COLLOQUY

By COLLEEN CORDES

At an unusually critical conference here last month on that very topic, Mr. Miller recalled how "things really hit the fan" when he aired his reservations about the rush toward new technology for teaching.

That was in 1996, just after President Clinton had

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: Have educators been too quick to embrace technology as the means to improve schools and colleges? (The responses) The Chronicle's daily coverage of information technology in academe.

called for every classroom to be hooked up to the Internet. Mr. Miller told The New York Times that such a goal was low on his own list of education priorities, and that the research evidence on the usefulness of technology in improving schools was "not very encouraging."

To him, what he said seemed "rather mild and judicious." But it generated what he described as an "almost hysterical reaction" among some administrators and faculty members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which publishes the newsletter.

The school had been wooing some corporate executives in hopes of getting major gifts, Mr. Miller said, and apparently the potential donors were angered by his words. A senior professor blasted him in an e-mail message sent to the deans and other senior faculty members. To his knowledge, he said, no one came to his defense.

"I was accused by various people of trying to stab the school in the back," said Mr. Miller, who added that his departure from the publication later that year was nevertheless amicable.

His experience at a leading university and his own education research, he said, have convinced him that basic questions about the impact of computers on students have rarely been asked, let alone systematically studied.

Elsewhere, Mr. Miller's views might sound unconventional. But they were right in line with what many participants had to say at last month's conference, "The Computer in Education: Seeking the Human Essentials," held at Teachers College of Columbia University.

Unswayed by the rush to technology around them, they spent three days sharing unusually skeptical ideas about the actual impact of computer policies on schools and colleges. Many said they were seeking a more balanced approach, rather than suggesting that computers be eliminated.

Not everyone agreed that the conference achieved a good balance, and at least one member of the audience leveled a charge of "Ludditism" at the skeptics. In any event, those who were most enthusiastic about the use of new technologies in education found themselves cast in an uncommon role -- the minority.

The critics of current technology policies said they were concerned about:

• The reluctance of policy makers, education administrators, and researchers to consider the drawbacks of information technologies at the same time they're considering the benefits.

• The lack of a carefully thought-out pedagogy that respects the changing developmental needs of students at different ages.

• A feeling that business agendas and parents' fears about their children's job prospects -- rather than compelling evidence that computers will improve education -- are driving the push to computerize all levels of education.

• A tendency, exacerbated by computers, to focus on developing children's logical-thinking skills too early, often at the expense of budding capacities in areas that are least machine-like, such as imagination, creativity, intuitive thinking, and the contribution of emotions to cognition.

• The potential for computers to do more harm than good if introduced too early in childhood -- "too early" being, for some critics, any time until the age of 12, if not later.

Others, however, suggested that many participants were too negative.

Alan C. Kay, a vice-president for research and development at the Walt Disney Company, argued that advanced technologies can make it easier for students to visualize and learn difficult concepts, especially involving symbols. But Dr. Kay, a former fellow at Apple Computer, had his own complaints about what schools are doing with computers. He compared the "music" that many children are making on computers in school to piano variations of "Chopsticks."

"On close examination, kids are doing nothing of real importance on computers, and they'd be much better off doing something else," he said.

He acknowledged that he and other researchers had naively -- and wrongly -- assumed that their best ideas for educational technologies would be widely adopted. In a rational society, he said, educators would introduce computers at an appropriate age. Still, he said he was optimistic that, given time, more-creative and sensible uses of technologies will prevail.

Gregory C. Simon, until recently the top aide for domestic policy to Vice-President Gore, challenged some of the critics' bleaker assessments. He agreed with others that students need only months, not years, to learn to operate computers.

But schools, he argued, also have to show students, at an appropriate age, the educational value of computers, so students don't assume these powerful tools are just for games. "The computer, used appropriately, is an indispensable, irreplaceable window on the world," he said.

Much of the discussion at the gathering related to pre-college education. But participants suggested that in higher education, too, the uses of technologies should be thought through more carefully.

Hubert L. Dreyfus, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, said relying on the Internet would actually discourage the passionate commitment that he saw at the heart of advanced learning in any field. The risk-free anonymity of the Internet, he said, makes it a good medium for slander, innuendo, endless gossip, and, ultimately, boredom. "Without some way of telling the relevant from the irrelevant and the significant from the insignificant, everything becomes equally interesting and equally boring."

