I recently ran across an essay by the neoconservative sociologist Nathan Glazer titled "Some Very Modest Proposals for the Improvement of American Education" (1984).
In the essay Glazer offers 7 proposals for improving education ranging from disconnecting the loudspeakers within schools to enlisting children in keeping their schools clean. Not bad ideas, really.
The one item that really captured my attention was "No. 5. Look on new hardware with a skeptical eye." For Glazer, and I suspect many others, the “passion for the new” hardware, i.e., computers, smartboards, etc., serves as a distraction and a means for avoiding the “real and hard tasks of teaching—which require almost no hardware at all, besides textbooks, blackboard, and chalk.”
Glazer goes on to note that when “Japanese education was already well ahead of American, most Japanese schools were in pre-war wooden buildings.” While they are now up-to-date, Glazer insists that their “up-to-dateness” has little to do with their record of academic success.
Schooling for Glazer is about reading, writing, and calculating. It is just that simple. New hardware means spending money, not only on equipment, but also staff, training, software, and security, both physical and virtual. As Glazer puts it:
“When it turns out that computers and new software are shown to do a better job at these key tasks [reading, writing, and calculating]—I am skeptical as to whether this will ever be the case—there will be time enough to splurge on new equipment.”
For Glazer, the teacher, “alone, up front, explaining, encouraging, guiding, is the heart of the matter.” The rest of it is just fun and helpful to corporate income, and gives an over-inflated district staff “something to do.”
For Glazer, students can learn about computers at home and college. After all, getting into college has little to do with what you can do with a computer as compared to the level one’s verbal and mathematics scores as documented by standardized tests. (Ouch!)
The bottom line for Glazer is the same ethos that frames No Child Left Behind legislation--focus on basic skills-- creativity and innovation can be “learned” in college or during extracurricular activities.
Ungainly as it may seem, in a way I find myself nodding in agreement to many of these ideas. Have we really gained any measures of success by introducing computers into classrooms? What are computers being used for: creativity and innovation or skill and drill? How many students are using weblogs as a learning log or for persuasive writing exercises? Given the “security” risks of opening access to the Internet, how effectively is the World Wide Web or Read/Write technologies being incorporated into learning activities? (These inquiries also beg the question as to who decides what is effective and how it’s being decided/measured—more on that later).
Clearly, if you follow my weblog, you are aware I am a huge proponent of the Read/Write Web (pdf) and computing in general. But when I begin to survey educators in the K-12 arena, most computer use in the classroom is hardly creative or innovative. In most cases, computer use is not possible in the classroom at all for a variety of reasons. I do not want to throw the blame for this fact at educators’ feet alone; there are many reasons why creativity and innovation languish in classrooms, computers or no. Yet, literacy skills and multimodal literacy do not necessarily require a computer. Skills such as play, performance, navigation, resourcefulness, networking, negotiation, synthesis, sampling, collaboration, teamwork, judgment, and discernment can take place without the use of computers.
So what can computer really do for kids in the classroom?
I think this is a critical question that needs further thought and explication. While I have my opinion, I encourage you to share yours.
Reference:
Glazer, N. (1984). Some very modest proposals for the improvement of American education. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 113(4): 169-176.
LOLCATS: retrieved from ROFLCAT
Keywords: academic success, achievement, Classroom 2.0, collaboration, college, computing, creativity, discernment, education, educational technology, educators, innovation, judgment, learning, liberalism, literacy, literacy skills, LOLCATS, Nathan Glazer, navigation, NCLB, negotiation, neoconservatism, networking, performance, play, politics, Read/Write Web, resourcefulness, sampling, School 2.0, school reform, skepticism, students, synthesis, teachers, teaching, teamwork, Web 2.0
Comments
> So what can computers really do for kids in the classroom?
They can teach them how to use computers.
Glazer may not have noticed, but there's fancy new machinery all through society, not just in the schoolhouse. Pretending that the world isn't changing is no way to prepare for it.
As a primary school teacher who is currently working full time as an ICT advisor working with teachers, a lot of what Glazer says is, unfortunately, true in many classrooms. Of course, good teaching is the baseline for student achievement but use of computers as an extra dimension to teaching can make the enhance the opportunities children have in their classrooms. I guess, the difference for me is that the use of the read write web gives children access to expertise outside of their classroom and allows them to make real connections with their own families and other classrooms around the world. It is the networking that the read write web has made possible and, very importantly, achieveable that has the opportunity to change the way we teach for the better.
There is also an interesting gap between older and younger teachers. This is a generalisation but the younger teachers coming through tend to be far more computer savvy and therefore need less skills training. As an advisor, I find this means that they are able to get into the more meaningful ICT activities quicker and are more willing to take up the challenge of using ICT. Will some of these problems of teachers not using ICT in an authentic context and at a deeper level fade as more tech savvy teachers enter the workforce?
In New Zealand, teachers will always struggle until we get past the one computer classrooms that most schools have. While you can still do great things, having only one computer is a barrier to really making the most of ICT. I think the government needs to come to the party and help with funding if things are ever going to really change.
