My brainstorming
No teacher can deny there has been a gap between tech advancement and tech advancement inclusion in the classroom, neither can we deny that for many years learners were considered –and perhaps in many places still- ‘bottles to be filled’ with knowledge, and such knowledge mostly coming from the teacher. No doubt such a perspective has also changed with the results from research in education and new trends, new tech advances and easy access to information from different sources. Of course many teachers now considerer learners as dialectic beings, people with previous knowledge, different backgrounds, self-directed agents that bring their ideas to enrich the learning processes, and many teacher make use of tech, of course. The way I see it, the discussion about ‘can software replace teachers’ may lead to other questions such as do people want to replace teachers by software? Will be software able –or is it already able- to tell when to use certain expressions in real life conversation? Software already can do a lot of stuff but I don’t think software can replace a dialectic relationship, or motivate you and this is something teachers can do, of course I agree when Ken when he says we should re-think our roles.

IMO, the classroom of today was instituted because it was a more efficient way to provide factory-style instruction to the young people of any country.

For a while the Bill Gates foundation was spending money on promoting smaller schools, until people started realizing that smaller schools often do not have the resources to provide the range of subjects and equipment and teachers that we consider important.

That being said, other people have pointed out that our current system ensures that young people spend inordinate amounts of time around other young people, whereas in former times they would have spent most of their teenage years around adults learning to become adults.

In addition, most of what I want to learn these days I can manage to learn by finding the materials I want on the web. However, I attend Chinese classes because I can get interaction with a native Chinese speaker. If there was a computer program available that could converse with me as well as a native Chinese speaker, there would be less need for me to attend classes …

She was an American who became some kind of missionary in China later. From what my wife tells you would like her methods - heavily focused on speaking, action, participation. Lots of variety. And highly enthusiastic. Obviously she left a life long deep impression.

The sort of teacher you cannot replace by softare or even podcasts.

Henning

It’s really common for people in China to stay in touch with their teachers. This can last well into old age when you can’t tell the teacher from the student.

Ken

My wife still talks about her English teacher in China. She must have been truely outstanding in capturing her students.

Here the role of the teacher comes into play. She or he needs to capture the students, to interact with them, and to guide them. Show the importance of the material and lay out a path. Make them look behind the curtains and discuss the resaoning behind the facts. Enable them to build up on your course after that stupid test is over. Sometimes you succeed in motivating them instantaneously, and sometimes it takes some time until they realize the importance of the content.

Some of the subjects I found most fascinating in University proved to be utterly useless later, while others, that I regarded to be boring those days, steadily gained in value over the years. And I still hear those professors voices, remember their habits, their approaches, their examples. It is personal.

For kids you have a total different ballgame. No way kids education can be handed over to programs ever. Not for my kids for sure.

I don’t think the purpose of tech should be to ‘accentuate the teacher’. The classroom shouldn’t be about the teacher. To my mind, the tech should be there to enhance the learning, which is pretty much why the teacher is there, too.

Nor am I totally on board with the ‘Humor, kindness, caring, concern, warmth, joy, anger, love ..’etc. It would be easy, for example, to add ‘control’, ‘lecture’, and ‘dominate’, etc. But more to the point, this suggests again that the teacher is the center of the world. Surely she is not the only source of these things in a room full of 16 kids! (If she is, then we have a serious probelem in our classrooms.) I’m not sure why we need to expose our kids to such an artificial environment for 8 hours a day to see basic human emotions.

If software could make the teaching of standard math more efficient, then I say, by all means, do it. With the time and money we all save, let he kids get out of the classroom and do some real learning.

I honestly believe that teachers need to fundamentally re-think our roles.

Ken Carroll

Frankly, what I understand you to say is that by eliminating teachers we can reduce the cost of education. Fine (perhaps) for self-motivated adults but I don’t want my children taught by heartless, soul less, emotionless machines.

And frankly I don’t think most children want it that way either.

I’m afraid that as an educator that cost savings is simply not a good enough reason to advocate eliminating teachers in favor of C .

In the end, the short 10-30 minute teacher intervention, no matter how messy it may be, will become a centerpiece of networked education not something to be eliminated. I’d be thinking of how to use software to accentuate the teacher not eliminate her.