More on Technology in Education
In case you haven’t seen it yet, the Economist magazine is having an online debate on technology in education.
Proposition: The continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.
I was going to write a summary of the comments on the Economist debate on technology in education because there are so many of them (they require quite a bit of sifting), but I had too many negative comments and didn’t want to seem like a jerk.
So, instead, I would like to elaborate on my own thoughts on the subject.
First off, I voted for the proposition: meaning that I agree that technology adds little to the quality of most education. I voted for the proposition because I think that we can do a much better job than we are doing now.
A laptop, in and of itself, is not a good thing. It’s just a laptop. You can use it for research, communication, browsing porn… It’s not the technology that is important, but how you use it.
So who is responsible for how the technology is used?
In the classroom, it’s the teacher. Apple, in its iPod page for the education section of their site says that:
Apple enables educators to expand their curriculum to meet the mobile and media-rich learning styles of today’s students. iPod extends teaching and learning beyond the normal classroom hours, allowing students to easily and continuously learn. iTunes and iLife let them access, create, share, and communicate knowledge, and iPod provides students the ability to learn as they live — on the go.
There’s just one problem with this scenario…it ignores the students who have much better things to do with their iPods than study.
There are a number of notable examples of iPods being used in the classroom to good effect. But they require a teacher who can create learning materials that serve their students. “In Some Schools, iPods Are Required Listening” runs the headline, but it was the teacher who put in all the effort to integrate popular music into her lessons—not the iPod. The teacher, Ms. Poli, transcribed the lyrics for her students. And the iPods were only used in class—they were collected at the end of class.
There are a number of examples of universities issuing iPods to students, like Duke University, and examples of students using iPods to record lectures, but a boring lecturer is still boring on an iPod.
So if technology isn’t good in and of itself, what makes technology good in an educational setting?
In my first post on the Economist debate, I quoted Sir John Daniel from the pro-side because I fully agree with the points that he makes. But, instead of reiterating his points, I would like to distill them into a single thought.
Before using a technology to teach, ask yourself: “What problem does this technology solve?.”
There are more answers than there are technologies, but that’s not the point. The point is to think about how to use technology to advance using it to teach. Websites that start out with a clear idea or improvement in mind provide more valuable content to students than websites without any clear idea of how they improve on textbooks and other resources that students already have access to.
I don’t think that the resources that are already online are bad, but they could be even better still, and that is the source of a lot of optimism for the future.