March of the Luddites

Are teachers technophobes? Something I read in Dave Warlick's blog yesterday really got me thinking. He wrote about a friend of his who opined that many of the teachers she works with can't even do an e-mail attachment. Dave countered that he just didn't believe that teachers were that far behind the curve. I'm not sure I can agree.

In my job as a Technology Facilitator, I'm often amazed at how many of the teachers of my generation (I'm a boomer) get down right uncomfortable when it comes to doing anything on a computer. My office is housed in the parish (county) career center, and you'd think that if there's anywhere in the system you could find a technically minded faculty, it would be here. But, to the contrary, I can cite endless anecdotes illustrating aversion to anything more techie than a mechanical pencil.

I can only imagine how overwhelmed some of these teachers would be in a one-laptop-per-child teaching environment. I honestly think some of them would opt to resign rather than deal with it. It would surly make realizing my (and many others) dream of an OLPC school system a mixed blessing.

Could this phenomonon be the true underlying cause that's stonewalling the implimentation of Web 2.0 techniques in today's classrooms? Would so many school systems have blocks on MySpace and YouTube if there were a concerted outcry from teachers to remove them? We as teachers are quick to blame our technological stagnation on administrative roadblocks and funding, but maybe we share more of the blame than we're willing to admit.