You just need to look at the example of Point England School in Auckland to see how ICT can raise student achievement and outcomes. They decided their pupils needed to raise their oral language skills and put in place a programme of podcasting in every classroom. They have won international awards, the children are motivated to podcast and they have seen an overall improvement in literacy skills. That's the bottom line!I'm not going to argue the use of tech in schools... we both believe that learning is networked (and speaking of which, I owe you an email still...) but the larger point you make is spot on.
I learned to teach in a school that did embrace those progressive values, and *then* the tech soared. As long as we expect tech to be the progressive tail that wags the dog, our progress will be limited. Let's look at how we teach, why we teach, what we want to accomplish... let's build inquiry-driven, project-based pedagogy, and *then* let's look at the tools we need to accomplish them.
People ask me, "Where are the schools like SLA?" And the answer isn't "Here are the other tech-infused schools..." it's "Here are the other progressive schools..."
So here's my return question -- how do we work with the CES schools, the Big Pictures schools, the schools where the values you desire are being embraced to now embrace technology?
A back-to-nature movement to reconnect children with the outdoors is burgeoning nationwide. Programs, public and private, are starting or expanding as research shows kids suffer health problems, including obesity, from too much sedentary time indoors with TV and computers.
http://thornburgcenter.blogspot.com/2007/07/no-child-left-inside.html
The post could use some formatting, or maybe that’s just part of the anti-computer ethos.
Theodore Roszak The Cult of Information “...the best approach to computer literacy might be to stress the limitations and abuses of the machine, showing the students how little they need it to develop their autonomous powers of thought.” (p.242) The first edition 1986 the second edition 1994
Neil Postman Technopoly “…technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology – from the IQ test to the automobile to a television set to a computer – is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control.” (p.185) 1992
I’m not quoting these “progressive” “left” or “ultra-left” critics/activists out of complete agreement, more out of respect for the diversity of the back-to-basics movement(s). The neo-luddites are more than neo-conservatives (who can also have us nodding our heads in agreement to their arguments here and there) they’re also ultra-progressives. Dewey didn’t use a computer. Like Roszak says, we don’t need it.
I disagree almost completely with Roszak and Postman, while I strive towards their end goals with my work, I wonder also about the possibilities of these machines.
To your question What can computers really do for kids in the classroom? Stephen Downes answers They can teach them how to use computers.
Downes is completely correct that the computers themselves could teach children how to use them. GUIs are so intuitive, that computers are easier to use than the timer on the oven in your kitchen, not to mention older technology like the 8-track tape (who ever got the hang of those things?). This freaks teachers out that a machine can replace them so easily. Why is it that kids learn more, easier, faster, better in the glow of a GUI? Another question is “do they?” but what we hear is that kids are learning slaves to the machine, and unteachable by humans.
So the question is literacy. Most teachers are politically illiterate, at least in Canada where the governments and media squash them at will and with frequency. Most teachers are computer illiterate, and as such are unable to teach through the machines. If teachers are being replaced (not today, but maybe a not-so-distant tomorrow) it won’t be the machines, but coders who are their replacements. In this day to be politically and technologically illiterate is to be philosophically illiterate, and that’s a whole lot of illiteracy in those claiming to teach literacy to our children.
So yes, the computer itself will teach children how to use it. The fear is that the coders are unaccountable. What are the values they code into the machine? And really how does this differ from Dewey’s constructed environments? Did Dewey propose a system in which those being educated were unconscious of the preferred result? With the computer interface are the graphics using or being used? This interface could be a very powerful metaphor for teaching, but students need to learn to use a computer beyond using programs. And of course the problem with this is a person with the knowledge to code/script/program a computer has an earning potential and interest area that excludes public school teaching as an option.
This is the second time I’ve typed this out and I'm still meandering, but if I’m trying to say something it’s that computers are tools for communication, but the form of that communication is dictated by code. Knowledge of the code allows the users to infuse the form of communication with a personal set of values. This understanding is key for promoting the tool in the “progressive” sphere. All the players in education should be critical of the tools, programs and their uses; they should also have the knowledge to alter those programs to create forms more consistent with their values.
What can computers do for students? Well, how about opening a student to a wide range of literacies? Look at the screen about you as you are reading this post. Look at other web pages. They aren't just text. They are image, animation, calculation, audio, and they are all dynamic–not static.
Most people are competent in one language at best, say writing or speaking or music, but a computer gives all of us access to all of those languages and allows us to create complex documents that read, speak, sing, draw, move, calculate, and do it in real time. How can we not see that access to this range of languages expands the ways in which we can say whatever it is that we are capable of saying?
Does the computer make students smart or even smarter? No. Maybe they will still say unwise things with computers, but they will have more ways to say them to more people. That is at least a quantitative expansion. And those who can say intelligent things? Well, they can say them in more and better ways to more people, too. And that is a qualitative expansion.
So, at least, computers give all of us access to a wider range of language: text, image, sound, animation, calculation. That is a significant expansion in the ways all of us have to think, encode those thoughts, and express them to others.
Then, let's talk about the shift computers have made from static texts to dynamic, multimedia texts, and the changes that will engender in the ways we view, manage, exchange, and interact with information. But that's for another post.