Technology and our misunderstandings

The Los Angeles Times trumpeted a bizarre column on Super Bowl Sunday from Michael Hiltzik titled "Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?" It was an attack on Arne Duncan's Digital Learning Day pronouncement that his goal for Obama's second term was the enrichment of Apple, which I've already attacked on much firmer pedagogical grounds. But what was really ironic in the column was the contribution of University of Southern California professor Richard E. Clark.

"The media you use make no difference at all to learning," Clark, director of the Center for Cognitive Technology at USC, is quoted as saying. "Not one dang bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years." Which is all quite true, and I do not know here if Clark's statement is being used completely out of context here or not by Hiltzik, because Clark is not heard from again.

And Hiltzik leaps to a different academic, and a different argument immediately. "Almost every generation has been subjected in its formative years to some "groundbreaking" pedagogical technology. In the '60s and '70s," he writes before another quote, '"instructional TV was going to revolutionize everything," recalls Thomas C. Reeves, an instructional technology expert at the University of Georgia. "But the notion that a good teacher would be just as effective on videotape is not the case."'

Then Hiltzik rushes back 16 years, back to when I was integrating technology - I believe very successfully - into both high school and university classrooms (full, up-to-date research tools in every room, simulations in science classrooms, interaction in learning second languages), and writes, "Many would-be educational innovators treat technology as an end-all and be-all, making no effort to figure out how to integrate it into the classroom. "Computers, in and of themselves, do very little to aid learning," Gavriel Salomon of the University of Haifa and David Perkins of Harvard observed in 1996. Placing them in the classroom "does not automatically inspire teachers to rethink their teaching or students to adopt new modes of learning."'

Typewriters can be beautiful, they can be nostalgic, but what exactly does one do
with text typed on a typewriter? How do you share it? publish it? have it edited?

There are a ton of media choices,
the point is not to choose just one.

Yes, this might be one more attempt by the elites of the publishing world to maintain the socioeconomic status quo. The column seemed designed to confuse and frustrate parents, teachers, and students. But... hang on... let's go back to the top... to what Dr. Clark said: "The media you use make no difference at all to learning. Not one dang bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years."

Again: "The media you use make no difference at all to learning. Not one dang bit." In other words, those who have tried, and keep trying - albeit without any evidence - to convince us all that decoded alphabetical text is somehow cognitively superior to any other way of bringing information into your brain, might be completely wrong.

Read the book on paper. Listen to it via WYNN (the tool which changed my life), via Balabolka (Free), via WordTalk (Free), via FoxVox (Free), or via an audiobook,or watch the video, or talk with someone, it makes no difference cognitively. The brain processes the information into memory, and that's the story.

Many of us have been arguing about this for years. People have routinely told me that, for example, listening to a book isn't hard enough (?!), or that the blind don't actually ever read, unless (maybe) they read Braille, then its OK, or that, as I was told on Twitter today, "I think allowing kids to grow up text-illiterate is a real disservice to them." I responded to that Tweet, which I listened to via Vlingo, by speaking into my phone as I sat in a parking lot.

Well, if there is no real evidence that print is superior, if we now have the tools to let all choose the information gathering tools and communication tools most effective for them at the moment, what's the issue with "technology" in schools?

For me, I have two responses: Short answer - we need tools in schools which allow students to learn to make those choices. This is what "Toolbelt Theory" is all about. Printed books cannot do this, but "Bring Your Own Device" plus a "Tool Crib" will offer every student the access path they need.

For the long answer... below is an updated version of a blog post from Change.org in 2009...

Technology: The Wrong Questions and the Right Questions

"A black board, in every school house, is as indispensably necessary as a stove or fireplace; and in large schools several of them might be useful."
"Slates are as necessary as black boards, and even more so. But they are liable to be broken, it will be said, as to render it expensive to parents to keep their children supplied with them."

"But are not books necessary at all, when the pupils are furnished with slates? I may be asked. Not for a large proportion of the children who attend our summer schools, nor for some of them who attend in the winter. To such I believe books are not only useless, but on the whole, worse than useless. As they advance in years, however, they may be indulged with a book, now and then, as a favor. Such favor will not be esteemed a light thing; and will come in time, to be sought more frequently, and with more and more earnestness."

