Tech In the Classroom Can’t End With the Technology

When I was growing up, I collected baseball cards and played video games. Like many kids my age, Bo Jackson was my idol. Bo Knows Bo was the first book I ever read cover to cover, I had more than 60 different trading cards of the dual-sport athlete, and my bedroom was plastered with posters of him and news headlines of his latest accomplishments.

Years later, the person I aspire to be has changed significantly; now I want to be Seymour Papert when I grow up.

Papert is internationally recognized as a seminal thinker about ways in which computers can change learning. He has written numerous articles about mathematics, artificial intelligence, education, learning and thinking. His thoughts were a generation ahead of most in education, as evidenced when in 1990 he said:

Many teachers are now grappling daily with the absurd scenario Papert raised 26 years ago. As I mentioned in a previous ConnectIT blog post, Beyond the Silver Bullet: Making 1:1 Matter, technologies will have little to no impact on learning if teachers are not also provided with training and professional development.

This article is part of the “Connect IT: Bridging the Gap Between Education and Technology” series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using the #ConnectIT hashtag.