I agree with Doyle here on the level that I learned astronomy with a hand cranked terrible beast of a cheap telescope (that I still use and love because it helped me learn so many things about the universe) instead of an iPad app…

Science teacher: Slow seeing: “Humans have the same cognitive and sensory tools today that we had a few generations ago. Observing the world is an acquired skill that cannot be learned through a screen. It requires interest, it requires time, and it requires building an internal scaffold that allows the child to make some sense of this universe.”

However, Doyle is tilting the tech windmill instead of focusing on the real issue involved with the type of “ooh, shiny!” listless teacher jargon-in-practice he rails against (rightly so). The problem here isn’t necessarily the tools themselves but the human capacity to hope that a new tool will solve problems just by being there in some sort of epistemological epiphany (I’m thinking of the proto-humans with the femur at the beginning of Kubrick’s 2001).

Instead, let’s realize that slow learning is a good thing and observation is a skill sorely missing from our students (and 99% of adults) today. However, “fast” learning (or whatever the polar component of slow learning would be) that emphasizes chaotic transfer of information over crowded electromagnetic signals from devices to our own neural network can also be a good practice in certain situations.

Teaching, learning, all of this, is a very subjective and organic enterprise. The essence of what “works” in the learning community that is my/our classroom doesn’t necessarily (and probably wouldn’t) work in Doyle’s classroom or most any of my colleague’s classrooms because of the dependent clause of human individuality (which is another reason I do love the independent education model).

So, let’s focus on providing classrooms what they require in their unique circumstances and leave the use of femur smashing technology tools up to small collectives of humanoids and their particular needs.

(Caveat emptor… I love Doyle’s blog, his writing, his tweets and what I glean from his brain via those channels on a daily basis even if he does take the name Luddite in vain.)