Thursday, June 23, 2005

stop yur micronchimps and lurn!

The Chronicle: 6/24/2005: Professors, Stop Your Microchips

We know from talking with k-12 instructors that "computer classrooms" often don't work in the way they are intended to work. I would extend the argument to include "laptop powered initiatives" where the faculty is not prepared to compete with wireless access to the internet. Essentially, an hour in class becomes a channel surfing experience......if what is on in front of me is not interesting, I will "change the channel" to email, surfing the web, etc.

There is quite a bit of research in education on what I call "discontinuous messaging". Essentially, instead of educational elements (talking before the class, using the blackboard/whiteboard/visual presenter, etc) working together to reinforce and build knowledge, these elements actually work as distractors. PowerPoint slides or Instructor? Which is more important? This is what the author is complaining about; that technology integrated poorly acts as a distractor instead of aiding in learning.

Classroom time is not treated as what it really is -- access to an expert that is going to guide the students learning experience. For the student to truly experience learning, it has to be active -- the student has to participate. This does not mean that everyone *must* do buzzword compliant endeavors such as "team learning" or "game theory based learning". It does not mean that every student must have a PDA or Laptop. It does not mean the instructor has to entertain.

Education is tough to quantify, despite our best efforts to apply principles of mass-production to teaching. Teaching doesn't scale. Education is profoundly expensive when done well. It is not necessarily expensive in terms of equipment or software. It is expensive in terms of time -- time that students, staff and faculty must commit to making it a meaningful experience. Money does not mean much when we are talking about hours and days of someone's life they will never get back.

We have tried for the last 150 years to apply the lessons learned in mass production to teaching, and we are finding that it often doesn't work. Given a choice between a computer lab and smaller classes, we opt for the computer lab, reasoning that the computer lab will offer enriched learning opportunities, but will also allow us to teach more students, give us "standards based learning" and "individualized instruction".

But blaming technology misses the point. Blaming the internet misses the point. Blaming a freakin' spell checker misses the point. The world is as it is. Pretending that these technologies don't exist is fruitless. It is akin to complaining about student's handwriting skills diminishing because they have typewriters. Instead of complaining that students don't use the library, spend time teaching students to be critical consumers of information, whether it be in a library, or on the internet at large -- which for many people, is becoming the library's replacement.

I posted a news item to our Mac user's list a few days ago, and challenged people to read it as if it was an assignment for freshmen english. It was because the story was most probably "fake news", something that is becoming quite commonplace, particularly on television, but also in other information channels we used to trust implicitly. If we are not able to teach critical skills required to analyze information, we are hopelessly lost. Fake News is such a big problem that the head of the FCC spoke about it to a room full of broadcasters a while back, warning that the FCC will begin cracking down on the worst offenders (insert your own cynical aside here). I am very much concerned that we are raising a generation of citizens that won't be able to tell Fake News from Real News.

So -- I disagree with the the author's admonition that we turn off our laptops. I say just the opposite -- use them, but use them in ways that challenge students to think. Don't do web quests that end up being a list of links -- have students construct knowledge. They won't like it -- because there are no shortcuts here. There are no tools that can neatly format internalized knowledge. There is only ourselves.

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