technology And the Promise of Progress in educAtion

Since the publication of numerous texts regarding technology in education and 21st century learning, schools, districts and departments of education have been talking about the new learning for the 21st century. Included in this are emphases on critical thinking skills, problem solving, and the use of technology. This short discussion will focus on the latter of the three. The 2009 publication 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times could be described as helping to create a tipping point at least in the advance of the discussion of said technological skills. The text was embraced by a number of educational jurisdictions as a seminal work prescriptive of where technology will be taking us. I believe the question should not be where is technology taking us but where are we taking technology? I am skeptical; at the same time, I am not a Luddite. I must admit that there are a number of benefits to the utilization of technology, but the most evident one for educators is not, in my opinion, a momentous one. It is simply a potential increase in student engagement. To paraphrase a statement from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), children are now born with square eyeball