Doubts About Digital

I find your interpretation of the results rather interesting. By your own report, the technology improved reading scores for 1 out of 3 cohorts, math scores for 2 out of 3, and technological literacy throughout. Given how important technological literacy is to employment in almost any white collar job, and useful even in blue collar ones (eg if you decide to become a self-employed plumber, and need to keep your own business records), I don’t see why you are minimizing the importance of these findings. Instead you emphasize that it didn’t increase “their general satisfaction with schoolwork” which probably wasn’t one of the major goals in the first place.Efficacy aside, I would definitely question whether the kind of “people-based initiatives” you suggest would actually be less costly – you might not have noticed, but in the US, labor is the most expensive input to pretty much every product and service, with the exception of advanced medical equipment. You can give a poor kid a netbook computer for about $300 today – it would cost at least that much for a summer’s tutoring, and at the end he’d still have the netbook to keep using.

Computers can be useful for learning; they are after all general-purpose machines. But like any tool, they can be used well or otherwise. The $300 netbook computer could be highly useful or a waste of three Cs, depending on how well it’s integrated into the learning process and on how well the user uses it. People have been looking for a royal road to learning for some time now, and technology does have its attractions. Fifty years ago language labs were going to help produce a generation of multilingual world citizens or something. They may still be around, for all I know, but the current situation in FL enrollments doesn’t seem encouraging.There’s no panacea. The key elements are still the student and the teacher, in that order; my guess would be that the third most important factor is parental involvement, books in the home, etc. Does anyone expect that a Kindle in the home will ever be a predictor of success?

Then as now the stupid people are the one’s who don’t read books and journals. Then as now the stupid people are the one’s who don’t spend time thinking.Then as now bad teachers are the one’s who try to find shortcuts or who just don’t have enough time to do it right (because they teach too large of a class or too many classes).Then as now, indeed!

“Do a cost accounting” is the key message in Mark Bauerlein’s commentary. In addition to the dearth of empirical research on”elearning” assessment, ROI on educational IT investments is almost non-existent. This will change dramatically as budget pressures will force an examination of this important topic.

Examining and objectively evaluating the merit of specific tools purported to increase the effectiveness of teaching is rational and professional. Much of the tone here is of that nature.There is a larger issue, one that runs beneath some perspectives taken here.It is irrational and unprofessional to cash one’s professorial paycheck while ignoring the contributions of the last 50 years of learning sciences (brain, cognitive, pedagogical), measurement sciences, and technology to our ability to teach. I’m not suggesting that all methods, techniques, tools, or bags of tricks work for all teaching contexts. Neither am I suggesting that we are obligated to adopt or even try every one of them. I am speaking about what we have learned about learning and evaluating performance. We should be ashamed of the fact that most of us still teach from a 1900′s play book, proudly displaying our ignorance of the relevant sciences (sometimes while teaching the very sciences) while robbing our students of the benefits of more effective and more efficient learning experiences.

Face it, educators (or at least some of them) are mesmerized by technology because based on their own experience they can see how it can make so many tasks easier. They leap to the conclusion that technology will allow learners to bypass the kinds of things they themselves had to get past. Unfortunately, they forget that some of those seemingly tortuous efforts they themselves had gone through provided the experiential base necessary to actually benefit from the technology. Technology can, and should, be a wonderful educational supplement, but as long as we regard it as a substitute for things more fundamental (hands on, trial and error, build from scratch, etc) we won’t see any gains. Merely putting technology (or books for that matter) in someone’s hands is not going to have any measureable impact.As for cost accounting, I suggest that we also need a cost accounting for the huge cost of all the cost accounting we have been indulging in in recent years and which is a major factor contributing to the rising cost of education.

Well said, @flowney (#3). I would like Prof. Bauerlein to be more specific in his references than “People advocate [digitalizing schools and classrooms] because they say that the new tools encourage students …” Which “people” say this? Shills for technology manufacturers and overly optimistic technological determinists? The issue is not the technology itself, it’s the design of the learning environment. It should not come as a surprise to find marginal impacts and cost inefficiencies when throwing technology into an environment where little is done to change teaching and learning practices.Technologies provide affordances that enable different approaches to learning a la @betterschool’s comment #10; most obviously (but not exclusively) in situations such as mega-classes and online learning. Techno-advocates (or skeptics) do not advance the conversation when they ignore the larger issue: facilitating the change in systems and individuals needed to make education more successful.

Fair point, julius, but the issue for me is that school systems have pressed forward in “facilitating the change in systems and individuals needed to make education more successful” without determining in advance just how successful this and that change will be. As for the people over-selling the technology as better suited to today’s “learners,” I have a whole chapter quoting them at length in Dumbest Gen, and they range from researchers to foundation heads to popular journalists.

