The following piece was forwarded to me from the HERN (Hawaii Educational
Research Network.) It is long and perhaps a bit weak on academic
groundings. However, I think it raises many issues that this group is
concerned with and does so in a succinct package.
Peace, Edouard
November 12, 1997 1997.1
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WIRED CLASSROOMS: WHAT YOU'RE NOT HEARING
Stephen L. Talbott
A Little History
----------------
Back in the late Seventies and early Eighties, computer-aided instruction
(CAI) was going to revolutionize education. Then CAI lost its glitter and
computer literacy was the rage -- students would learn to program in
BASIC, and then become engineers and scientists. Today, you don't hear
much about programming in BASIC (or any other language). Now we're
convinced we have to let our kids mine the informational riches of the Net
if they're not to fall hopelessly behind.
Do we have a much clearer idea about why the Net is so essential to the
child's education than we once did about why computer literacy or CAI was
the critical thing? And are we so knowledgeable about this that we can
confidently say, with full understanding of the trade-offs, "It's
obviously better to invest billions of dollars in wiring our schools than
to use these billions to improve teacher salaries, lower the
teacher/student ratio, or add more highly trained staff"?
Computers are not the first technology to promise an educational
revolution. Here's what the New York *Times* wrote in 1923 about radio:
The Hertzian waves will carry education as they do music to the
backwoods, isolated farms and into the mountains of Tennessee, Kentucky
and West Virginia. The limitations of "the little red schoolhouse"
will pass away; the country schoolteacher will be reinforced by college
professors and other specialists. Radio will be an institution of
learning as well as a medium for entertainment and communication.
Of course, when that promise soured, there was no need to be pessimistic;
attention was already focused on the next, glittering opportunity --
television:
While children may be bored and restless when merely listening to a
speaker [on radio] without seeing him, living talent or motion pictures
broadcast at a certain time to all schools in a given area will capture
and hold their interest. The fascination of television for children
has already been demonstrated in the homes of those now possessing
television receivers in the New York area. (Sarnoff, 1941)
Today, we've all heard the new mantra countless times:
You can't expect a passive medium like television to contribute much to
the education of viewers. But with the advent of interactive computer
networks, education will be revolutionized. The child's imagination
will finally be set free to roam the world, guided by his own
interests.
And we already hear rumors of the next round:
Why should students be interested in flat-screen interaction with a
two-dimensional world? But with full-immersion virtual reality we can
present the child with infinitely rich learning environments. He lives
in the world he is learning about, and even helps to create it.
The problem in all of this is not hard to grasp. The proponents of these
new technologies have taken their eyes off the educational ball. They
have not first identified an *educational* problem and then gone out and
determined that, yes, computers do indeed look like the best of all
possible solutions to this problem. Instead, bedazzled by the technology,
they simply assume its necessity and try to figure out how it should be
used. Absolutely convinced that they have an *answer*, they set about
looking for the *question* -- upon which they are convinced their
children's future must hang. Unfortunately, they never seem quite able to
locate the question, which is forever shifting.
Every proposal to bring computers into the classroom ought to be preceded
by a clear statement of the educational problem to which the computers are
expected to be the solution, along with an explanation of the solution.
This is not too much to ask of an institution devoted to the cultivation
of human *understanding*.
Non-problems
------------
There are good reasons for having computers in (some) classrooms, and
there are lousy ones. It just so happens that the reasons driving the
current frenzy to wire our schools are almost uniformly lousy ones. They
include the following:
*** "We Need Computers Because They Give Students Access to So Much
Information."
But the availability of information is not the educational bottleneck. It
has not been for several decades, if it ever was. Our challenge, given
the infinitesimal fraction of available information we can actually use in
the classroom, is how make it the occasion for a profound learning
experience.
As Neil Postman has remarked, "If a nuclear holocaust should occur some
place in the world, it will not happen because of insufficient
information; if children are starving in Somalia, it's not because of
insufficient information; if crime terrorizes our cities, marriages are
breaking up, mental disorders are increasing, and children are being
abused, none of this happens because of a lack of information."
In fact, Postman tells us, information is more like garbage than anything
else. It assaults us from all sides, and needs to be cleared out if we're
to blaze a path that the child can follow.
When we think about the teachers who most decisively influenced us, what
we remember above all is the teachers themselves, not some striking piece
of information they conveyed. We saw in them what it meant to be a human
being facing certain aspects of the world. *That* is a path a child can
follow.
