- How can we manage innovation better? How can we control this “disruption”?
- How can we manage resources effectively to keep the technology current?
- How can we figure out what skills outcomes are best supported by technology and which skills are best taught in other ways? Are we going to need to create areas that are high-tech and others that are high-human?
- What is the value of an education that has a high cost in human capital + high cost technology? How can we make an argument for the non-technological strengths of Lawrenceville while ensuring that we keep the program innovative and up-to-date? Is there a value-added in the use of technology in classrooms at Lawrenceville? What is it?
- How does the use of technology play into the debate over the need to teach to 21st century skills such as collaboration, communication, flexibility and initiative?
- How do we cope in schools with the digital divide between generations that will persist and perhaps widen over the years? How can teachers who are not “digital natives” learn to teach these skills and create more effective learning through the use of technology? What does this mean for teacher preparation and mentoring? How can we create expectations for the appropriate use of technology in schools?
- What is the value-added to the educational outcomes provided by digital technology? Have we shown that value-added? [Note: unfortunately, there is little way to monetize the production of good educational software]
This is the blog site for the technology committee at the Lawrenceville School. We hope to use this site as a place for discussion about the role of technology in a Lawrenceville education, bringing in the voices of teachers, students, parents, alumni, and the world at large. We will also maintain a collection of related resources here.
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I think ultimately that we have to weave technology into the fabric of a Lawrenceville education in such a way that it is a supplement to and not a replacement for face-to-face communication.
ReplyDeleteThe irony, I believe, in a generation that is moving increasingly towards a life filled to the brim with technology is that no matter how much we remove ourselves from social interaction, the people who have the communication skills to talk and interact with other people are the ones who will succeed the most in the years to come.
The first example I site is Zappos. If you are not familiar with this website, they sell shoes online. The site's success was so staggering that Amazon bought it to absorb the competition. In any rate, Zappos is a great example of removing society from social interaction. Instead of walking into a store and engaging in conversation with a salesperson, one can simply click "buy" on a website and be done with the whole process.
But Zappos understood that at the end of the day, problems would arise and there needed to be effective communication between the company and the consumers. So in staff training, Zappos taught people to engage the consumer in a friendly manner. If they heard a dog in the background, & they themselves had a dog, then strike up a conversation with the consumer about dogs. If the consumer mentions the town or state or region where they are from, & the employee knows about that area, then strike up a conversation about it.
The result? Zappos is one of the most highly rated companies for customer service and its sales are extraordinary.
Groupon, another massive internet sensation, is another example of the importance of communication. If you don't know them, Groupon sells online coupons to consumers in their cities. Spas, Restaurants, events, etc. They offer one daily STEEP discount (50-90%) on a particular product/service in a city. In two years, Groupon rose to be a billion dollar company, but one of its driving mantras is Customer Service. If customers have a problem, they can actually call groupon and get a live human on the phone and sort through the issue.
In a world where the automated message has become increasingly popular amongst corporate entities, and the "Conact Us" part of website leads you to send an e-mail instead of make a call, here are two massivey successful companies that have bucked that trend and have provided human interaction as means for solving problems.
Apple did a similar thing with its wildly successful Apple Stores. Instead of making a phone call and getting an automated machine, one can walk into a store a speak directly with a human to solve a problem. Apple recently passed Microsoft with the 2nd highest valuation behind only Exxon.
I find in my interaction with the younger generations, that social skills have deteriorated in a staggering fashion. Despite the trend moving towards all-technology-all-the-time, dealing with others on a social level is going to separate the cream of the crop going forward because nothing can truly replace human contact in the real world. The people who succeed will be the ones who can balance both the technology and the interaction. Lawrenceville needs to do everything in its power to add technology into the mix while maintaining the greatest skill one can learn in high school: how to communicate effectively with others.
-Perry Kalmus '99
I think ultimately that we have to weave technology into the fabric of a Lawrenceville education in such a way that it is a supplement to and not a replacement for face-to-face communication.
ReplyDeleteThe irony, I believe, in a generation that is moving increasingly towards a life filled to the brim with technology is that no matter how much we remove ourselves from social interaction, the people who have the communication skills to talk and interact with other people are the ones who will succeed the most in the years to come.
The first example I site is Zappos. If you are not familiar with this website, they sell shoes online. The site's success was so staggering that Amazon bought it to absorb the competition. In any rate, Zappos is a great example of removing society from social interaction. Instead of walking into a store and engaging in conversation with a salesperson, one can simply click "buy" on a website and be done with the whole process.
But Zappos understood that at the end of the day, problems would arise and there needed to be effective communication between the company and the consumers. So in staff training, Zappos taught people to engage the consumer in a friendly manner. If they heard a dog in the background, & they themselves had a dog, then strike up a conversation with the consumer about dogs. If the consumer mentions the town or state or region where they are from, & the employee knows about that area, then strike up a conversation about it.
The result? Zappos is one of the most highly rated companies for customer service and its sales are extraordinary.
Groupon, another massive internet sensation, is another example of the importance of communication. If you don't know them, Groupon sells online coupons to consumers in their cities. Spas, Restaurants, events, etc. They offer one daily STEEP discount (50-90%) on a particular product/service in a city. In two years, Groupon rose to be a billion dollar company, but one of its driving mantras is Customer Service. If customers have a problem, they can actually call groupon and get a live human on the phone and sort through the issue.
In a world where the automated message has become increasingly popular amongst corporate entities, and the "Conact Us" part of website leads you to send an e-mail instead of make a call, here are two massivey successful companies that have bucked that trend and have provided human interaction as means for solving problems.
Apple did a similar thing with its wildly successful Apple Stores. Instead of making a phone call and getting an automated machine, one can walk into a store a speak directly with a human to solve a problem. Apple recently passed Microsoft with the 2nd highest valuation behind only Exxon.
I find in my interaction with the younger generations, that social skills have deteriorated in a staggering fashion. Despite the trend moving towards all-technology-all-the-time, dealing with others on a social level is going to separate the cream of the crop going forward because nothing can truly replace human contact in the real world. The people who succeed will be the ones who can balance both the technology and the interaction. Lawrenceville needs to do everything in its power to add technology into the mix while maintaining the greatest skill one can learn in high school: how to communicate effectively with others.
@Perry - Great examples! You really distilled the essence of this: How do we strike the proper balance here? John Naisbitt in his bestseller Megatrends (1982!) called it "high-tech / high-touch".
ReplyDeletePerhaps start a technology counsel on campus that systematically addresses electronic technologies to determine best practices for their exploitation...Email, IM, Forums, Blogs, Screensharing. The team could do a best practices survey across the Internet, determine baseline recommendations, then push out guidelines to the campus population that could then continue to refine them. These guidelines would not be absolute rules, but general rules of thumb to give the population healthy technology habits. they could be revisited over time by new generations of counsel members that would rotate periodically to keep perspectives fresh.
ReplyDeleteThanks Marc! Our Board of Trustees is working on this now and we expect to soon bring in a group of teachers from different disciplines to act as "evangelists" in their department.
ReplyDelete