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The Didactron
A Tale of Educators' Lives in a High-Tech Teaching-Learning Space ©

by Robert H. Giles, Jr.

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Introduction and Preface

Dedication:

For my wife Mary Wilson Burnette Giles and daughters Anne Clelland and Margaret Galecki, all teachers and learners, and other beautiful humans.

I once thought I could develop a superior teaching and learning space. I started developing proposals to various government and other groups in 1968. Those failed and I have intermittently studied and revised and have tried ever since to get help and to get a start on such a space. The older I got, the more difficult it was to carry around an overhead projector. Eventually all classrooms had such devices…a major innovation. Now there are a few special teaching rooms, but throughout schools throughout the country, the blackboard (or some modern version) holds fast. Distance-learning emerges like a spring-time conk from dead wood. It can be a helper and unifier, but it cannot carry the educators' load.

I eventually gave up, then decided to write about what I thought might be the potentials. Maybe a design document, an image-equivalent of an old blue-print, might shed light on a very important topic. Eventually, we'll all have to realize the limits of education and what it has come to mean. We'll have to concentrate on building knowledge bases and on people's ability to do things, to perform. We have abilities and see needs to change them. The unit of change becomes the objective of so-called educational acts and thus we can see the needs for significant change, from one ability or state to another. First, we have to decide what we want to be able to do after the successful education. Being sure of that change and making it reasonably permanent is part of the task. The other part is making it cost effective. As elsewhere in life, what we want is not what we can afford. Sometimes, what we need cannot be afforded either.

Robert H. Giles, Jr.

The Didactron seems expensive to some people. All of my thought leads me to believe that the cost per unit of significant desired, lasting behavioral change will be much less that the results of our historical and current procedures in the public schools and universities that I have known.

I continue to praise the rare exceptions, those brilliant teachers and special conditions. They are too rare. It is time for a alternatives for most people who will learn and be taught.

Perhaps you will share ideas with me about some of the topic(s) Email the author, use the address attempting to avoid vandals, by merging and sending to RHGiles, the at symbol, and RuralSystem and then add a dot.com

Last revision January, 2008.