The Silicon Classroom — Week 2
Today’s class followed up with the question “What is ed tech?” discussed last week. Guest speaker Karin Forssell, Director of the Learning Design and Technology (LDT) Masters’ Program at the GSE, came in to shed some light on the development of ed tech and general technology that has been used for education. Her first activity was fairly straightforward: We organized pictures of things, mostly tech- or ed- related, into a timeline of their development. Things like books and spectacles appeared earlier than the Internet or an electronic calculator. Then, we chose to organize the pictures based on which ones were for collaboration and which ones were for self-use, and with the added dimension of which ones were made for education purposes and which ones had other initial purposes. This one sparked a larger debate because many of the items could be used for either collaboration or individually, and also for both specific and general purpose. We closed with Karin talking about the LDT program.
Class kicked off after Karin’s talk. We had a more formal discussion about the history of ed tech from before the digital age to now. The common goal for education grew and changed over time — it was used to socialize citizens, for national defense, and for occupational preparation. With this background, we discussed a higher philosophical question:
“Who is education for?”
Our discussion led to motivation and our own experiences before coming to Stanford. For some, education was for the motivated, the self-driven. For others, education was for those who couldn’t find the motivation or didn’t have the means to succeed. Using our different backgrounds to inform our discussion, we learned about different school systems that catered more to stellar students and others that worked to raise up less successful students.
After wrapping up the discussion on the purpose of education, we covered design thinking. One of our projects is going to help students tackle a design and engineering problem. Because it is a 14-week long program, we will be coming in to help during the tenth week. The challenge for us, however, was to think of ways to reinvigorate the students’ interest in STEM for the tech challenge and beyond. We jumped into the design thinking process with an example warm-up activity exploring how to redesign the gift-giving process for your partner.
Next week, we will devote all of our time to brainstorming and running through the design process. Stay tuned!
