two weeks’ time frame if it was done the traditional manual method. Incidentally did you know that the space shuttle was designed to fly on the 286? Those are headed to a museum now.

The point of this discussion is to demonstrate the need plan for the updating of our school and school programs, we have to envision the impossible, the improbable, and the fantastic. The Browning building was built about the time John Glenn orbited the earth (and he is approaching 90 years old!!) and the academy building was built shortly after that with the gym under construction when the Apollo moon program was ending. At the time of construction the main visual aid in the classroom was blackboard and chalk. Today it could easily be handheld technology.

Today three quarter’s of the world population has hand- held computer technology, from cell phones to I-pads. Think about this. Three quarters of the earth’s population has the potential to access the internet in their hand. This is a whole new area of usage that most of us in education are behind the curve on. We do a good job with teaching students the basics of traditional computer usage in the realm of business applications or higher education, but we currently do not address the new field of handheld technology. This technology and social networking is as much a fact of life with students today as textbooks or calculators. We must come to grips with the use of this new field, train teachers to use it, and create an infrastructure within the school to adequately and safely support its use. This is no small task. In fact it is daunting to consider.