"Backup Education?"

"Backup Education?" Marc Prensky asks. No: don't just back up. Get out of the way. Far out of the way.

People are generally frightened of change. It represents challenge, discomfort, mental and physical stretching--all things that most people don't want to endure if they don't have to. After all, isn't technology and our ever-evolving world supposed to be about convenience and ease, rather than the kind of discomfort that might be brought along by large-scale change?

I get it. I don't want to be stretched in two different directions in my life either. Hardly ever do I wish poly-directional stretching on myself, especially voluntarily. And I think it is the basic human response to the notion of "change"--a largely emotional, perhaps latent "fight-or-flight"-type response--that drives much of the emotion that swirls around the topic Prensky tackles: why do some teachers devote huge amounts of mental resources into trying to deny the central role that technology plays in education? Is it because they don't want to be stretched personally? Or is it because they genuinely believe that technology as a central facet of education is not in the best interest of students?

In the end--assuming that technology is not "going away" (which strikes me as a fairly safe bet)--it seems like many tech-wary teachers are going to have to make a choice: join the 21st century or get out of the way. Support and adopt the use of "real-world" tools in the classroom--or at least be quiet about not supporting them: don't be proverbial "sticks in the mud," don't form pockets of people whose main goal focuses essentially on failure--the hope that the wide-spread application and use of technology will essentially fail. It seems that the message that "backup educators" should be digesting is as simple as a Disney story moral: in the words of Thumper's mother in Bambi, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." Or is that too much of a stretch?

It feels like backup education teachers will eventually be irrelevant once we reach a point in time when it is simply absurd and irresponsible to exclude technology from the classroom. Some argue that that day has already arrived. The million dollar question: when will that day be widely recognized by the masses as having arrived? 2012? 2015? 2020 or beyond?