Introduction

Welcome to paidogogos, my occasionally updated musings on instructional&educational technology. I've begun this exercise mostly to help crystallize my own thoughts on how technology and education interrelate. I've been working in this field for more than a decade, yet I spend half my time at conferences surprised at some idea out of left field that makes me feel like a dinosaur, and the other half surprised at the other folks who seem stuck in the stone age compared to us. Yet most of these new technologies have a pretty thin track record in terms of verifiable impact on learning- the number of talks, papers and ideas with detailed statistics on learning outcomes is low at best and often close to zero. (And this includes a lot of my own.)

So where do we go from here? Are our current projector + Smartboard equipped classrooms really effective? Do Web 2.0 technologies really translate into a different (and better) way of working and learning? Is Powerpoint truly a tool of the devil, or perhaps just a mild annoyance?

I've taken the name of the blog from the Greek παιδαγωγέω, a slave who would accompany a young boy in ancient Greece to supervise his education, make sure that he went to school and that he behaved while he was there. It's the origin of the modern word pedagogy, the science of teaching. Interestingly, the word origin assumes that you only teach children!