Keeping the lights on

Not too long ago, a conversation with a colleague about the effect of people’s careers on the world made me stop and think. Sometimes, we teachers take teaching for granted. As teachers, we have a unique opportunity to make a difference in the world; to influence others’ lives in a significant way. What will our students remember about their experiences in our classes? How will their online learning experience influence their lives?

Perhaps the New Year is a good time to reflect on each of our contributions and to the built-in influence that is part of a career in teaching. Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, Inc., states in a recent article in PC Magazine that “Most IT departments spend around 70 percent of their budgets simply ‘keeping the lights on.’” Social anthropologist Dr. Jennifer James, in her speech to COSA last June, explained that one of the differences in the Digital Generation is that it is the first generation to grow up with all their basic needs fulfilled. This generation has more time, opportunity, and money than any previous generation to fulfill their need for self-actualization, and they intuitively know this. I believe that to reach these students, we have to do more than just “keep the light on.” Social networking, multimedia, and Web 2.0 provide us with tools, but it is our job to create opportunities for our students to use those tools to develop the communication, innovation, and creative skills that life in the 21st Century requires.

It is our challenge as technology-using educators, delivering education over the Internet, to do more than just “keep the lights on”. It should be our mission to lead by example and to create best practices on how this can be accomplished. Our challenge is to structure our lessons and our courses to reach beyond the basic, beyond the norm—to tap into the self-actualization and innovation that each of our students is capable of; to create meaning by creating new content and repurposing old content in new ways, using the tools of the 21st century.