Why we need the Digital Education Futures Initiative
Some people claim that technology should not drive what we do in education. Technology they say, is just a tool to help us deliver the curriculum. These people have short memories. Schools first came into being around 3000 BCE to teach the new technology of recording and retrieving meanings by incising patterns in clay tablets. Around 400 BCE Socrates complained about the damaging educational effects of the then still relatively new technology of literacy at a time when it was spreading throughout ancient Greece. It is impossible to imagine the contemporary mass system of schooling, so similar everywhere you go in the world, without the invention of the printing press that provides the books this system is based upon.
Technology has always been at the heart of education
The central role of technology to education becomes evident when we look at cultures where print literacy and numeracy are not the norm. Oral cultures also have education but they do it differently. In oral cultures young people are guided into communities of practice through talk and action, and they are also often initiated into their long term culture, learning how to walk with the ancestors and how to talk with the ancestors.
Thinking about how much of our current education system is entangled with the affordances and the needs of print literacy is relevant now precisely because we are currently undergoing a transition in our dominant mode of communication. Every year in every area of life more functions that were once carried by print switch over to the Internet. This shift is potentially just as profound, if not perhaps even more profound, than the earlier shift from oracy to literacy that Socrates complained about.
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