From Now On

From Now On

I first came across Jamie McKenzie in the early 90’s when I was beginning work on my Masters' degree in Educational Technology and Media. He had been the technology coordinator of the Bellingham, Washington (think Microsoft and Boeing) school district when it published one of the first comprehensive sets of technology and acceptable use policies available on the Internet. Those policies seemed fairly forward thinking at the time and were widely copied by a number of other school districts. Later, I began to come across his writings through LM_Net, the listserv subscribed to by most teacher-librarians that I know (although we were called media specialists then). He had begun publishing a monthly email newsletter called "From Now On," that warned many districts against wholesale adoption of technology.

From Now On has since become an online webzine that publishes articles devoted to technology integration, information literacy, and authentic learning experiences. It has also spun off a couple of sister publications: "The Question Mark" devoted to questioning and higher level thinking skills ("Learning to Question to Wonder to Learn"), and "No Child Left.com" which features McKenzie’s thinking on No Child Left Behind ("17 Reasons NCLB Must Go.")

McKenzie casts a questioning glance toward technology that I applaud. Recently he took Marc Prensky’s notion of "digital natives" to task for sloppy thinking and "arcade scholarship. Hip. Clever. Glib. Wrong." "The field of education technology has suffered a surfeit of fools and poseurs claiming to be futurists and visionaries." In his article "The Technology Treadmill," he cautions, "We had best be discerning making use of these new tools only when they enhance learning and do something that justifies the expense involved in acquiring and feeding them." Our real mission is to help our students become humans first and to help them to "question, ponder, wonder and contribute." Too often the technologies that we adopt become mind-deadening tools focused on lower level skills, and the internet becomes a welter of information that leads to data-smog overwhelming our students. We must find ways to help them learn to think first and then to find the tools that contribute to their thinking.

To that end, McKenzie has produced and publicized a number of strategies for teachers to help their students become become better readers, writers, thinkers, and communicators. In addition to "The Question Mark," McKenzie has adopted a form of web-quests that he calls Slam Dunk Lessons (SDL.) He has the teacher narrow the information sources down to a single thought provoking digital source, whether an article, a picture, or even just a quote, and engages the students to deeper, thought provoking questions about that source. Recently, McKenzie has been pushing for "authentic intellectual work," based on Fred Newmann’s concept of "authentic teaching." Authentic assignments delineate issues that students are intimately concerned with and then use learning activities that include not only research but also "real world" activities such as interviews or even volunteer social work before coming to conclusions and recommendations based on their findings.

His writings on "authentic learning" in the language arts mirror many of the ideas and strategies that came out of the "whole language" movement of the 80’s and 90’s: students will be more engaged and motivated when they have control and ownership over their topics, their time, and their products. Technology can play a key role in this process, especially through mind tools such as Inspiration, and electronic text since it is permeable, fluid, malleable, responsive, available, transportable, and marriageable.

Often, the articles at From Now On seem truncated, shortened versions of chapters from the books or the presentations that McKenzie presents. Sometimes the graphics that accompany the articles seem a bit contrived and distract from the message. But always the messages that the articles present are worth pondering as an antidote to the "techno-shills" that often inundate us with snake-oil promises.