Slashdot Mirror
The Flickering Mind
What's bad: The first 350 pages of The Flickering Mind are as depressing as anything I've read. In case after case, Oppenheimer describes politicians' and educators' mindless acceptance of claims by technology pundits and technology companies. The sheer number of tax dollars poured into worthless software and soon-to-be-obsolete hardware is appalling The fact that so few lessons have been learned in 20 years beggars the imagination.
Those are my words, not the author's. The book's examples are laid out in very plain, factual language. No raving rants, no wild tangents. Just record after record, study after study, interview after interview.
Oppenheimer has researched the book by interviewing teachers, students, former students, educational software employees, district policymakers and government officials across the U.S. People with hands-on experience using things like distance-learning systems, CD-ROM-based textbooks, math and reading games, multimedia software, student laptops, school intranets, web-based research papers, and dozens of pieces of educational technology.
A recurring theme in these interviews is how computers either make formerly easy things harder (like classroom discussion), and hard things avoidable (students who know how to copy-paste don't have to construct sentences).
"One English teacher could readily tell which of her students essays were conceived on a computer. "They don't link ideas," the teacher said. "They just write one thing, and then they write another one, and they don't seem to see or develop the relationships between them."
The many interviews give The Flickering Mind a personal feel, and make the reading easier. In many ways, it's like a record of the author's travels from school to school. But one of the book's great strengths is Oppenheimer's unwillingness to rely on anecdotal evidence. Much of the book is devoted to analyzing studies of technology's impact in schools. A good chunk of these studies are commissioned by firms that sell educational software. Not surprisingly, they tend to be shallow and nonscientific. Many pages are spent pointing out flaws in this research. This becomes important when Oppenheimer turns the same critical eye on studies which support his own conclusions. An interesting sub-topic of the book is how very few truly objective educational technology studies exist.
All the evidence against computers as useful learning tools wouldn't be so alarming if computers didn't cost so much. But educators seem especially blind to the continual costs of staying on the technology bandwagon. There are two faces to this problem, and The Flickering Mind addresses both. The first is schools cutting faculty and programs in order to purchase hardware and software. The second is local and national governments granting subsidies and to companies who promise to assist schools with technology. In both cases, taxpayers foot the bill.
The Flickering Mind relies mainly on educators' own criteria for determining how technology helps learning (can the kids read, write, and do math?) But it also takes time to puncture the oft-recycled dogma that society has a shortage of graduates with high-tech skills:
"When employers who were fretting about this gap were asked what skills mattered to them, this is what they said: Most important of all is a deep and broad base of knowledge. "Want to get a job using information technology to solve problems? Know something about the problems that need to be solved." This statement reflected the sentiments of nearly two thirds of the Information Technology Association of America's members. Following far behind this priority was "hands-on experience" with technical work, which less than half the nation's IT managers considered critical (Most apparently felt perfectly capable of teaching those skills on the job.)
What's good:
All is not Luddite doom-and-gloom. The Flickering Mind is careful to highlight the areas where computer technology helps kids learn. Many schools do benefit from computers--as long as the computers are in central labs (not in the classroom), and not networked. One school has a senior-level class in which students build the computers used in the labs. Programming classes are valued by upperclassmen with an interest in technology careers. Some educators have made adjustments, like the teacher who removed all but a single-size font from the machines "so the students can write instead of wasting time adjusting the text".
The final third of the book is an uplifting counterpart to the ignorance and frustration described in the first two thirds. Oppenheimer gives details of visits to several schools which buck the trend of embracing technology as an end in itself. They use computers, but not in the class:
"In an aging brick building on New York's Upper East Side, a dozen teenagers of varying ages, half of whom look like street kids, pull their desks into a circle as their teacher distributes several thick handouts. "You're killing trees," one student complains."
"Yes," says the teacher. "I'm killing lots of trees"
After the students have spent fifteen to twenty minutes with the handouts, discussion begins. The debate is constant and heated. Whenever the dialog bogs down or goes off course, the teacher quickly interrupts. "I want to hear some pieces of evidence here!" he insists.
A university professor contrasted former students of this school with others she'd met: "I've had the experience of asking students a question and there's a one-sentence answer. And it's not a question of shyness or dumbness, but the person hasn't learned how to develop an idea. How to make a statement and then qualify and describe and give examples and illustrations. Each and every one of these people could do that."
