XplanaZine

I’m not much of a church-goer and am certainly not aligned with any of the evangelical or fundamentalist Christian groups. If I attend church at all, it is in a mainstream protestant building where I can expect an intellectual homily and that safe feeling of tradition.

On the other hand, I have watched fundamentalist Christian groups grow almost exponentially thanks in large part to their embracing of change and their use and exploitation of technology.

I first started watching this phenomenon back in the 80’s. Mainstream protestant denominations that had once been the backbone of religion in the States were already being swept aside by Evangelical Protestants who understood TV and had better sound systems and acoustics.

In the 90’s, the conservative Christian movement embraced video and multimedia presentations. Homilies were supported by animated gifs inside of PowerPoint presentations. More recently, these groups have embraced the Web, streaming media, and blogs.

Certainly, the more liberal mainstream Christian groups have adapted as well as they can, but attending the “progressive” service at a traditional Methodist church is a little like watching a 7-foot white man walk down the dirt path of a Central American village — it just doesn’t quite fit.

As a liberal, this is the same way I felt during the last Presidential election. “Hey,” I said, “if we’re so smart and sophisticated, how come the other guys just beat the crap out of us with our own technology.” Sure, we had Moveon.com, but they whipped us with radio spots in rural America . And we talked a big game with our blogs, but they adapted more quickly to change and had a better integration of Web and TV.

In both instances — religion and politics — technology has proven itself to be a diffusive power indifferent to ideals or emotions. It has become a democratic weapon there for the taking, ready to empower whatever owner is bold enough to wield it.

Michael Schrage talks about this “democratization” if innovation in his farewell article for Technology Review:

The Big Lie of the Information Age is that “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” What nonsense. In reality, nothing in this world is more powerful than an innovation that has diffused to the point where it enjoys both global reach and global impact. Ready access to ideas promotes awareness, but ready access to innovation promotes empowerment and opportunity.”

Schrage goes on to say that:

the challenge for policymakers and populations alike is how to cope with the pervasive — and perverse — consequences of ever more people gaining ever greater access to ever more innovations that offer ever greater impact for ever lower costs. Why? Because diffusion is inherently messy and unpredictable, and because the ingenuity of a technology’s adopters more than rivals the creativity of its original innovators. We ignore this at our peril.

I like that last part — “Because diffusion is inherently messy and unpredictable, and because the ingenuity of a technology’s adopters more than rivals the creativity of its original innovators.”

And I like to think it’s true. Especially that last part. I like to believe that we as teachers and educators will seize the technology before us and mold it with our ingenuity. I want to believe that we will be willing to take blogs and RSS and VoIP and every other great collaborative tool and turn it on its head so that learning can be transformed and transformative.

I have my suspicions, of course, that education will be transformed by technology, but not by the traditional and current institutions or educators. My hope is that it will happen at the hands of a new breed of enlightened educator who really gets the potential of what we are witnessing. My fear is that it will happen at the hands of dangerous ideologues that are willing to embrace technology and change to win converts.

podcast feed
i-podder download