Does the Chalkboard Still Have a Role to Play?

As part of a course I am taking this semester, I’m exploring the Horizon Project, mostly focusing on their process for coming up with their technologies.  I’ve been having lots of fun exploring the wiki, checking out some of the examples they provide for each of their technologies.  One example of collaboration webs–a technology that will be mainstream in a year or less–is a very cool use of Pageflakes by the Writing Program at the University of Southern California.  It’s an interesting mix of old and new.  The content is old: the “topoi” are lenses for viewing an issue and they originated with Aristotle.  The pageflakes site is very new and incorporates video, RSS, text and images.  It would be a useful site for beginning writers outside USC.

I watched the classroom discussion video related to the topoi and laughed out loud as the camera panned outward:

Pageflakes - Mark's The Topoi Flakes
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

It’s a chalkboard! A good, old-fashioned chalkboard! The writing prompt scribbled on the chalkboard is about comparing the coverage of news stories through the web and the mainstream media. But it’s scribbled on a chalkboard.  I guess it’s a good lesson about using the technology that is available but it just struck me as an odd juxtaposition to the very 21st century technology being used to display the video. Here I sit in Virginia watching a video of a USC professor pointing to a chalkboard.  Really a sign of the times in which we live where old and new exist side by side.

5 thoughts on “Does the Chalkboard Still Have a Role to Play?

  1. Karen,

    That chalkboard is a green screen of the kind that are ubiquitous in southern California, and I am completely CGI.

    Actually, what you say is so pertinent. The goal of our educational project has got to be to use the technology that best serves the moment not some sort of tech for tech-sake or fetishizing the new.

    You might enjoy this post, too:
    http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2008/08/23/widget-based-education/

    I’m just glad you weren’t laughing out loud at my orange shirt. Good luck with the course!

  2. If we accept the proposition that teachers should understand how to use any available technology to enahance their practice and help kids learn, then we must include the chalkboard. And posterboard, finger paints and the pencil. There are simply times when analog beats digital.

    However, having made that point, explaining the “21st-century reinterpretation” of an ancient writing technique using a chalkboard does have a few too many dichotomies. 🙂

  3. Thanks, Mark, for sharing…I hadn’t seen it and it makes an excellent point about the potential of analog tools like the pencil. For someone who routinely seems to be arguing with Word about just what it is that I want to do, I resonated with your comment about being limited by the cursor.

    My biggest concern when I work with educators is that I send the message that “old” tools are no longer acceptable. There are relative advantages and disadvantages to all the tools we use.

  4. Yes, I think that often comes across as the message beneath any time we try to sell new tech (particularly if we’re excited about it). That’s why I find it’s useful when we point out (as you have) how much we’re interested in media literacy broadly not just new media literacy.

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