The informational content of our learning is almost never as important as
the intensity and qualitative vividness with which we work over this
content as we bring it to life within us, or as the degree to which we
exercise and extend our capacities in doing so. How do we gain this
intensity and vividness? Most of all with the aid of a teacher or mentor
who brings those qualities to our shared experiences.
Louise Chawla at Kentucky State University has reviewed the published
research about the influences that make people choose careers as
environmentalists, naturalists, ecologists, and the like -- careers
suggesting a concern for the natural world. Not surprisingly, two of the
influences consistently showing up at the top of the list are (1) wild
places directly experienced (usually at a young age); and (2) adult
mentors (Chawla, forthcoming).
*** "We Have To Prepare Our Kids for the Jobs of the Future."
This argument is fatally off-target. The software that kids use today
will not be the software they use five, ten, or fifteen years from now on
the job. The World Wide Web, for which huge numbers of people are
programming and creating content today, did not even exist four years ago.
And, by all accounts, the pace of technical change is increasing rather
than slowing down.
The critical thing is to prepare centered, reflective, deeply grounded
students who will, as adults, prove able to cope with the change.
Students who have not come to know themselves and their own powers of
understanding before they are exposed to the dizzying, adult world of
technology and commerce will be the ones least likely to adapt in the end.
Messrs. Clinton and Gore -- supported by high-tech corporations and far
too many educators -- drill into us that we must train children to carry
out twenty-first-century jobs. But that does not nearly raise the mark
high enough. Our real task is to raise mature individuals who will be
able to decide what sorts of jobs are worth creating and having in the
twenty-first century. Adapting kids to existing technology is not the
first priority; the first priority is to enable them to stand above all
technology, as its masters rather than its tools.
Ironically, the kids today are typically far ahead of their teachers in
their adaptation. As many teachers today cast around frantically to
figure out what they're supposed to do with the high-tech toys being
pushed at them, the kids are often the ones who end up showing them how to
use the stuff.
A single semester's course for eighth graders could easily teach basic
typing, word-processing, spreadsheet, and web-search skills, preparatory
for any high-school requirements in this regard.
*** "We Have To Help Our Kids Become Global Citizens."
If you want to find out whether a child will become a good world citizen,
don't look at a file of her email correspondence. Just observe her
behavior on the playground for a few minutes -- assuming she spends her
class breaks on the playground, and not at her terminal playing video
games.
Contrary to the prevailing, romantic picture, the Net invites yet further
de-emphasis of the single, most important learning community (consisting
of people who are fully present) in favor of a continuing retreat into
communal abstractions -- in particular, retreat into a community of others
whose odor, unpleasant habits, physical and spiritual needs, and even
challenging ideas, a student doesn't have to reckon with in quite the same
way her neighbor demands.
A technology educator once remarked to me that he's seen students who
spend time corresponding with pen pals in Kuala Lumpur never bothering to
say a word to the Asian students who locker right next to them.
As to the multicultural benefits of online exposure, certain basic truths
have yet to make their appearance in the public discussion. Lowell Monke
taught for several years at a private, international school in Quito,
Ecuador -- a school that now has Internet access. These kids, he points
out, "raised in a society influenced by cable TV and vacations in Miami,"
are hardly in a position to educate American children about a native
culture that predates the Incas. Go twenty miles outside the city,
however, and you will find that those who live in the thatched-roof huts
don't even have power outlets, let alone Internet access.
The global network of techno-haves reinforces the participants'
impression that they live in a homogeneous thought-world, leading 'Net
gurus to extol the virtue of the 'Net as a means for discovering
commonalities among "all" people of the world. The irony is, of course,
that the similarities being discovered are those that high technology
itself has spread. (Monke, 1997)
Perhaps the most convincing reason for use of the Net has to do with
learning a foreign language. But even here it's useful to see how
distorted the rhetoric about computers has become. It is, of course,
perfectly reasonable for the more advanced language student to look for
opportunities to correspond with language natives. Setting aside the
likelihood that there are native speakers in the local community, this
opportunity has long been available -- and occasionally taken advantage of
-- courtesy of the postal system. And without massive capital outlay.
Students who send and receive one email message per day can just as easily
send and receive one letter per day.
The fact that email has suddenly given new life to the penpal idea is
certainly owing to the computer's (temporary) glamor. Is glamor the
substance of the new educational paradigm?
