Where every student has his or her own portable computer, uses it like
a pencil and paper, can learn anytime or anywhere, and can produce the
caliber of work that would be accepted in boardrooms
around the world. (Want more? You can have it.) Where forty pupils in a classroom surf the web for relevant material
to the individualized topics they've chosen to investigate; where forty
pupils, both physically and virtually, wander around the city collecting
data on their world, input that data into their laptops and send it to
a pool where others can share and make use of that information; where forty
pupils download up to the minute photographs that arrive from space, and
paste them into their word processors as part of their multi-media presentations
on astronomy, or connect to operating tables in online hospitals from where
they download up to the minute vital statistics on patients, and paste
them into their Excel spreadsheets as part of their biology projects. Where forty pupils, supposedly working on their class and individual
projects play solitaire on their laptops and send ICQ messages back and
forth while the teacher, convinced that his/her pupils are studiously making
use of unlimited access to online information, e-mails Microsoft with a
blurb on the wonderful things happening in his/her class, hoping to get
media exposure via an endorsement campaign. As I noted in last
month's column, computers have been around the classroom long enough
for us to start to get a picture of how they can be integrated into the
educational process, or to see how their use changes and enhances traditional
pupil/teacher interactions. Yet what we seem to get most of is simply more
of the same.
This favorite cartoon sadly depicts that most expected
scenario: nothing will change. Yes, we'll integrate the computer (and the
internet) into our classrooms, but traditional pupil/teacher interactions
will continue to be the norm - kids will continue to sit in rows in their
classrooms, in physical proximity to their peers, but hardly interacting
with them, receiving instruction from, and responding to, only their teachers.
In the following cartoon the computers are "integrated" into the classroom,
but the traditional classroom has emerged the winner.
Around the time that I was preparing this column I was
approached my someone who told me he wanted to find material on Helen Keller
on the internet. Another person present at the time of the request immediately
answered that he could probably find a good deal of information, but that
an encyclopaedia (even on a CD-Rom) would be better. Having been in this
situation enough times to readily identify it, I quickly responded that
that wasn't the proper answer, because the person who responded hadn't
understood the question properly. Honed down to its bare essentials, the
question was:
But there you have it - instead of dealing with pupil/teacher
interactions, I'm discussing the cosmetics of term papers, which in the
end, due to an almost total lack of serious educational thinking, is what
the use of computers in schools comes down to anyway.
And of course it's not just pupil/teacher interaction.
It's the whole question of access to learning materials. In Texas, for
example, the chairman of the State Board of Education has proposed replacing
public school textbooks with laptop computers. Textbooks for the entire
state are expected to cost about $2 billion over the next six years, and
part of the proposed idea is to invest the money that would be saved from
not purchasing textbooks into laptops for every pupil (made available through
leasing) instead.
That's a proposal that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
Textbooks haven't been the most successful educational tool either, and
there's nothing sacred about them. Doing away with them was suggested long
before computers attacked the schools. In a list of proposals designed
to change the nature of the (then, and now?) existing school environment,
from their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969) Neil Postman
and Charles Weingartner write (p. 137):
It seems as though only a very thin
line distinguishes between updating on the fly and outrightly rewriting
history. Though I wouldn't go so far as to accuse them of wanting to enforce
some sort of Big Brotherly Newspeak, I have
my doubts as to whether the boards of education could resist the possibilities,
nor whether they'd know where to draw the line. A new Minister of Education
has taken office who thinks that history should be taught just a little
differently? No problem, the links to certain events get easily edited
out. Evolution is no longer popular? Just switch the links from Darwin
to the Bible. Once you get the hang of it, it probably can even be fun.
And if, after waiting too long for the educational paradise to emerge from
the use of computers in school, it becomes necessary to downscale the original
copywriter's predictions, just rewrite a washed down version and link to
it instead. Few will know, or care.
That's it for this edition. Reactions and suggestions
can be sent to:
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In Education - Main Page
From the Boidem -
an occasional column on computers and information technologies in everyday
life
April 19, 1998*:
This month's column was originally
conceived as part of last month's, but that was before my AltaVista search
on "makes learning fun" showed such a high correlation between computers
and kids' enjoyment at school - at least in the eyes of copywriters. Of
course making fun of copywriters is much too easy, and it's really not
fair to wax profound simply by knocking their platitudes. Sometimes, however,
it's unavoidable, and what's more, when those platitudes become standard
fare we have no real choice but to knock them at every chance we get. Which
of course brings us to Microsoft's Anytime-Anywhere campaign:
Imagine a school...
What a wonderful world it would be. Being considered a relatively
imaginative person myself, I figure I can catch the spirit:
Imagine a school...
Believe me, I'm all for it, and it's
really quite easy once you get the hang of it.
But sometimes, that lurking and bothersome adversary, reality creeps
in and you get a slightly different scenario:
Imagine a school...
Truly, what a wonderful world it would be.
(Interestingly, an internet savvy-friend suggested that if the person
who prepared this cartoon actually knew something about the internet, the
wording would have been slightly, but significantly
different.)
So just what kids will do with computers and an internet
connection in their schools is far from clear, though perhaps preparing
reports that could be presented in boardrooms is a distinct possibility:
polished and glossy reports which have to be squeezed before even a bit
of real content drops out of them.
My daughter is preparing a report on Helen Keller for school and it
would be nice if I could get another photograph, maybe one more interesting
snippet of information that would flesh out her report, and to note in
the bibliography that she used the internet.
In other words, the question wasn't "where can I find information
about Helen Keller on the internet", but instead "how can I readily find
some information, even information I already know, about Helen Keller without
devoting too much effort?". I'm quite sure that in this particular case
the first responder was correct - that the information that could be found
in an encyclopaedia would be at least as good as any that might be found
using the internet. But in our schools as we know them today, the other,
sub-text, question was a much more logical one to be asked. The internet
has become more of a buzzword than a resource, and every parent wants his/her
child to access it before completing his/her report on any given topic
- how many extra points on a grade do you get for each URL in your bibliography?
Declare a five-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks.
But as much as Postman and Weingartner's proposal attracts
me, I'm very dubious about the idea of having CD textbooks, or even online
textbooks. I've already admitted that I don't see anything sacred (or even
overly educational) about them, and not purchasing them would undoubtedly
be a money saving venture (is education supposed to save money?). It would
also make editing and updating much easier - the idea of an online text
means that we can change and update that text almost on the fly. No need
to withdraw outdated texts from the schools, just change the content on
the out of date page, put it back up on the web, and it's all there. Ah,
but there's the rub.
Since with two or three exceptions all texts are not only boring but
based on the assumption that knowledge exists prior to, independent of,
and altogether outside of the learner, they are either worthless or harmful.
If it is impossible to function without textbooks, provide every student
with a notebook filled with blank pages and have him compose his own text.