Dr. MaryFriend Shepard

Coordinator, The Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership, Educational Technology, Ph.D. Specialization

 

 

The Third Wave

 

by Alvin Toffler (William Morrow, 1980)

 

Every time I read this book it blows my mind because Toffler was writing things decades ago that are taking place today.

 

In this follow-up to Future Shock, Toffler writes about three ages: Agrarian, Industrial, and Information. In the Agrarian Age’s education system, you have the little red schoolhouse and the agrarian calendar because in the summertime children need to be in the fields helping their parents work the land. In the Industrial Age model, you see students standing in straight lines, sitting in straight rows, having a lot of lectures. They are being prepared to work on an assembly line.

 

As the world moves to the Information Age, where things are driven by knowledge, information, and access to information, we’ve seen a paradigm shift in all segments of society. The Internet and technology have dramatically changed the way people do business, but too many schools have stuck with an Industrial Age format. You go into schools and there are still desks plastered to the floor and students sitting still and trying to listen to teachers, and this approach to learning isn’t working anymore. In education technology, and this is why I love it so much, we’re literally beginning to see the whole transformation of the way people are learning through technology.

 

When you start seeing the cycles of history, it can help you understand how we have to help people move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. A lot of people hold on to what’s comfortable and what’s familiar. Learning about history can help us move through history to the next stage.

 

TheWorld Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

 

by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

 

This is an anecdotal book, not a real theory book, but it’s remarkable in terms of explaining what’s going on in the world. What Friedman says is, we have come full circle now. We used to think the world was flat, and then we discovered it’s a sphere. But through—and because of—technology, the world is “flat” again. For example, people in India may be doing your tax return while you’re sleeping. Because of technology, we’ve leveled the playing field.

 

As we’re entering this Information Age that Toffler writes about (see previous book recommendation), technology is becoming amazingly powerful in creating a different form of learning for children. They’re learning to think critically. They’re learning how to write and how to publish their ideas for an electronic audience. They’re not just writing for their teachers, and because of this, they’re doing better work. This is what we’re seeing with Web 2.0 tools that are allowing our students to really enter into the Information Age.

 

As an educational technologist, I look at a continuum. I go out to schools, and I talk to teachers who say, I don’t want a computer in my classroom, and if you give me one, it’s going to collect dust. Or, I make PowerPoints to demonstrate things on the computer, but I don’t let students touch it. And so on. But the exciting group is the one seeing the power of the Web and the power of wireless telecommunications. You start seeing things like The Horizon Project and The Flat Classroom coming out, where the students connect with global markets and global populations.

 

When you look at the world of work, the business world has moved to the Information Age. Many schools and many teachers have also gotten there, but many haven’t, which brings me to the third book …

 

Diffusion of Innovations

 

by Everett Rogers (Free Press, Fifth Edition, 2003)

 

This is an absolute “must read” for anybody in educational technology or education. Rogers identifies five groups of people in terms of how they accept innovation. They are the innovators, the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and then the laggards.

 

What we’re seeing, when we look at Toffler’s Information Age, when we look at TheWorld is Flat (see two previous book recommendations), and when we look at the kind of exciting projects that teachers are doing, is that the people who have really moved into the Information Age with technology are innovators and early adopters. It’s all just beginning to merge and move into the early majority. But the early majorities are very deliberate people—so when it gets to them, then you’ve won the race, in a sense.

 

So Rogers has an awful lot to offer to anybody who is interested in, rather than frustrated by, the acceptance of innovations. He helps people understand that technology is not going to go away. If you watch the evolution through innovators and early adopters to the early majority and then to the late majority, there’s much hope that this is going to hit school systems—that it’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen fast.

 

 

 

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