#edcmooc WEEK 1

INTO THE PAST
I remember reading Asimov's science fiction short story " The fun they had" and how I felt: the children must have felt lonely when they had to work on their own and worked on a machine and there was no school and no teachers!! I was only a student at that time but today as a teacher I like to read this short story with my students because it describes today's world in education in some way and I like them to think about the main differences between now and the time I went to school forty years ago. Yet, I feel technology can be positive. My students are digital natives and they can do more things than me. They learn in a different way!

The videos in the resources of this week were " shocking" because they showed the negative side of technology where human beings are overwhelmed by using it and also made me reflect because the man seemed to lose contact with nature and had a life that depended too much on the use of technology. I am and was aware that e-learning can be threatening , especially if you belong to a generation that is not digital born.We are used to analyzing the complexities and often it is said that technology can make our life worse, because we depend on it, on the changes, we are under pressure any time we change a mobile device or buy a new one.
However , life in the past was not always so easy and we can say that the new tools are empowering us and our students. It is up to use to know how to use them.
It is true that today we are more connected and we can do a lot of things from home. Learning is more on line than in the past, thus I found interesting the article " Change comes hard: higher education's view of online learning follows the familiar "pc pattern" in eLearn Magazine.
In my country, Italy , we are still working in the old schools, but we are trying to implement teaching by introducing the new technology.......
The article is a bit old, from 2002 but it still describes how some teachers, the old generation, are looking at technologies in education.
24/7 college courses are also mentioned. And we learn that there will be more education, I feel that today's MOOCs are a great opportunity but we must think about education not only as a business, education is important for the generations who will live in this world in the next years because technology will continue shape and change our life. Human beings can manage !
Technology can help us to be less passive, we can create and develop projects on line, we can work with our students, and the use of internet and youtube can make the world enter school rooms. Too often there is gap between school and the outside world.

With the young and children it is up to teachers to know the risks and to monitor them while they are working but again life should be part of our teaching, because we might learn a lot about William Shakespeare but it is also important to be able to express one's ideas, to work together, to use new tools and possess the so called competences needed in the XXI century.

Technology should be seen in a positive way because the world of education of the past does not exist anymore.
Digital education for me can be good, Noble considers technology in a negative way but I feel that education cannot be like the past and teachers will be important supporters in education.
The main problem for me is to have the money to buy technology that can work: in poorer parts of the world it must be difficult. Also in Italy we have great problems, the great digital divide now can be negative for the future of a nation.