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Article Excerpt
Starting in the late 1970s and gaining strength throughout the 1980s and 1990s, scholars and policy makers have trumpeted the benefits that technology would bring to the practice of teaching and learning. While by and large this remained a promise unfulfilled, recent research suggests that today's computing and networking technologies are beginning to penetrate educational venues (Becker, 1999, 2000, 2001; Gibson & Oberg, 2004; Ronnkvist, Dexter, & Anderson, 2000; Russell, Bebell, O'Dwyer, & O'Connor, 2003). As a result, now is an important time to revisit the potential of technology for education. In this article, we focus specifically on the implications of technology for teacher preparation and the institutions that engage in it. Our main concern is to identify and explore how a more pervasive technological infrastructure might serve as a catalyst for schools of education to reconsider how teacher preparation is done.
The term technology is broad and can encompass many tools and applications. In this article, when we refer to technologies we mean to encompass the standard suite of desktop productivity tools including word processors, presentation managers, and spreadsheets. We also include what is emerging as the standard suite of networking tools: e-mail, Web browsers, synchronous and asynchronous (1) text-based conferencing, and synchronous video and audio conferencing. In addition to these, we explore the utility of tools that find extensive analytic use in various domains of practice, for example, simulation, modeling, and visualization tools in science and text analysis tools in literature. Finally, we believe it is important to add to this list technological tools that aid in reflection. A key member of this category is video tools that allow teachers and others to consider and analyze their personal practice and the practice of others.
In what follows, we begin by describing two approaches to the use of technology that have been popular in the past several decades. We then discuss a more recent perspective, one that we believe is critical for enhancing teacher education. Specifically, our emphasis is on the social and interpersonal affordances of technology for teacher learning. To conclude, we review four implications for teacher education that we claim take advantage of the social ways of knowing offered by technology today.
THINKING ABOUT THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY: THREE PATHWAYS
In this section, we argue, as have others, that technology today offers a way to connect learners, teachers, and others to the social fabric of communities of practice (e.g., Albon, & Trinidad, 2002; Gardner & Williamson, 2002; Putnam & Borko, 2000). To situate this perspective effectively, we will first characterize two other approaches that have typically been used to integrate technology into teacher education: the first being technology acquisition, and the second consisting of instrumental use of technology. These two pathways along with the third approach of using technology to support new social practices are a strategic suite. Together they create a frame to recast our thinking about technology and teacher preparation.
Technology Acquisition
It almost goes without saying that before technology can have a role in organizational change, it has to be acquired. There must be a technical infrastructure that is rich and reliable enough for people to come to depend on it for their regular work. While it is a necessary developmental step, the acquisition of a technical infrastructure is not an end in itself.
Teacher preparation institutions and other organizations have thought about helping learners through technology by infusing the organization with technology (Means, Olson, & Singh, 1995; Office of Technology Assessment, 1995). It appears that at times, the goal of organizations in the past has been to purchase lots of technology and hope through its presence that learners will organically come to use it and, through this use, work differently. In schools of education this often looks like outfitting labs and classrooms with the latest in desktop and networking technology. Rather than creating fundamentally new forms of work, this strategy may lead to the same old work done on up-to-date and costly equipment (Landauer, 1995). We, and others (Gomez, Fishman, & Pea, 1998; Pea & Gomez, 1992), have argued that this is a necessary stage in an evolution to new forms of practice. At its core, this stage of organizational use of technology has the naive theory that the presence of a tool, like a spreadsheet, will organically create better analysts. Teacher preparation institutions and other organizations are often troubled when they look back on large investments just to see that the classroom preparation of teachers occurred much as it occurred prior to those investments in technology (Becker, 2000, 2001). In hindsight, it is evident that the social fabric of teacher preparation is not likely to fundamentally change by the mere presence of technology. Again, in hindsight it is easy to conjecture that the simple acquisition of technology is not enough to encourage the faculties of teacher education institutions to teach differently and the administrators of teacher preparation institutions to conceptualize the task of teacher preparation differently.
Process/Product Relationships
A more aggressive form of integrating technology into the life of a teacher preparation institution might be termed process-product integration, that is, thinking about the power of the technologies we use in terms of the products they create. For example, organizations often think the core value of a technology like a presentation manager is simply that it allows its members to create presentations. While it is true that presentations are important products for an organization, the impact of presentation managers as such has been much more pervasive (Parker, 2001). Presentation managers, like Power Point, have become new forms of communication within organizations.
Similarly, teacher preparation institutions in the past, and currently, have often thought that their task was to simply prepare teachers to know how to use technology (Flick & Bell, 2000). In the case of presentation managers for instance, the task would be to make sure that teachers know how to use one or another popular presentation manager tool. Yet, we would argue instead that presentation managers are a case where teachers should be helped to see that this tool can actually aid learners to display their knowledge and to display their knowledge in different ways. Thus, in addition to instrumental control of technologies, it is likely to be valuable for teacher preparation institutions to help preservice teachers to understand the role that a technology can play in the transformation of students' work in schools. Like acquisition, instrumental use is necessary but likely insufficient as a perspective on the conceptually proper role of technology use in the context of teacher preparation.
Shaping Social Relationships and Social Arrangements
A third perspective is that as technologies become a part of an organization they enable new social arrangements. For example, when word processors made their way into offices two decades ago, one of their most profound effects was not to make the typing pool more efficient but to ultimately eliminate it by placing the means to create documents in the hands of the people who needed to create documents. Similarly, we argue that thinking about technology in this way allows preservice institutions to reconceive how preservice education might be carried out.
Before discussing the implications of this approach specifically for teacher education however, we want to briefly introduce the reader to the range of new social practices that we believe current technologies afford the world of education more broadly. First, for example, it is clear that today's networks allow schools to have access to more information and people than was ever before possible. Internet browsers and the World Wide Web give students and teachers access to information that is highly situated in domains of practice. Second, today's networks and computers make it possible for teachers and children to, at various levels, join communities of people well beyond their schoolhouse doors. With synchronous and asynchronous conferencing, teachers and students can join with varied communities in the discourses of those domains (New London Group, 1996). Third, applications of technology, like scientific visualization and dynamic modeling, make it possible for people in schools to use tools that are the same or very similar to the tools that people in professional practice use in their own work (Edelson, Gordin, & Pea, 1997). Fourth, applications like visualization and modeling have the characteristic of making abstract concepts, like feedback, tangible and dynamic for learners (Jackson, Krajcik, & Soloway, 2000). Finally, computing applications that are readily available to learners, like multimedia authoring tools, allow learners to display what they know in a variety of ways that extend well beyond text and stand-and-deliver presentations (Mott & Klomes, 2001; Ripley, 2002). These tools are also a way for public and concrete reflection on what learners know.
So what does this mean...
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