*** "CD-ROMs Bring the World to the Student's Desktop."
It is true that CD-ROMs, like television nature programs, carry images and
sounds that would otherwise remain unavailable to students. But to leave
the matter there is, again, to ignore what is essential to *education*.
Listen to this true story:
Yesterday my eleven-year old son and I were hiking in a remote wood.
He was leading. He spotted [a] four-foot rattlesnake in the trail
about six feet in front of us. We watched it for quite some time
before going around it. When we were on the way home, he commented
that this was the best day of his life. He was justifiably proud of
the fact that he had been paying attention and had thus averted an
accident, and that he had been able to observe this powerful,
beautiful, and sinister snake.
Barry Angell, the father, then asked exactly the right question: "I
wonder how many armchair nature-watchers have seen these dangerous snakes
on the tube and said `this is the best day of my life.'" And he
concluded: "Better one rattlesnake in the trail than a whole menagerie of
gorillas, lions, and elephants on the screen" (Talbott, 1995: 160).
The point is not that children have to encounter rattlesnakes or other
exotic and dangerous animals. The essential question, rather, has to do
with how children forge an inner connection to *whatever* experience of
the world they are having. The dramatic footage on the screen distances
the child from the subject matter, which is why this footage is not often
the cause of memorable days. And to the extent the child *is* affected by
it -- most likely to happen in the case of jolting special effects -- the
result is more like something that is *done* to the child than something
he gains from his own capacity to connect to the world.
Imagine that the boy's father had begun tormenting the snake, and that
together they had thrown rocks at it, finally leaving it killed or
injured. We can be quite sure that the boy would not have celebrated the
best day of his life. In fact, assuming that all natural feeling had not
yet been deadened within him, we can guess that he would have felt
distinctly out of sorts by the end of the day.
But that, of course, is not what happened. The father clearly felt wonder
at the snake's presence, admiration for its beauty, grace, and power, and
a receptive curiosity about its nature. Without this context, the boy's
experience could not have been what it was. What counted was not only
that he met a snake on the trail, but that he found something of the
snake's meaning in his father's responses. The boy learned about the
snake by seeing its image, not upon a screen, but reflected in a living
teacher.
There's a very simple, and intuitively obvious rule: where we fail to
impart a a love for the bits of nature to which kids are immediately
exposed -- in lawn, garden, park, and street -- we will not make up for
the deficit by subjecting them to more distant, more mediated experiences,
however exotic. The quest for powerful sensations can only have the
opposite effect, blinding children to the "routine" wonders of their own
experience:
As an environmental educator leading field walks for many years, I
found I often had to wrestle with the fact that kids (and adults) who
had been raised on lots of [nature] programming expected the same sort
of visual extravaganza to unfold before their eyes; they expected a
host of colorful species to appear and "perform" for them. (Kevin
Dann, quoted in Talbott, 1995, p. 161)
Why the Computer Belongs in Education -- and When
-------------------------------------------------
As a society we suffer, paradoxically, not only from a certain giddiness
and euphoria about the dramatic changes brought by technology, but also
from a kind of technophobia. For all the eagerness to bring the computer
into our classrooms, we seem unwilling to have our students *confront* the
computer.
Encouraging students simply to consume the offerings of the computer and
the Net (and of corporate sponsors) is the truly timid approach -- rather
like uncritically turning the classroom over to television. The computer,
after all, is not a *less* tendentious form of technology than television;
by its very nature as a logic machine, it is capable of embodying more
tendencies, biases, assumptions, cultural imperatives, and hidden agendas
than any other technology ever developed.
When children are asked to employ complex technologies as "black boxes,"
they almost certainly defer to those technologies in inappropriate ways.
They fail to understand their experiences, and abdicate their own
responsibilities.
The need, then, is to demystify the computer for children, enabling them
to understand the nature and limitations of this remarkable machine. How
did it arise historically? Who were the inventors, and what was driving
them? What sorts of problems are suitable for the computer's algorithmic,
or recipe-like, functioning? What problems do not lend themselves to this
functioning? How does the computer's intelligence differ from human
intelligence?
