Nancy Bailey watched advance promotional material for PBS’s “School of the Future,” and she is fearful that it will be a sales pitch for digital learning.
She writes:
“On Wednesday, Sept. 14, 9 pm ET, PBS and NOVA will air a two hour special called “School of the Future.” The advertisement tells us much. They are warning that the future for children demands that students need better preparation to succeed due to globalization. What they probably won’t tell us is that this future will likely continue to be manipulated by corporations.
“Technology
“This abstract, strange future they speak about (possibly puzzling to the smartest among us), will be about technology, of course.
“Their message appears to be that we better address technology that can be used with students, even to study their brains to see if they can learn faster and better. The goal is to close the achievement gap.
“The ad has that hint of emergency for which school reformers are known.
“Sal Kahn of Kahn Academy fame will be on the program. I don’t mind Kahn’s online instruction, but it is naïve to believe that such a program will replace public schools and real teachers.
“And that’s what today’s technology is about. Don’t be deceived by the few teachers that might be shown on this program.
“In some parts of the country they are sitting children online in teacherless preschools.
“They are replacing elementary, middle, and high school classes led by teachers with all online instruction, even though research shows that more computer time doesn’t work out as well as less screen time.
“Many school districts have wasted an exorbitant amount of money on iPads that have not proven to be worth what administrators thought when they purchased them. In some places they sit unused in the closet.
“Technology isn’t bad. It can benefit teachers, students and parents. But it should not be made to appear like it will miraculously improve the way students learn used alone.
“Many parents understand this. The reasonable use of technology is what Parents Across America recently advocated for in a position paper. They recognize the overarching push many corporations are doing to destroy public schooling by creating all online schooling.
“The last chapter in my book Losing America’s Schools: The Fight to Save Public Education is about the technology threat. I believe, like many, that the ultimate goal of the school reformers involves closing public schools in favor of all online–at home or in substandard charter schools set up like warehouses.
“Technology might help the homebound student or the student in rural areas, but this is an alternative. It can also provide review for students who need it, or advanced information for students who want it, but it is not as good as brick-and-mortar schooling.
“It is also troubling to hear repeated claims that computers will individualize schooling which we will hear about in this program. They might give students lessons at their level of understanding, but truly personalized learning involves real teachers and students with which to connect. The human element is critical.”
Get ready for the Brave New World of education, the one without teachers. Think of the cost savings!
Get
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s time to admit we don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to educational technology.
We’ve already had one round of chagrined admissions. About 10 years ago, the common practice was buying hardware and dropping it into schools: Every student got a laptop, perhaps, or every classroom got a computer-driven whiteboard. Policymakers finally realized that such purchases don’t boost student achievement or create a new generation of programmers.
Better planning is now more common, but it’s time for chagrined admission 2.0.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/daniel-willingham-false-promise-tech-schools-article-1.2636472
“It’s time to admit we don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to educational technology.”
I have to disagree with that statement. It’s like saying we don’t know what we’re doing with pens or books in school. Technology is just a tool. We know how to use tools – whether pens, books or tech – to guide student inquiry, discovery and expression. The problem is when we allow education to become the tool of the technology, rather than the reverse. And we don’t do that because we don’t know what we’re doing but because we’ve been co-opted by people who stand to profit from it.
Totally on the spot today, Dienne!!
(as usual)
In a sense I agree with you, Dienne, and I am sure I have said the same thing myself, but pencils and books have a much more easily defined function. Computers go far beyond those functions. I think we are bedazzled by the possibilities so much so that every time something new arrives on the scene we are distracted by the novelty.
I have been fighting a transition to a so-called smartphone that as far as I can tell is one of the dumbest inventions of all time. Every time a punch an icon, rather than opening, the darn thing moves to my home screen! It took two days before I could get the darn thing to unlock. The only thing it does well is vibrate. While customer support from my carrier is supposed to be very good, I could spend all day calling them for information the extensive online manual appears to not consider important.
So in a sense I”m with you, Dienne. I never needed an owner’s manual and customer support for a book or a pencil!
cx: Every time I
Ha 2old2teach I thought I was the only fossil dragging my feet. I cling to my old flip-phone– never learned how to store contact #’s & prefer to use my memory instead. My [younger & tech-savvy] sister enjoys reminding me that if it ever breaks, there is an identical, unused phone in the boxes I brought home 2 yrs ago from our deceased-at-86 mom’s house…
They are no longer going to support my old phone! I figured it was time to try to master the beast now that it doesn’t matter. I’m retired but didn’t even get a cell phone until I started to commute quite a ways for work. It was never on except when I made a call or was waiting for one. I never told the school when I got one because they wanted to use our phones (and minutes) for routine classroom contact.
But look on the bright side, 2old – now you can play Pokemon Go! 😉
Sorry, don’t mean to be flip – I too dragged my feet switching to a smartphone and there are still days I want to throw the darn thing through the window. But overall I think it’s made my life better – I can finally text (never could master that having to push the number button one, two or three times thing) and taking and sharing pictures is a lot easier now – even a Luddite like me can do it. Bear with it and best of luck.
