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Technology Won't Fix America's Neediest Schools -- It Makes Bad Education Worse
theodp writes: In an adapted excerpt from Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, Univ. of Michigan prof Kentaro Toyama begins: "'Technology is a game-changer in the field of education,'" Education Secretary Arne Duncan once said, and there was a time when I would have agreed. Over the last decade, I've built, used, and studied educational technology in countries around the world. As a computer scientist and former Microsoft employee, I wanted nothing more than to see innovation triumph in the classroom. But no matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology 'levels the playing field' of learning, but what I've discovered is that it does no such thing."
I think the underlying thinking behind most educational technology is take the work out of the hands of the local practitioner, deskill the teacher. While the sellers and developers of edtech will never admit this is the case and my not even realize it themselves it basically amounts to central planning.
If a computer program is going to teach a kid math the pedagogical approaches it takes will be more or less fixed and ones designed at some central facility somewhere. It wont be the paradigm the local instructor was using and it may or may not add to clarity.
I am in my early 30's depending on who you ask I am either the last of the gen X'ers or among the first of the so called millennials. Outside of some of the education television experiments tried in classrooms on boomers, I saw most of the early experiments in edtech. I had a number of older teachers who had spend years drawing their own little cartoons, crafting their own little narratives to help us understand. I also had younger ones who wanted to try out all the new MECC stuff. I was in Minnesota. If that worked for you great, if not the instructors were mostly caught flat footed with no alternative ideas about how to convey the lesson, unlike the other teachers that had taken the time to develop their own materials.
Central planning isn't any better for education than it is for economies. When edtech stops trying to teach and really starts trying to make teachers more effective it might work. A better hammer will allow a good carpenter to get his framing done faster and possibly even done better. A better hammer isn't a robotic carpenter though, but most edtech attempts to be a robotic teacher.
My sister teaches Highschool math subjects. She loves Mathmatica. She says it lets throw up a visualization on the screen the really helps some of her students get it. Its faster and better than anything she could scribble on the whiteboards. She is using it though in the context of her own lessons to explain her own contrivances that show how to apply the math. Its a generic tool though, while lots of educators use it isn't designed only for education and it isn't designed to teach any specific lessons.
Edtech needs to focus on giving teachers quality general use tools and class room appropriate hardware on which to run them. It does not need to be trying to create a digital textbook equivalent or play instructor on its own.
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Well... the elimination of artisan labor and the rise of mechanized production processes was effectively a process where a (complex set of) tools enhanced quality so much that it made the bad carpenters and the good carpenters more or less indistinguishable.
Of course, the day we get technology capable of doing the same for education will also be the day where we have technology sufficient to render obsolete all educated workers, so the fact that technology has finally fixed schools will be a footnote in a much more dramatic restructuring of basically everything.
This.
I like to think of technology as a rising tide; it raises all boats. It doesn't make dinghies into yachts.
Technological improvements in teaching tools don't help underprivileged children more than privileged children. They improve things equally for everyone.
This doesn't mean that everyone will get the same benefit. There are at least four factors that will still affect the success of children in school, regardless of technological tools:
1) Parental involvement and investment (temporal, emotional and monetary).
2) Community culture. e.g., gang activity, health of relationships with local authorities.
3) Individual intelligence.
4) Teacher skill and investment.
Properly applied (using experimentally proven methods), new technology improves school learning. Giving children new tools will not, however, improve the performance of uninterested children more than interested ones.