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."

Comments

Shouldn't this be obvious?

[schklerg]

I've yet to see any technology that can overcome bad process, bad practice, and bad planning. Why should education be any different?

Marketing may try to sell a magic fix, but reality seems to always win.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[Vermonter]

It's like saying that handing out new hammers to a bunch of carpenters will make the bad ones good. A tool can only enhance quality, not create it.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[DarkOx]

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.

Re:Shouldn't this be obvious?

[tnk1]

Back in the day, my own anecdotal experience was that disruption is a big deal. I sat in both honors classes and "regular" classes back in the day. There was a huge difference in how much you learned based on how disruptive the class was. When I was in a class filled with kids who were dedicated to getting good grades and learning things, you got shit done. I learned less, had less taught to me, and was less able to concentrate in the regular class. I still personally got good grades, but that was because the class was dumbed down so much, it was hard to understand how anyone could have done poorly, let alone failed those classes, even without being a nerd.

In the end, I realized that I worked to get in honors classes as much to simply not be in the regular classes as I did to excel. You literally could not learn even easier things very well in a disruptive class.

Personally, I think we need to pick out the disruptive cases, get them in smaller classes with more structure, and get them out of the way of people who want to learn. Then everyone, including the disruptive kids, will probably be more successful.