"At first, it will be well for the small portion of each day in which very young pupils are allowed to have slates, to let them use them much in the way they please. Some will make one thing, some another. What they make is of comparatively little consequence, provided they attend, each to his own business, and do not interfere with that of others."

In 1842 William A. Alcott, a now forgotten member of that legendary American family of letters, wrote a series of articles for the Connecticut Common School Journal, asking teachers across America to make use of the newest educational technology - the black board and the student slate. Well, it wasn't really new. West Point had been using these for instruction since at least 1820, but then, as now, schools were slow to adopt new ideas.

But in the 1840s everything in communication was changing. Wood pulp based paper and the rotary printing press had created the penny newspaper, an entirely new way of spreading news - and often gossip. The telegraph had arrived creating the revolutionary concept of instantaneous communication across great distances. And the world itself was shrinking as steamboats and railroads rushed humans from place to place at unheard of speeds.

William Alcott's ideas, handheld - "1:1" slates, the chalkboard, individual seats (allowing children to leave
without disturbing others), kids moving around, good heating, big windows...

These new technologies spawned new forms of writing. Authors such as Charles Dickens began serializing fiction for the masses - one no longer needed to buy expensive books and sit in that big leather chair. Writers even created the first blogs - think of American Notes. Others, people like Horace Greeley, were redefining journalism.

The world was changing, and certain people, led by Alcott, were desperately trying to drag the schoolhouse into the present.

The Question

Then, as now, there was furious opposition. Alcott admitted that he was seen as being "against books." He was perceived as disruptive. He was already forcing schools to buy costly new furnishings (individual student desks and chairs, to replace tables and benches), and now he was advocating a radical change in how teaching took place.

Then, as now, the wrong question was being asked. In 1842 the doubters wondered what these new technologies could do for schools as they existed. Today, educators and policy makers constantly wonder what computers, mobile phones, and social networking will do for a curriculum largely unchanged since 1910.

That was the wrong question then, and it is the wrong question now. The right question is, what can schools, what can education, contribute to these new technologies?

Just as in 1842, just as in Socrates' time when literacy appeared, the technologies of information and communication have changed radically this decade - the ways in which humans learn about their world have changed radically, and schools will either help their students learn to navigate that new world, or they will become completely irrelevant.

How you learned doesn't matter at all

If you are a teacher, a parent, an administrator, or the President of the United States, I do not care how or what you learned in school. Or, let me put it this way, your experience in school, or in sitting with your mom studying books in the wee hours of the morning, is completely irrelevant to any discussion of the education of today's students.

Maybe worse than irrelevant. Maybe dangerous. The belief that "your" experience is relevant leads to a nightmare loop. Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me."

And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.

Choosing everything: A student listens to text while creating
his own seating and desk... (Michael Thornton)

The majority of our students do "poorly" in school, do not achieve their potential in school, do not enjoy education. Doing it "the old way," utilizing the old tools, ensures that they never will.
Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which earlier media forms disabled.

Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency."

But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it. This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable previously.

Technology is NOT something invented after you were born

Technology is everything humans have created. Books are technology - a rather complex and expensive one actually, for holding and transmitting human knowledge. The schoolroom is technology - the desks, chairs, blackboards, schedule, calendar, paper, pens, and pencils. These are not "good" or "bad," but at this point, they are simply outdated.

Yes, we still have stone carvers. Yes, we still have calligraphers. But we no longer teach students to chase the duck, pluck the feather, and cut the quill. We no longer teach Morse Code. We no longer teach the creation of illuminated manuscripts.

Now we must give up teaching that ink-on-paper is the primary information source. It is not. We must give up insisting that students learn "cursive" writing. Instead, they must learn to text on their mobiles and dictate intelligibly to their computer. We must toss out our "keyboarding" classes and encourage students to discover their own best ways to input data. We must abandon much of Socrates' memorization and switch to engagement with where data is stored. We must abandon the one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the "clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher, or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where it leads us.

And we need to start by understanding that we are preparing students for the world that is their future, not the world that is our past.

- Ira Socol