Steve Arnold: Connecting Students, Teachers and Technology

Using technology to connect students with learning, new experiences, and the global community motivates Steve Arnold, vice-chair of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. He dropped by OSU recently for a couple of old-fashioned face-to-face conversations about applying the most innovative technology to education and refurbishing Education Hall for the next one hundred years.

Counting George Lucas and Bill Gates as colleagues, Steve sees technology as a powerful vehicle for learning. “Technology is changing the ways of communication and the ways we relate to each other,” he says. “The distance between asking the question and getting the answer is collapsed by technology.”

Steve’s perspectives about the roles of teachers in relationship to technology are revealing. He says, “The teacher becomes a facilitator in the process of learning and doesn’t have to deliver all the teaching. Teachers now are struggling between preserving the past versus consuming information in a different way.”

Listen to a podcast with Theresa Hogue of the Corvallis Gazette-Times interviewing Steve where he explains why “students should be good at more than the written word…they should be media literate.”