Conclusion
The Flickering Mind is one of the most well-researched books I've read. It is well worth checking out from your library. It's even more worth buying, because you'll likely be re-reading it and lending it to your friends.
You can purchase the The Flickering Mind from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Methinks the submitter doesn't speak with educators and politicians all that often. It's simply absurd to suggest that your typical educator or politician blindly believes that computers are the solution to America's education woes.
One wonders about the reviewer's credentials if this is how he frames the debate surrounding the use of technology in our schools. This is a complex issue with no clear answers--not some good vs. evil Joes 'n' Cobra brawl.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Astronomer Clifford Stoll similarly makes compelling arguments against computers in the classroom (libraries as well) in his books Silicon Snake Oil and High-Tech Heretic.
I saw Clifford Stoll in person at a lecture given in front a group of librarians. He animatedly pointed out, with his lecture notes written on his hand, that in the distant future the jobs that people do will still require old-fashioned learning and hands-on experience.
"If I were around even a hundred years from I now I wouldn't want to visit a dentist who's learned his trade from a CD-ROM," he explained, "I would want a dentist who had hands-on experience at a dental school."
He talked about how software packages make the outrageous claim that they can "make learning fun," when actual learning takes self-discipline, hard work, and effective human teachers.
As for me, I love being able to order books from the library online, and have them sent from faraway libraries to the one down the street from my office, but I still sometimes feel a bit cheated that I had the Dewey Decimal System and its card catalog lookup method drilled into my head from an early age, only to have the latter removed from the library and replaced with a row of computers. When our library system first implemented this change, the computers were far more difficult to operate than the alphabetized drawers of the card catalog. Nowadays, with the web-based system, it's much easier to find exactly what I want, but I still sometimes miss the thrill of the hunt, as it were, flipping through cards organized by subject, title, and author, searching for just the right book.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
I rate this book a.....Q
You just didn't spend enough time playing Quake.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Teachers are just being stubborn. They have to change with the times. Instead of grading a paper "F", grade it "OMFG n00b".
Instead of grading it "A", grade it "<3".
When the kids get rowdy, instead of trying to yell over the crowd, just write "STFU kthx" on the board.
Change with the times, people.
Author and submitter sound like they're a bit grumpy over this whole computer fad thing. "Darn kids and their technology! Why, when I was your age, I had to write my reports on *paper*... with a *pencil*!!..."
C'mon... the only success stories in schools were where the comps were not in the classroom, and weren't networked (how do you print??) sounds fishy to me, and smacks of some serious anti-tech bias, IMHO.
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
The problem with Computer education is that they use computers for every area of studies but they don't teach them how to use the computer as a tool. For Science Class students will use computers to virtually dissect a frog. But when it comes to doing a calculation they will still reach for the paper. Or what happened in college there was a student working on there math homework in the computer lab, they were using the application called Maple (for those who dont know about it it is a fairly powerful math program) now he needed to do some simple arithmetic so he went around asking people for a calculator. Not even thinking about using the calculator that comes with almost every OS on the planet. Or in maple where you just need to to type the formula in and follow with a ;. He was trained to use the computer and Maple just as he was taught but it never occurred for him to use the computer for a problem that wasn't required for class to solve. But because the teacher are so inflexible about computer they don't teach the students to use the computers as a tool. They just use them as a way to sit down and grade papers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You need good people teaching good things to good people to get good results. We barely pay the teachers, and so we scare away lots of good people from teaching. Our curriculums are weak and far away from reality. We raise our kids without a parent at home using the TV/computer as a surrogate and feed them non-stop hyperactivity chow, and so they are more or less unteachable.
Computers won't fix this situation. Maybe if we fixed the other 3 problems, they would make a good situation better.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
I am finishing a masters in Ed. (Computers and Ed. Technology) and this book was a big part of my thesis. I have been involved in my school's technology for years. This book should be required reading for every princpal and teacher. Sadly, he exposes the "education industrial complex" (paraphrasing Eisenhower) and highlights many problems with our education system. I could go on, but that's my thesis. Schools need to go back to the basics, readin', writin', 'rithmetic. Literacy and critical thinking should be the goals of school, and if the kids never even touch a computer in school, they won't miss a thing. Though I do believe there should be a technology component, where kids do learn basic computer skills.
