Technology Competency and Associated Challenges

Bill Gates stated in a speech, “In all areas of the curriculum, teachers must teach an information-based inquiry process to meet the demands of the Information Age. This is the challenge for the world’s most important profession. Meeting this challenge will be impossible unless educators are willing to join the revolution and embrace the new technology tools available.”…. Every educator looks at the integration of technology—and its challenges — from a different perspective. Technology coordinators view the problems of insufficient hardware, software, and training as major obstacles. Teachers consider the lack of time to develop technology-based lesson a concern. Administrators identify teachers’ lack of experience using technology in instruction as yet another challenge. Teachers and administrators, however, can and are beginning to overcome these barriers with effective leadership, proper training, planning, and a commitment to enhancing teaching and learning using technologies. (Shelly, Cashman, Gunter, & Gunter, 2004, pp. 6.10-6.11)

Teaching with Educational Technology

The 21st century brings the Pacific islands unwelcome currents. Global economic integration will strip Pacific islands of trade preferences. Radical weather change, reef damage, and sea level rise will push natural resources toward extinction. To buck the tide, we do not need business-as-usual leaders. We need mould-breaking, heroic leadership. Education is key. We had better start teaching our kids political science from the cradle. In the next century, social ills rooted in economic injustice and flourishing in ethnic and religious strife will continue to generate desperation in the world’s poverty pockets. Instead of stirring clouds of human rights allegations, we must learn to live with the migrants and refugees fleeing to our shores. Television, the great leveller, homogenises cultural values in every corner of the world. Indigenous language erodes. Island cultures are swamped. The heroic leader will need a worldly education and a “bend-your-back for others” apprenticeship in traditional island service. (Bruce, 1998, p. 126)

Second Language Acquisition and Online Learning

In responding to the need for quality EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher education, my university also offers English majors an EFL teacher education course, which can be counted toward teacher accreditation program credits. The EFL methodology course includes lectures and activities to familiarize students with theoretical bases of EFL instruction and hands-on classroom practices. One special component of the course is the incorporation of cross-cultural e-mail correspondence, allowing prospective teachers to communicate with fellow pre-service bilingual/ESL teachers in the United States. The cross-cultural component of the course is an attempt to foster the prospective teachers’ reflectivity through social/interpersonal interactions with a distant group of colleagues made possible by Internet technology. (Liaw, 2003a, pp. 1-2)

Teaching with Educational Technology

There was a time, not too many years ago, when word processing was the most popular computer activity among students. For most students, the computer was little more than a high-powered typewriter. Today, a PC can be a window into the global system of interconnected networks known as the Internet…. The World Wide Web makes the Internet accessible to people all over the planet. The Web is a huge portion of the Internet that includes a wealth of multimedia content accessible through simple point-and-click programs called Web browsers. Web browsers on PCs and other devices serve as windows into the Web’s richly diverse information space. (Beekman, 2005, pp. 16-17)

Technology, Educational Media, and E-Resources

Digital computers have been around for some 50 years. Their influence has been felt in fits and starts. Early significant applications were in science, engineering and mathematics. In the last 20 years, we have seen computing become relatively universal with stand-alone PCs and workstations commonplace in homes, offices and factories. Both computational power and data storage capacity have become relatively cheap. Powerful application packages for word-processing, numerical processing and graphical work are readily available. Data of all kinds can now be represented and manipulated digitally, including photographs, video and audio tracks. Increasingly all of this is possible not just on stand-alone computers but also over networks and in particular the Internet. (Ryan, Scott, Freeman, & Patel, 2001, p. 9)

An E-Learning Journey

A day in the life of a student in the year 2010: A student enters a learning center building and goes directly to her personal information panel. After checking in, the student is prompted to attach her electronic notebooks to upload homework from the prior day and transmit any communications from her parents. This information is sent to her is age-appropriate and is processed based on the type/assessment criteria. The assessed work is uploaded to her file, which she can access when she attends the class that deals with the information. This information is used as a personal baseline for the day’s individually designed learning activities. She also may upload her work electronically via the Internet to receive constructive feedback in a timely manner to make decisions on the process and progress of her work. (Smith & Shelley, 2002, p. 21)

Academic Online Resources and Global Implications

The question of finding the right information is perhaps even more important, and it requires a new organizing principle of information for the digital age…. The problem that people are running into with digitized information is that the amount of information is growing exponentially. The number of Web sites has grown from 5,000 to 50 million over the last 10 years or so, and the information they contain is very dynamic. At the same time, search engines are becoming more powerful and people are creating more sophisticated, semantically based retrieval mechanisms. All of that will, in fact, improve the quality of search and finding information. However, there is a different dimension, that of video and audio information, which cannot be routinely indexed and searched at present. (Goodman, 2001, pp. 13-14)

Educational Technology and Learning Theories

Because of the changing nature of today’s students, economic pressures, and rapid implementation of distance learning courses and programs, definitions of what constitutes education and learning are changing, too. Whatever years ago instructors viewed their students as blank slates whose minds could be filled with the information they were imparting, current constructivist theory holds that students, through their interaction with one another, the instructor, and their environment, create knowledge and meaning. (Palloff & Pratt, 2001, p. 3)

Guam and Micronesia

Pacific means “peaceful.” Ferdinand Magellan named it when he became the first European to sail across the ocean in 1521. Since it was so calm, he called it the Pacific Ocean. Magellan never saw one of the Pacific typhoons. A few years before Magellan, a Spanish explorer named Balboa was the first European to see the ocean when he walked across the Isthmus of Panama. Since he was facing south, he named the ocean the South Seas. Actually, most of the ocean was to the west of him. If you look at a globe of the Earth, you will notice that the Pacific Ocean is the single largest feature on Earth. All other oceans and all continents are smaller than the Pacific. (Ridgell, 1995, p. 3)