The central message of Tierny, Bond and Bresler’s Examining Literate Lives as Students Engage with Multiple Literacies is that new technologies are at once expanding possibilities in the classroom, are easily being assimilated by young students and are also meeting resistance from teachers who find these new opportunities to be nonessential to the mission of education. Literate Lives ends with an exhortation to educators not to eschew the potential of new technologies in the classroom.
The impression I got from the Tierny article was that the resistance among certain teachers evolves from the feeling that the integration of multi-media implements in the learning process are just “bells and whistles”. Colin Mulberg in his article ("Just Don't Ask Me to Define It': Perceptions of Technology in the National Curriculum") counters that judgement by proposing that “new” technology has always been a part of education, and that it has always been controversial. Mulberg rejects the idea that technology is simply a superfluous element, but is interwoven in all facets of the human experience, and therefore should have a rightful place in the world of education.
I tend to agree with Mulberg’s viewpoint, but understand the response of traditionally trained teachers who must feel overwhelmed with the perceived difficulty of mastering new media.
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