In the old days, the rhetoric about technology use in the school classroom was pitched as a binary debate. You were either part of the movement to promote technology or the object of that movements concerns and vitriol. Time has moved on. 90% of today’s online information was created in the last twenty four months. Industry figures show that media is a social reality, and teachers are in the demography targeted by technology and media as consumers.
It therefore make sense to describe a unit of work (not pedagogy) as media centric, media moderate or media light. After all its the work which matters right? From this, schools can appoint staff to classes on a basis of their personal belief, skill, attitude and experience with media centric to media light units of work.
Currently, the teacher has the powers of veto and experimentation with little accountability. As media and technology are not mandated, this approach shifts the focus from what the teacher is willing to do to what the unit of work needs within the context of who will be learning it. It pushes attention from curriculum design to learning design, away from functional knowledge competition (the twitterati) to declarative and more naturalistic practice. If students prefer media centric in a media light class, that’s hard luck. Something’s don’t work as well with technology, and schools should be able to figure that out by now.
It also disempowers the endless marketing online, and accepts that teaching kids is pluralistic, not a binary to get yourself Twitter famous.
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