I’m struck by the fact that no one here seems to be discussing the home environment in which the computer is placed. If the adults in the household know of nothing to do with a computer than play games, then the children will have a much harder time developing good, technologically supported study habits, and it should be no surprise that the gap widens between them and their more privileged classmates. I was struck a few years ago when the parent of one of the earliest Head Start participants was interviewed. She remembered being instructed to read the newspaper each day with her child on her lap so that the child could watch her mother reading. I wonder how many of those parents had to pick up the habit of reading the newspaper each day in order to provide that model for the kids?If we want to place computers in the homes to help lower income children, we need to stop treating it as an either/or option with the “people-based” initiatives Bauerlein suggests. In particular, we need to broaden the scope of such initiatives to include the whole family in the practices of lifelong learning. Given the exigencies of adult life, that will need to include e-learning in the mix.

Bauerlein has always written/spoken ill of technology in education, as well as any other “outside the box” teaching practices. He will always try to shoot holes in any research supportive of these new technologies/practices/theories that are continually in various phases of experimentation. Expect Bauerlein to always conclude such essays with a strong pitch to continue the traditional “people-based teaching initiatives”. He does so because he is patently aware of how easily he might be replaced from his now cushy gig at Emory, if any of these new practices succeed.

Yes, ndkaneb, the home is crucial, and, sad to say, all too many parents regard the laptop the same way they regard the TV set–a babysitter. And while betterschools is right to highlight innovations in teaching, keeping some component of “old-fashioned” methods in the school day might prove helpful in assessing the benefits of those innovations.

I am at a loss to comprehend the extreme conservatism displayed by so many among the professoriate. “‘Most ideas about teaching (sub: physics, psychology, communications, medicine, dentistry, printing, transportation, nutrition . . .) are not new, but not everyone knows the old ideas.’”I would wager that those among us who still teach under the 1900′s model would run for the hills of second opinion if we observed this kind of reluctance to incorporate the findings of science into one’s practice in our personal physician. I have a pilot friend who thinks aircraft have gone downhill since the invention of tricycle gear and flaps. He has an excuse; he is 91.Is there anyone reading these posts who seriously believes that the last 50 years of brain and cognitive psychological research, and the measurement sciences, have produced nothing to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our teaching? Did we stop learning and growing with Euclid? I have made these observations in other venues. Among those who disagree, I get two kinds of comments: (a) “What brain and cognitive sciences are you talking about?” and, more predictably, (b) “The old methods work perfectly fine, why should I change?”Again, in medicine and teaching and pretty much everywhere else, there are some methodologies that worked well in 300 BCE or 1900 and remain best practice today . . . but they are precious few.

@betterschools I’m not sure we’re that far apart. My argument is that the *best* educational approaches of the past (eg frequent feedback, active and social learning, attending to connecting new concepts with prior knowledge, accounting for the experience and needs of the individual learner, contextualizing problems in authentic situations, encouraging metacognition/reflection) are largely validated by the research. The inertia of ~500 years of medieval lecture/recitation and ~100 years of industrial model schooling make it difficult to put these into practice for many teachers.Prof. Bauerlein, the director of the teaching center at my institution likes to use exactly your suggestion (he calls it “close reading”) as an example of a better use of PowerPoint. With selected passages on the screen in a large classroom, using highlighting features, instructors are more assured that students are able to follow along, without having to worry whether they have forgotten their text or have not located the correct paragraph. With clickers, an instructor could seed discussions in a large classroom by asking no-right-answer questions and displaying the results before asking students to turn to their neighbors. In an ideal situation – small class, prepared and motivated learners – the technology would be silly. But most of us aren’t working with the ideal.

@jwjulius,Thanks for the clarification and additional response. Looking at your list of examples, I agree that we may have no material differences. An aside, I would add to your list a construct I call problem-based horizontal learning, an efficient process that well run organizations employ every day. Explaining it is for another venue but, if well done, it can compress the time-to-proficiency considerably while producing more transferable learning.As you note, “The inertia of ~500 years of medieval lecture/recitation and ~100 years of industrial model schooling make it difficult to put these into practice for many teachers” perhaps you can comment on why you and your colleagues think this is so and what solutions you have in mind. One conjecture is that many professors still see (or want to see) higher education in its 1900′s version serving a small number of smart, rich and generally highly motivated students who held very different views toward institutions and authority figures. This conjecture may be an explanation for their conservatism but how is is possible to be both intelligent and to fail to see the obvious transformation of higher education into the large mass markets that presently define it? Whatever the cause, this dimness of vision does not speak well for the modern professoriate. What you say about the unwillingness of those who teach to keep pace with scientific advancements is not a significant problem for physicians, psychologists, or any other profession of which I am aware. Perhaps a better explanation for the problem is to be found in the “management” structures of higher education, structures which permit the professoriate to remain ignorant if it so chooses. Physicians, etc. would quickly lose their jobs were they to remain ignorant of modern findings.

I wouldn’t call the methods I single out “1900s models.” They go back a lot farther than that.

I bought a $99 CVS Sylvania.

It is about equal to a 1997 desktop. It won’t run today’s BLOATED software but it is GREAT if the user understands its limitations. If the limitations are not acceptable then spend 200 more dollars and carry a heavier machine around.

It needs more software that is EFFICIENT.

But an 8 gig SD Card can hold from 400 to more than 16,000 books depending on the format and size. It makes a great book reader.