By the time I figure out how to play “Pokemon Go,” it will be gone. 🙂 I will master that *#!! phone, but It will be a race between mastery and senility.
Depends on who “we” is. Selectprep is correct that the “we” calling the shots on how ed $ is spent– federally or at state level– ‘don’t know what we’re doing when it comes to ed tech’. Caveat: that “we” is uninterested in ed-tech ed-achievement results. What they “know” is that ed-tech products pushed by deep pockets footing their campaign coffers can be sold to uninformed voters footing the bill, at least until results are in, & by then, “we” will be pushing the next swindle.
Flashing lights, bells, and whistles.
It’s easy to hope that technology will make the world a better place, like Star Trek instead of Brave New World. It’s very enticing to wish for an easy solution to climate change and all the other problems of the world today. We want to rest easy that we are leaving the planet better off for our kids and grandkids. Some think tech is the cure, not part of the disease.
It’s just not true. That’s what makes it so dangerous.
When this got started, back in the days when all us geeks were still enthused about the Promise Of Technology, it was all about putting tech in the hands of learners and teachers, distributing computational and informational power to the people. That would still work if anyone would let it, but the paradigm shitted, er, shifted, when the corps(e) took over and started concentrating power again in their own grubby fists.
That was inevitable, though. They shouldn’t have let the industry run it.
It’s like letting Nabisco direct school lunches and insisting the lunches will be healthy because the people who work there are “good”.
“Good or bad people” isn’t the issue. The issue is whether the people who are selling the products should be directing this. The answer is “no”. If they don’t know that why would I ever trust them with children or public funding?
Can we say, “get $ out” of politics often enough? Our present legal structure allows ‘non-profits’ to profit, & to ‘speak’ like voters on supposedly-prohibited political topics via a bit of extra pprwk. Nothing will be right until this is corrected.
Under the present zero-sum view of capitalism (and a prima facie oligarchy), the actual education of children is equivalent to the training-of and paychecks-for “low-level” workers: presently necessary for the business to do well; but hopefully, and in the longer run, dispensable.
That’s not to say that such a view of capitalism is the only view, or that there aren’t better ways to understand and implement it without transforming to a totalizing socialism (there are). Nevertheless, under the present view of it, and once we all, including the oligarchs, realize that privatization of education doesn’t work on so many levels, there will still be those who wanted only to make money on “education,” but then there are those others who really consider education of the polity in a democracy as the most dangerous of ideas. <–For those, the whole thing is about getting rid of it.
I shudder to think how much money will be spent on this before there is ANY analysis of value.
Billions. It’s a recipe for regret.
Chiara and Anne: Let’s not forget, either, that the FIELD of education has been working on and progressing in educational theoretics for a very long time.
Perhaps we can forgive (authentically motivated) legislators for not being professional educators, if not for NOT having a good literature review or staff investigators specializing in movements in the philosophy of education.
But those whose fields are either computer science or some aspect of business, especially those with a specialty in marketing, are both (1) by definition ILL-INFORMED about the APPLICATIONS of tech in a classroom full of children; and probably (2) don’t know that they are as ignorant as, in fact, they are–which means they go at it thinking that (to hell with teachers) their expertise in developing apps is directly applicable (pun intended) to the complexities of student development.
What exactly is the educational background, then, of those billionaires cum policy controllers/makers? And what do computers do with students who fall outside of what the algorithms “tell” those whose supposed needs are, first, monetary? <–that, as distinct from what teachers do?
“Let’s not forget, either, that the FIELD of education has been working on and progressing in educational theoretics for a very long time.”
Yes, but who is paying attention?
I’d like to think the new theoretics are being taught in ed schools. In fact, as a free-lance FL-ed [PreK/K enrichment] I was thrilled to find an excellent updated text which includes latest theory & methods being used in FL-ed college programs for the last decade.
Yet I know for a fact that current proven methods in teaching conversational FL are used only in a few far-flung districts in my region– in my pricey NJ school district yes for some in hs, but only due to the absurd fact that FL is verboten to IEP students from 6th-10th grades (to make room for Resource Room), so they were forced to come up w/a super-efficient FL course to meet grad reqts.
Things will perk along for now, & improve in NJ FL, thanks to the ’90’s NJ core curriculum which pushes FL-learning-start down to K/elem, at least in well-funded districts. (Middle-class & poor districts have substituted, in elem, online-FL buttressed by occasional visits from ‘specialist’). Even traditionalist middle-school FL teachers have to up their game when incoming students have mastered the beg level, & it will trickle up… until the long arm of NJ-DOEd — [Christie has already replaced excellent proven NJ ELA & math stds w/CCSS/ PARCC] — after science! after soc stud!– turns its destructive eye to world languages…
To bethree5 who commented about the movement of educational theoretics: “Yes, but who is paying attention?”
Yes–but the mediation of field knowledge and new theoretics is a part of ANY vibrant field. That these don’t move along well in education speaks to internal issues that, again, are rooted in the problems that this site and Diane are addressing–like the lack of teacher resources, including structured TIME allotted for keeping up with the field in systematic collaboration with others (in my experience, some schools do better than others, for instance, some best practices programs); and systematic communications between (a) our teachers and (b) old and new movements in education and associated fields (sociology, psychology, philosophy, history etc., and other subject-related fields).