John Morris, a computer engineer and educator, has put together an
instructional block for eighth or ninth graders in which just such inquiry
is undertaken. In addition, students resort to the laboratory, where they
undertake work giving them a basic understanding of the technologies
supporting the modern computer -- magnetics for memory and disk drives,
primitive relay-based calculators, and so on. Then they visit Boston's
Computer Museum, where they can see some of the machines they've been
learning about. They also see how computers assist us in various jobs --
weather prediction, air traffic control, automated directory assistance,
reading for the blind. Finally, back at school, the students pull apart a
personal computer -- dismantling its disk drive as well -- to see how the
machine is constructed.
Understanding the technology and simply using it are two different things.
One can play video games for years while having almost no understanding of
the underlying technology. During the high-school years students should
begin to gain an *understanding*. Use -- and, far more important,
*appropriate* use -- will naturally follow from the understanding.
How much of the pressure from parents and teachers to "bring the schools
up to date with computers" is the result of their own insecurities,
projections, and hopes in the presence of a technology that has never been
demystified for them?
Morris reports this classroom incident:
While I was teaching this year, the famous chess tournament between
Kasparov and Big Blue was held. I brought to the classroom a magazine
that offered the banner, "The Brain's Last Stand: Kasparov versus Big
Blue." "That's silly," said one student. "It's not a man versus a
machine; it's a man versus the people who programmed the machine!"
One could not ask for a greater insight into this media- and industry-
hyped event. The students will understand that the theory behind the
machine and its construction, though challenging, is knowable. They
will look upon computers differently. Yes, the computer will still be
seductive and alluring. Computer games appeal to their innocence and
curiosity. But the machines will look a bit more like a tool and an
invention, whose sole purpose is controlled by the user, not the other
way around. (Talbott, 1997)
It is worth adding that much of this desirable, high-school education
about computers can take place without there being any computers in the
classroom. For example, the algorithmic nature of the computer's
functioning can be taught using such things as kitchen recipes. And the
students can learn about the basic operations of the computer's CPU,
buses, memory, and so on, by acting them out -- one of the more effective
ways of imparting a real understanding.
Educators Must Grapple with Technology
--------------------------------------
One can easily imagine the first users of the automobile thinking, "What a
wonderful tool for strengthening our communities! It's so easy to hop in
the car and drive across town to visit with friends or people in need!"
Yes, the opportunity was there. But the nature of the car, interacting
with our own natures, had, by most accounts, a rather different overall
effect upon our communities. Urban sprawl, ghettos walled off by freeway
ramps, malls, the "escapist" mindset of car-owners, air and noise
pollution, long commutes .... The positive potentials remain even now, but
it is foolish to celebrate them without heeding the full text of the
bargain we have struck with the technology.
Or consider television. One could have said -- many did say -- that now
we would bring politics into the intimacy of every living room, and there
would be a renaissance of democracy in America. Yet the actual fact, as
most would acknowledge, has been quite different: the immediacy of the
screen somehow translates into a greater distance. The political process
becomes more remote, more artificial and scripted, less sincere. It "goes
cosmetic." The involvement of those who watch in front of the screen is
less intense, not more so.
Do we understand why it happened this way? And if we do, have we learned
how to prevent the same problems from infecting those other screens we are
now importing wholesale into our classrooms?
One thing is sure: no school that does not look into these issues with
all the wisdom it can muster, and does not become passionate about them,
can possibly resist the parental, professional, and political pressures to
wire the classroom. Only a school with a sense of mission and a
willingness to undertake a difficult conversation with its community has
any hope of steering a purposeful course through the hype, the industry
propaganda, and the public's near-religious view of technology.
The tragedy is that so many schools are rushing ahead with a fundamental
transformation of their classrooms *without* any considered sense of
mission, but only with a vague feeling of necessity or compulsion. Our
children, some years from now, will doubtless let us know the results of
our willingness to make of their lives a grand experiment -- an experiment
founded upon our own reluctance to confront technology and put it in its
rightful place.
Bibliography
------------
Chawla L. (forthcoming). "Significant Life Experiences Revisited: A
Review of Research on Sources of Environmental Sensitivity." *Journal of
Environmental Education*.
Monke, Lowell (1997). "Letter from Des Moines," in NETFUTURE,
http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/1997/May2297_49.html.
Sarnoff, David (1941). *Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Sciences*, January, 1941.
Talbott, Stephen L. (1995). *The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending
the Machines in Our Midst*. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates.
Talbott, Steve (1997). "Helping Students Understand Computers: John
Morris's Innovations at a Waldorf School," in NETFUTURE,
http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/1997/Jul3097_54.html.
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