I might also suggest Jane Healy's "Failure to Connect" and Clifford Stoll's "Silicon Snake Oil". Please take it from me, I am a high school history teacher, and I see this problem as wide scale.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Personal anecdote here: way back when I was in high school, the PTA scraped together some money to buy a dozen Apple II computers for an after school computer club. The following year they were incorporated into a computer lab, and a course was offered as an elective for us nerdy kids, but computing wasn't part of the general curriculum.
Anyway, for my final project in that course, I wrote a program that could take a term paper draft and size requirements as input, and then it would produce an expanded draft to meet those requirements by fiddling with margins, word and line spacing, and finally by inserting nonsense phrases if necessary.
I submitted the source code, a sample input (3 1/2 pages) and the output, a 5 page English paper (which had been graded "A")
The teacher gave me an "F" on principle, or maybe because I didn't properly comment the code.
I even used that program to expand this one-line post.
More music, fewer hits
>He talked about how software packages make the outrageous claim that they can "make learning fun," when actual learning takes self-discipline, hard work, and effective human teachers.
Cats and dogs can't survive on instinct alone. Both need to have learned hunting skills. How do they acquire them? They play.
Play is how mammals learn. They expend enormous energy in play. If play weren't a vital function then non-playing creatures would have taken over the world through sheer efficiency.
"Self-discipline, hard work, and effective human teachers" could be a description of what happens when humans "play" soccer.
Learning *is* fun, inherently. We're programmed for it. Any healthy young child is constantly exploring, taking things apart, and asking "why?".
The great mystery of our educational system is how it has made learning seem like a chore.
I have watched my children being taught with computers in the classroom, computers in a separated "lab", and computers at home. Much of what the author mentions is very real to me.
The amount of time spent changing font types, font sizes, paragraph alignment, etc. is added time they could have avoided. Typing speed is a severe limiter for a long report -- and "teacher says it has to be typed/printed". Spell-check and grammar checks give an impression that they don't need to check their own work. I end up reviewing and marking the errors to make them correct them.
The educational software that they found so fun when they were younger fit into two categories - something they already knew and was easy OR something they hadn't learned yet and had to ask for help with. There was no actual instruction on HOW to do things - just little games using the skills.
========
Perhaps the scariest offshoot of this is how computers and software are implemented everywhere else (businesses and government). I've seen people spend hours working on a document that should have taken them 20 minutes. I've seen people who don't bother knowing how to speak or spell because the word-processor will do it for them. I work with people who claim the computer makes them more productive -- when I also know they spend more than 50% of their day online surfing sites completely unrelated to their job and get less done in the 50% they actually do work.
I'm not a Luddite by any means - I use my computers for maximizing my productivity. I even try to teach my children how to avoid the pitfalls by making them hand-write their rough drafts, research from books, and have a preset format that is used for all documents.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
In the 20 years I have followed computers as educational tools, I have yet to see a single credible (ie: not vendor paid) study which showed a benefit from using computers to teach normal kids normal subjects.
Once we get into special areas, things change.
For instance there have been many studies which show huge benefits to below average kids, where the computer can be used to implement repetitive teaching techniques.
Similar positive results have been documented for fringe topics and above average students.
Most of these fringe areas can be reduced to the simple phenomena of the computer being used to make up for a teacher shortage. None of the studies I have seen argues that the results are different from what would have happened if sufficient teachers where available to implement the same amount of teaching.
But still not one single study have shown a consistent, tangible benefit for normal kids in the normal basic subjects {$native_language, math, science}
Many studies and reports have pointed out tangible damage.
Considering how much money has been spent, that is a pretty disturbing scientific basis.
Anectodal evidence is distributed slightly different: All the good news is about things which are going to happen. Once the computer have been rolled in, we practically never hear good news.
Combine this situation with the recent study out of Chicago which documented that for each hour of television toddlers watched per day, they had 10% higher risk of ADD at age 7, and we have a really disturbing situation at our hands.
Poul-Henning
PS: And as somebody who is old enough to have written a lot of text on a type-writer, I can personally attest that it makes you think a lot more about the text before you write.
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
Because of this, I am likely to make better decisions about cryptography. I will not confuse a stream cypher with a one time pad.
Now:
More and more, my education is coming from the Internet.
I believe we need to rethink the whole concept of school, and what it is for.