Its a Tool, Not a Magic bullet

While young people in the connected world become ever more deeply immersed in the processes that networked IT can provide, and smarter at using it, their educators are still not getting it: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops.

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards.

Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs. Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums.

Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

Yep. And I know why. look at the key phrases.

• did not fit into lesson plans
• increased pressure to meet state standards.
• resistance from teachers
• logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs
• a quick fix
• teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums.
  
• used educational software programs for math and reading

In other words,

• this technology does not support existing pedagogical models (it never did and never could)
• rote learning (the standards are 50 years out of date)
• disrespected and unmotivated teachers who cop the blame for the inadequacies of their societies (ask any politician what they have ACTUALLY done to support teachers beyond demanding ever more with ever less because they see education as a COST not an investment)
• no technology planning (do they install whiteboards but have no budget for markers? Actually they do, I saw a stroy a couple of weeks ago about the shortages of MARKERS. Different technology, same dimwitted approach)
• and, (excuse me for shouting) THERE IS NO DAMNED QUICK FIX!!!

Meanwhile, what ARE the kids doing with this stuff? Back to the story:

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to

1. exchange answers on tests
2. download pornography
3. hack into local businesses
4. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but
5. also posted step-by-step instructions
6. on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Let's see.

1. colaborative learning
2. sex education? (at the least something about gender issues)
3. research, critical thinking and project planning
4. problem solving
5. more collaborative learning
6. information sharing and peer to peer teaching

That doesn't include their MySpace pages, flickr and Youtube creations, multi-tasking and god knows what else. The kids are using the tools to learn like fury, the people providing their education don't even know how to look, let alone learn from their actual environments.

And don't get me wrong, this is not all about teachers, who are treated like dirt by the rest of society then expected to fix all the problems that said society creates.

Networked IT is a (god help me) paradigm shift, it is changing everything, no wait EVERYTHING! The kids have access to a steam engine and their educators are asking where the buggy whip is. of course they are failing, but they are not failing what they think they are failing.

Update:
You're right Steve, and I think its a matter of achieving those ends through the new technology rather than in parallel or trying to tack it on.

One of the most interesting Education projects in the Stockholm Challenge was "minimally Invasive education"  by Sugata Mitra. You can find an interview with him here 

So much of what we think of as education is a process to instill conformity and enable control because we are terrified of "what might happen" if we didn't lock down the collective impulses of 35 kids.

And we are still locked into an idea that some people "have" education and that they can take the empty vessel of a child's brain and "fill it with knowledge". Yet we KNOW that that model is garbage. It doesn't even describe the process that we actually attempt and it is on a different planet from the one in which kids, and all of us, learn.

Networked IT fundamentally shifts the centre of power and control; those who have that power and control now are afraid of that because they think that if THEY lose it, SOMEBODY ELSE will get it. But the network DISTRIBUTES the control which means that it can only (generally) be exercised by some level of consensus; nobody has enough of it to grab it from everyone else.

When networked IT stops being a subject and becomes the platform on which kids learn, and for many in western societies it already is, all of the structures and process appropriate to other technologies and pedagogical models ceases to operate. When the kids have already integrated IT into their world view, when they think in network, not only will they not necessarily do any better with "computers in the classroom", by trying to make them sue the things in ways that are not endemic to the technology, they may actually do worse.

If your kids speak Hindi, why would you try to teach them in Tagalog?

Comments

[brenda]

excellent analysis earl - i agree wholeheartedly. somewhat discouraging though to think that these are the exact same discussions/issues we were facing about 10 years ago! how long is a learning curve?

[Earl Mardle]

Hi Brenda

Agreed, I remember when 2020 Trust facilitated the sun Server donation to a school in Wellington and a young teacher confessed to me her nervousness about it because, "the kids know more about it than I do".

To which my response was, "and the problem with that is?" A kid is a learning machine, apart from providing guidance and a safety net, the important thing is to get out of the way.

And the most important thing that teachers do is produce students who are smarter than their parents.

Thanks for dropping in. Your tick is really worth having.

[Steve Dulaney]

Hello Earl,
This is a really interesting post, and there is a lot of truth in what you say. I teach mathematics at a public high school in the US, and I see much of what you are talking about. I spent seven years trying to get some basic technology in my classroom, and only recently had some success. Administration could never see how I would use it, even after I explained my plans. I finally picked up an old computer that was being thrown away, installed a new hard drive and some software, just so I would have a computer for the students to use in my room. Getting Internet access so that I could download some data for my statistics class is still an ongoing project.
I would say, however, that there is still a real need to learn the basics in all classes. That is sometimes not being taught, and without the ability to read, write or do basic algebra calculations, all the rest of the technology goes to waste.
Keep thinking and writing about this topic.

[brenda]

Just read about Tech Angels (http://www.techangels.org.nz/) .. maybe more of this should happen, or are adults too full of themselves to swallow their pride and take lessons from children?

[Earl Mardle]

Brenda.

Errmmm, probably, but I'm MUCH too polite to say so.

The other thing is that this is not just about technology, or teaching methods, course structure, lesson plans etc etc, its also about power and control relationships as I say above.

They are the elephant in the living room that NOBODY wants to talk about and without which almost none of the decisions made and results that come out make any sense.

Power and control MATTERS. Thanks to Johnnie Moore for the pointer to this monstrosity that makes it clear.

The most expensive state school in Britain will have no playground. The Cambridgeshire authorities in charge of the new £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough believe a lack of outside space will avoid the danger of 'uncontrollable' groups of children running around at break time.

At least they are honest and up-front about it.

[Desi619]

As a new and upcoming teacher, the world is opened to me as to how many resources the internet can bring. Youtube can force teachers to use their imagination for school projects. When I was in high school, I remember scrambling to find someone with a video camera to make a video for a project...with Youtube, now all you need is a webcam (if you were desperate) digital camera, or any type of movie program and students can make and post their videos for projects. The creativity is endless with technology; teachers just have to think to use it.

You're always going to have students trying to get around the filters. It has to do with the whole idea that when someone says, "don't touch" it makes it more appealing. Most of these kids don't want to read about the civil war, they want to do something fun, put a little creativity into it, and the internet can be the best tool a teacher can have.