Content area
Full Text
Rethinking Education in The Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America, by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson
"... in today's world, one of accelerating change, in which many skills become obsolete nearly as fast as they are learned, both schooling and learning are under siege."
-Allan Collins & Richard Halverson
INTRODUCTION
Book reviews are generally about a newly (if not recently) released work. Such currency of publication presumably represents what is better in the form of what's trending, cutting edge, or around the corner (about to be birthed as the next phase of the new and, subsequently, better) and we hope in the grand scheme of things that matter to us. However, every now and then, a work comes along that captures our imagination, and then we place it on the bookshelf of progressive, revolutionary, and critical ideas to gather dust as it germinates into a classic. Over time, such a work grows in importance due to the timeless stimulating questions raise, which are predicated upon arguments that confront the status quo and serve as fertile ground for trending predictions (however, shortsighted those turn out to be in the long run). Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, in hindsight, have such a book written just 5 years after the Web 2.0 tools revolution and in the explosive yet nascent midst of such webbased tools proliferation.
This thoughtful work, with all its inherent flaws and optimistic assumptions, portends an envisioned future, which skeptics despised and enthusiasts oversold, that has not come to fruition as a result of many variances known and yet to be known. It is time nonetheless to knock the dust off this seminal work and take a look anew at the ideas it purports as seeds of the digital revolution as well as take stock of progress made in these early years of the current lifelong era of education to which we have shifted and are now experiencing. As such, this book review is most warranted.
CONTENT
Part 1: Technology Enthusiasts Versus Technology Skeptics
This insightful book opens with "How Education Is Changing" (Chapter 1), which showcases the coauthors' big-picture view of the "current" state of education premised upon their central argument that there are "deep incompatibilities between the demands...