Is technology for the "doing" part of learning or expressing "Essence"?

During the past six months I attended two seminars entitled, "Radical Leadership" ( from People Builders) that were transformational in my day to day way of personal inter relationships. The basis is from an excerpt of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Over-Soul" which differentiates the "eating drinking planting counting" side of our lives to the "essence" or passion of our lives. As I see it, in schools, technology is still considered for the most part to handle the "doing" and "counting" part of learning that students and educators complete from "bell to bell". The descriptors for "doing" are surviving, chaos, confusion, controlling, resistance, draining, fear. (Does this sound familiar!)

What I have been reading about in my last two weeks as a newbie blogger is how I see educators and students tapping into the "essence" of technology. The descriptors for "essence" are wisdom, creativity, vibrantly alive, expand, acceptance, abundance, inspiration,energizing, trust...to just name a few. Essence is from the heart, passion, and the "goose bumps" part of life.

When you think about the teachers that have been innovative and the ones that students learned the most about life ....were they the teachers who went through the mechanics of doing...or the passionate educators who embraced the passion for teaching and making a change? I think the answer is obvious. The latter are the individuals that will be the leapfrogs in this movement to the Web 2.0 technologies.

My First Comment!!

It is true...it is very exciting when someone responds to your reflections about a passion. But the best part is the sharing and the compassion that you are not alone in this frustration about how our schools are handling very slowly the access of the Web 2.0 technologies for our students. We need to be part of the solution and the discussion of how we can make the technology work for our kids. In just the past 2 weeks of opening these blogs and reading, I have learned a great deal.

Before I dreaded my time on the computer, to do the mundane "doing" of responding to emails, etc. Now I find that the blogging fulfills a passion and the essence of why I am in this career of special education/ speech pathology. For those of you that read this...I encourage you to take the plunge and develop an aggregate reader at google and also start reading some blogs and creating posts. It will stir your creative juices.