When attending a guest lecture by John Hunt on how to make use of information technology in education, I found that his lecture talked more about education philosophy than technology.
John Hunt is an education consultant of Willi Toisuta & Associates. He teaches at the School of Science and Education of the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Recently Hunt was involved in One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, a project to provide affordable laptop for children in the world. He is active in computer literacy efforts in Papua and Dumaji, an Aborigine area in Australia.
The point of his lecture was simple and everybody may have understood it: that technology can be very useful for learning processes. With the Internet, people can access knowledge as much as they want. Meetings, exchanging, and competing ideas can be done across time and space. Computers help people to express, save, and share their ideas with other easily, in a faster and affordable way. Etc.
Hunt asked the audience to imagine themselves as a dinosaur and wrote three problems that they may have had when they became one. Why he did so? Hunt said that as a learner, people have to think creatively. To be able to think creatively, people have to think differently. Referring to Bloom’s taxonomy, Hunt explained that in learning, people started with remembering, then understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and finally creating. To be able to create new knowledge, people have to be creative. People can use technology in every stage in Bloom’s learning taxonomy.
Creativity is useful in the use of technology. Matt Farthing, one of Hunt’s students who was learning about cells, expressed the results of his learning by composing a song about cells structure. Matt said, he learned better about cells from such activity. Now that “scientific song” can be viewed in YouTube.
John Hunt promoted John Dewey philosophy on inquiry-based learning. A teacher needs to involve students in the process of scientific inquiry. Students can be involved when their curiosity is aroused. How? Hunt usually asked his teachers what they have known and then what they have not known and what they want to know. When one knows what s/he wants to know, s/he can decide the best way to get that knowledge, the technology that may be used to get it, etc.
Hunt’s lecture reminded me that technology is a tool. It is up to the individuals whether to use it for learning or for entertainment. Technology will only be beneficial for learning when people use it for learning. Technology which consists of hardware and software depends entirely on the brainware of the user. This is probably the reason why Hunt’s lecture discussed more on learning philosophy than technology per se, because the use of technology depends entirely on the paradigm of the user. Fortunately, this paradigm can also be altered with the help of technology, similar to what John Hunt did when he presented his lecture where he was making use of data, chart, and visual imagery in LCD technology.
SATRIA ANANDITA
© Illustration: Samantha Penney