Week 3 Topic 2 Resistance to Technology

Topic #2: Why do you think educators are so resistant to change, especially when it comes to technology? How do other institutions, such as business, deal with technological change?

Educators are of a special breed. They seek to influence and broaden the minds of their followers (students). The tools they use in fact are secondary to their purpose as what is to be achieved is a shared enlightenment of knowledge.

What does all this mean? Simply put, you really don’t need technology to teach. If you think about it, there are factors that have become the catalyst for creating a need for educational technology. Reaching the masses, sharing of a concept, creating a volume of sort – to name a few. However, lets ponder on these questions.

- Do we address goals like, individual development planning, and lesson retention?
- How about addressing human contact and social integration?
- Have we really captured the essence of educating for the sake of educating or…
- Are we just perpetuating a need to ‘amass’ the chains of tools that might hold us back from achieving our original purpose, which was to teach?

The bottom line is this; until there is an earnest attempt to define purpose in educational technology, the educational purist may find it difficult to accept and trust technology not for what it is, but rather, for what it portrays itself to be – a silver bullet to solving educational needs.