It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
—Abraham Maslow
We began with Basic Needs, a chapter whose title is inspired by Abraham Maslow's pioneering work on what people, including children, need to survive and thrive. We are ending with a chapter introduced by his contention that the tools we have influence the knowledge we obtain. Maslow was a pioneering scientist who began his career studying the behavior of dogs and monkeys and made his mark exploring the psychological processes of human beings. These processes, he explained in a book of memoirs, did not fit into "the extant machinery for achieving reliable knowledge." By machinery, Maslow meant the scientific methods and concepts of the 1930s, and he clinched this observation with his hammer-and-nail remark.
For those of us who grew up before personal computers and electronic aids became ubiquitous, when the tools for learning were pencils and spiral-bound notebooks, chalk and blackboards, it is tempting to treat learning as a purely mental activity, and technology in the schools as a toy, a frill, or a distraction. For those of us scrambling to keep up with the Information Age, it is tempting to dismiss machine shops and hands-on skills as outdated and unnecessary. This hammer-and-nail thinking is flattening our schools: Too many of them have dismantled workshops and studios, yet have installed little in their place except already obsolete computer labs.
The child who starts kindergarten this fall may not know how to spell her name, but she will know how to surf the Web. The engineers, entrepreneurs, educators, researchers, and school administrators whose stories conclude this book make a compelling case that learning itself is already rewired, and that we must create learning environments as flexible and fluid as today's technologically sophisticated learners. All we can know about the world that today's kindergarten student will step into when she graduates is that it will have, to paraphrase Maslow, machinery for gaining knowledge beyond what we can imagine.
RESOURCES
www.edutopia.org
The George Lucas Educational Foundation’s website and magazine spreads the word about ideal, interactive learning environments and enables others to adapt these successes locally. This site also contains an archive of continually updated best practices.
www.futurelab.org.uk
Futurelab transforms the way people learn through innovative technology and practice, and develops the resources and practices that support new approaches to learning for the 21st century.
www.digitallearning.macfound.org
The MacArthur Foundation launched this initiative to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. The website shares emerging research, blogs, awards.
www.insight.eun.org
An observatory for Information and Communication Technology in school education, Insight is designed to support decision-makers in education at national, regional or local levels to develop effective strategies for e-learning.