RE: "Technology"? "Computer Technology", or "Office Skills"???

Seth Bates comments were important and bring up a key issue for the Master Plan to address:

"The confusion that is being promoted in this dialog and many others about "Technology" is very destructive and wholly unnecessary... The problem is that these courses take valuable time away from real academics and real technology courses, while teaching NO underlying content."

I've understood the technology threads last week to mostly be referring to "Instructional Technology" with a little bit of "Computer Applications" thrown in. In the "industry" which provides technology to schools, we use the single word "technology" to mean these two things and assume that the audience knows that "by context".

But Seth rightly points out that technology as a curriculum area is an entirely different matter. "Infrastructure Providers" for schools always assume that the principal and teachers themselves are responsible for the curriculum delivered via the coursework and network. But, as Seth pointed out, this is "destructive" if the school touts their infrastructure as if it gaurantees students will learn advanced technology subject material.

The "Master Plan" ought to formally isolate these two unrelated uses of the word "technology". The detailed paragraphs on each would then be found in the relevant areas within the Master Plan.

However, after noting this problem and taking steps to prevent unwarranted intrusion into curricular of content hours by the artifact of our "infrastructure" technology, we STILL have a major problem.

It is clear to some of us that even "instructional technology" is being hijacked by assuming that expensive purchases of "systems" equates to a complete "technology implementation plan". Even worse, the "systems" being sold are often obsolete designs (meaning they couldn't be used to run a multi-national corporation because the network services and databases are missing). Yet even where the design is adequate, the "content" made available to the teachers and students is wholly inadequate--a shortfall whitewashed over by the hype of "Internet" resources.

The Master Plan, I think, should not try to hold districts accountable in any of these areas--technology (or true science)content, instructional technology, etc.--until it can also provide a blueprint at a very granular level that inspires the technical staff at these districts towards new standards of excellence. (I guess this reflects my general disappointment with the draft Master Plan; it spends almost all of its verbage on how to hold exhausted and overworked administrators accountable for something that even the Master Plan has no "vision" for. We need to centralize the vision and decentralize the execution of this plan.)

Phil