Below is an excerpt from a recent post on the iPads in Education Ning entitled, Do iPads Have the Capacity to Change Education?  I encourage you to read the entire posting, but I thought the following excerpt was spot-on:

"In her study of how technology is used in industry, Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has identified two distinct phases in the way new tools are implemented. She calls them "Automating" and "Informating". In the Automating stage, new tools are used to reinforce existing practices and processes. We see this stamped all over the educational space. Smartboard use that reinforces existing frontal teaching methods. Digital content replacing paper distribution. Technology that speeds the efficiency of existing standardized testing. The essence and character of traditional educational practices however hasn't changed. It's still "business as usual" in most American schools.

The second phase of a tool's implementations - "Informating" as Professor Zuboff calls it - involves the re-imagination of processes using the new technologies. Instead of focusing on making existing processes more efficient, we start to look at entirely new methods and goals. We are in the infancy of that stage in education. In the Informating phase, educators reevaluate goals, visions and processes:

- We see a society that values skills such as critical thinking, communication and creativity over the rote memorization of content. After all, the vast majority of content can be easily accessed within seconds on most mobile devices.
- We value new literacies such as informational literacy that enables students to access, filter and evaluate the evolving mass of content now available.
- We recognize an emerging global society where development of collaborative skills far outweigh traditional demands that students sit still, listen and work only on their own.
- We understand and value the use of text as a means of conveying information but also recognize that alternative medias are the language of new generations and their use needs to be encouraged in schools.
- We feel the empowerment granted by new technologies and their ability to move us from frontal delivery of content to involving students in discovery based and interactive learning practices."