Lesson 2

Technology: Boon or Bane?
"Technology is in our hands. We can use it to build or destroy".

Introduction

     After understanding what educational technology is all about it may be good reflect on whether this thing called technology is a boon or a bane to education, a blessing or a curse to education.

Activity

     Read the paragraphs given below and analyze the message of the comic strips/photograph given below. Is technology a boon or a bane? Stated more simply is it a blessing or a curse? A blessing or a detriment to a person's development?

A. Technology can be fascinating and mind-blogging in what it can do. It can bring distant places and people together, establishing invisible but powerful connections. It can transform societies, economies and cultures by opening them up to other ideas and other options, raising new expectations and creating new needs. It can release and rechannel previously unknown or wasted energies into more productive endeavors, allowing its users to pursue more creative goals.

B. Below are reactions to the question "Do instant messaging e-mail, cell phones and other gadgetry bring family members closer or drive them apart?"

     "Using a lot of high-tech gear to communicate at home is a poor proxy for face-to-face communication and sees omnipresent technological ties as threatening to intimacy." B.I.

     "Typing each other instead of talking to each other can only lead to problems down the road, such as teens using e-mail to deceive parents about their activities." G.W.

C. Study these comic trips. Find out what it depicts about the consequence of the use of technology on relationships, learning and life.

Abstraction

     Technology is a blessing for man. With technology, there is a lot that we can do which we could not do then. With cellphones, webcam, you will be closer to someone miles away. So far yet so close! That is your feeling when you talk through a cell phone to a beloved who is far away from home. Just think of the many human lives saved because of speedy notifications via cellphones. 

In education technology is bane when:

• the learner is made to accept as Gospel truth information they get from the Internet
• the learner surfs the internet for pornography
• the learner has an uncritical mind on images floating on televisions and computers that represent modernity and progress
• the TV makes the learner a mere spectator for computer-assisted instruction unmindful of the world and so fails to develop the ability to relate to others
• we make use of the Internet to do character assassination of people whom we hardly like
• we use overuse and abuse TV or film viewing as a strategy to kill time

     Technology contributes much to the improvement of the teaching-learning process and to the humanization of life. It is indeed a blessing. But when not used properly, it becomes a detriment to instruction and human progress and development.

     Technology is made for man and not man for technology. Technology is made for the teacher and not the teacher for technology. This means technology is meant to serve a man in all aspects of life including instruction. It is man, and in the context of the classroom, the teacher, who determines how technology ought to be used in order to reap the maximum benefits that come along with technology.

     The integration of technology in the instructional process must be geared towards:

• interactive and meaningful learning
• the development of creative and critical thinking
• the development and nurturing of teamwork
• efficient and effective teaching

Postscript - Thank God for the gift of new technology!

    Now with the computer, I may commit as many typographical error as I can and I have not to re-do the whole thing again. How convenient! What a liberation!