I have posted about this before. I once encountered a teacher returning to college in her late forties or early fifties who was quite confirmed and proud of the fact that she and computers had done a thorough and complete job of keeping their distance and not meeting for any purpose. This teacher is a high school science teacher who wanted a print out of article citations on her topic so that she could find them in the stacks. Somebody else was to get the citations, look them up in the online catalog and provide her with the citation and call number blend so that she could amble up to the shelves where they resided and photocopy the articles. This teacher was very unthrilled when I told her I would give her one citation and call number and then show her how to look up more. I got her on a computer and was about to engage in information science force feeding when a computer internet outage of about one hour intervened, she went to the shelves to claim her article and I never saw her again.
Generalizations like "People can develop without structured training" are exceedingly dangerous and deny the diversity in our society. Diversity is not just a matter of different sexes, different racial or ethinic background or one of income status only. Diversity also lies in areas like personality, flexability or the lack thereof, interest in or total hostility to technology. I have run into in my various areas of public contact with quite a few teachers who are upstanding devout members of the Church of Computer Refusal and these are elders, priests and leaders of this church. Many of these folks will not be changed by a structured program such as a boot camp with water torture or beatings as an incentive to thrive in their computer literacy skills, much less develop without structured training. How, for example, are students going to learn research skills for building a bibliography on a topic if their teachers do not know that public libraries in many states provide public access to databases from sources like EBSCO, First Search, Infotrak from Gale / Thompson, ProQuest Direct and others. These teachers do not bother to go to the public libraries in their area to find out what is offered on computer for student research and they most certainly do not learn anything about how to use these tools for research questions so they teach students headed to college nothing about them. Then the students go to colleges where there are few who are skilled in the use of databases and have financial and time pressures and may settle for purchased term papers or make do for their research citations with what they can find in Google without even a clue that there is a Google Books or a Google Scholar. Here is the original post that includes the story about the teacher who refused to use computers. EDUCATION: TECHNOLOGY : EDUCATION: K-12: TEACHERS: Some Opinionated Comments Regarding Technology Skills in the K-12 Learning Experience <http://snipurl.com/ti70> Here is a post in which I go into some more detail and cite other posts regarding this topic. Re: [DIG_REF] RESEARCH: RESOURCES: Google Isn't Everything <http://snipurl.com/ti73> Even if the state library system and local public libraries in a specific place do not offer databases, there are still places where a teacher wanting to learn about these tools may do so. The ERIC, TRIS and PUBMED databases are available from the United States Federal Government. EBSCO offers a database free to the public and in particular to teachers that is discussed in these two Net-Gold posts. DATABASES: EDUCATION AND ERIC: From EBSCOhost: Teacher Reference Center (TRC) - Journal Information for K-12 Teachers and Librarians <http://snipurl.com/ti7e> DDN] Using the EBSCO Elementary Secondary Education Database for Adolescent and Adult Health Education Knowledge David P. Dillard Fri, 12 May 2006 09:22:59 -0700 <http://www.mail-archive.com/digitaldivide@mailman.edc.org/msg05482.html> The opportunities are there. Computers for the home and internet access are getting cheaper. For the teacher who refuses to have any part of this scene, however, putting them in a room with a computer connected to the internet, with a nice mug of hot chocolate and nice soft music playing in the background is not likely to cause these people to develop without structured training and even perhaps with it, shotgun pointed to their head or not and as a result, many students will have a much harder time before they get to college and even more so when they are in college in any of their academic pursuits that require serious bibliographic research. Sincerely, David Dillard Temple University (215) 204 - 4584 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Net-Gold <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/net-gold> <http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/net-gold.html> General Internet & Print Resources <http://library.temple.edu/articles/subject_guides/general.jsp> <http://www.learningis4everyone.org/> <http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/ringleaders/davidd.html> Digital Divide Network <http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/jwne> Educator-Gold <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Educator-Gold/> ==================================================== On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In a message dated 7/12/06 5:43:07 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > Sharing the reservations of a lot of people about Negroponte's proposal, > > nonetheless I don't see a lack of training as a total inhibitor to success. > > People can develop without structured training. > I disagree when we are talking about teachers, who have already been labled > incompetent and out of touch, and who may know the pedagogy, but not the > latest > in use of technology, with time being a factor, and testing the gun to the > head. > Bonnie Bracey Sutton > bbracey at aol com _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