But studies show, he added, that learners never achieve mastery of a skill unless they care deeply about achieving it; failure causes pain, and success elation. The "nihilistic pull of the new network culture" doesn't prohibit such personal commitment but does inhibit it, he argued.

Teachers with their own passionate commitment to learning "can pass on their passion to their students," and model their mastery of a subject -- best done in the close apprenticeship of classroom or laboratory, not in cyberspace. The best teachers are strongly committed to their students, he added.

Some took exception to his critique of computer networks. Dr. Kay said he had had a long-distance "apprenticeship" with another scientist for some time before actually meeting him. Mr. Simon pointed to citizens' use of the Internet to promote a new treaty to ban land mines.

Still, many echoed Dr. Dreyfus' contention that the teacher-student relationship is education's core. Computers can do little, at best, to strengthen that bond -- and, at worst, can weaken it, some suggested.

Lowell Monke, who teaches advanced computer-technology classes for students in Des Moines's five public high schools, is writing a dissertation on the impact of computers on school culture. In Des Moines, he said, teachers talk much less than before about their students' capacities, and much more about the capacities of the district's new technologies.

"The more students rely on the ever-increasing skills of the machinery," he said, "the more time and effort they end up investing in and learning how to use the technical skills necessary to get performance out of the machine -- and the more they begin to think in machine-like ways."

"Today," Mr. Monke added, "we give our students powerful external resources in lieu of drawing on and nurturing their inner ones. It's not insight that is important, it's outcomes."

Langdon Winner, a professor of political science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said in an interview that he used Web pages and e-mail to communicate with his students, but that he considered these educational tools a "very minor thing."

Basic teaching skills, he said, "involve building a relationship between human beings, and, in that light, sometimes networked computing can help out. But a lot of the time it's just completely peripheral.

"The most valuable thing I can do for my students is to get to know them as people, as individuals."

Computers, some speakers argued, capture and enhance one kind of human thinking -- based on calculation and logic -- that is powerful but limited. They do nothing to enhance moral intuition, imagination, emotional thinking, and a disciplined will, the critics said. The intensive use of computers with young children can actually stunt those qualities, some suggested, adding that they are all the more important if students are to be taught to manipulate powerful new technologies that can be used in constructive or destructive ways.

"I look at some of these kids," Mr. Monke said in an interview, "and I wonder what they're going to do with all of this power, because their moral, ethical development is pretty minor at this point."

And many speakers offered examples of how many students and researchers now think of the mind as a computer. In addition to popular fantasies about cyborgs -- human-robot hybrids -- that have been fueled by Star Trek, Dr. Winner noted, some artificial-intelligence researchers foresee a "post-human" future, in which the "pathetic shell" of the human body has been shed and the mind "downloaded" into a superior, robotic form. "I find myself more and more surrounded by young people who find this an alluring vision of what humans could become," he said.

In a dinner discussion, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor emeritus of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called such enthusiasm disturbing. He recalled speaking with students who are unable to imagine human experiences that cannot be directly and completely expressed in words. Whatever can be captured in words, their thinking goes, can at least theoretically be programmed into a machine, he said.

Some researchers at leading institutions in artificial-intelligence studies convey to students an image of the human being as "a mediocre product of mediocre engineering," he said, their point being "that we can do better than that."

Dr. Weizenbaum, who is Jewish, and whose family left Nazi Germany in 1936, said he was troubled by what he sees as a parallel to the Holocaust: Eliminating a whole people was Hitler's "final solution" to "the Jewish problem," he said. The vision of some researchers seems to be a "post-biological" age, in which the elimination of humans in favor of a superior form of artificial, intelligent life would be the "final solution to the human problem."

For his part, Stephen L. Talbott, who edits an Internet newsletter related to education, suggested that the computer's limitations are a "picture of what we might become." He urged schools to provide many more hands-on, personal experiences of nature to help ground children in the natural world, as a counterbalance.

As for the future of higher education, Rensselaer's Dr. Winner poked fun at what he sees as a flood of uncritical rhetoric about the impact of new information technologies, not least the recently unveiled "wearable" computers.

Today, he said in an interview, students wear T-shirts bearing the emblem of their alma mater. "In the future, your T-shirt will simply be your alma mater."

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