But these are internal to the field and, with adequate support, can and should be addressed there. The problem we were talking about is when other (external) fields step in to set policy and curriculum with little or no understanding of those movements, or of the principles or problems associated with the field of education, or that they might differ from their own field.
There’s an ignorant assumption going on there–of an automatic hegemony of their own field’s methods, principles, and goals (business, technology, etc.); coupled with the assumptions (a) that field-specific educational theoretics don’t exist; and that (b) teachers are superfluous; and that there is no vibrant bond between field specific (educational) theory and its “apps” going on there–that is, in the teacher-student relationship throughout students’ entire changing developmental process.
Plato thought teaching was the divine profession. Guess what–there are authentic reasons behind that thought, and any good teacher knows exactly what he meant by that.
Who is listening: . . . indeed.
A recipe for the 1%.
I’m much less concerned about the money this will cost than I am about the lives that will be affected: careers destroyed, students not entering into education because there aren’t many jobs, students whose knowledge and excitement for learning will be destroyed.
They keep saying this is “active” rather than “passive”, but it’s not.
This is one of the schools King chose to highlight. Look at this photo. What is “active” about this? They aren’t looking at him or at each other. They may as well be at home learning online.
Why not just enroll them all in a crappy “cybercharter” and call it a day, if the plan is to turn every public school into a crappy cybercharter?
Who even ASKED for this? Did these kids?
https://twitter.com/BTCS_Director
Ours is not to reason why; it is to get the consumers, ie. schools to buy more products. Now that’s good business!
The use of the term “personalized education” abounds in reference to incorporating more apps and platforms into a student’s educational life. Some are authentic tools that help students. Most of the time, though, “personalized education” is an Orwellian term for eliminating teachers and professors and enforcing an “IMpersonal” education modality.
Anne Richards,
You are right. The hawkers of hardware and software call the machine learning “personalized.” Real personalized learning involves people interacting
Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect has several devastating chapters on schools, students, teachers, and technology.
And?
Read it.
American Graduate – one of the co-sponsors of this show — is predictably funded by the Gates Foundation. See this:
http://www.americangraduatedc.org/about
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), in partnership with America’s Promise Alliance and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has launched American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen — an initiative to help combat the dropout crisis in this country. Local public radio and television stations, located in 20 “hub markets” where the dropout crisis is most acute, are at the core of the American Graduate initiative.
Henny Penny running around shouting “the dropout crisis in this country”. We obviously need Sir Billy the Goate to save us!
🙂
Remember when PBS almost went under during the recession? They were saved by the billionaires, including the big tech moguls. Now, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is owned by those billionaires. It is sad to say, but public television is no longer owned by the public. That’s why I’ve pretty much stopped watching. Gone are the days of Robert MacNeil and John Lehrer. Just like other networks, it’s now just one product endorsement masquerading as news after another.
If I recall, they were taken over by Liberty Media owned by a libertarian?
I seem to remember that public television used to get a fair amount of government support and that that support was slowly eroded by conservative forces pushing for private control. I think we can now see what we have lost by handing it over to private industry.
An old-fashioned liberal’s report:
PBS: I find regular NewsHour & Wash Wk in Review are more informative than network natl news– fairly balanced, often by panel. But any special topic spots on NewsHour (ed or anything else) are suspect, & PBS ed specials are like press releases– which makes me leery of all their topical specials (tho Frontline & NOVA OK).
Meanwhile CNN & MSNBC have become mostly neoliberal hotbeds, tho I’ll chance Maddow or Kornecki on non-ed topics. I recommend CSPAN Wash Jnl for neutral topical reporting including education. Guest-speaker slant is challenged by man-on-the-street call-ins & capably moderated. BBC is necessary to get balanced perspective on what’s going on outside US.
Let’s see, the Wisconsin Journal of Education back in 1935 or so had an article on the schools of the future, you know the schools of the 1950s. And the photo accompanying the article was of a classroom with a radio (you know those cool now antique wood cased rounded top ones) on the teacher’s desk imparting the lessons.
Why am I thinking of this?
Thank you very much. Domo arigato.
Ah, what a blast from the past. As an 80s girl, you, like, totally made my day. Thanks!
LOL! You are very welcome.
Sounds like you’re about the same age, more or less, as my kids. They were born in the mid to late 70’s.
Keep your eye on XQ Institute. They fund PBS News Hour. Their ads are a bunch of dismal assessments of PISA scores (Diane thoroughly debunked here), portraying schools as stuck in the 50’s, failing schools, etc. I believe they are backed by Steve Jobs’ widow and probably a bunch of other billionaires.
Yes
That Jobs’ billionaire widow and Arne
They claim they will reinvent schools. I can only speculate what that means.
There’s another group in Ohio called kidsohio.org. They seem to be influential along with Fordham and increasingly setting education policy. While rather obscure, I eventually found backing from Wexners (Limited Corp), AEP, JP Chase, and some law firm. What is concerning is their claim to be non-partisan and data-driven. Save us from more driving data.
I’ve seen XQ ads asking the public to “join the conversation; help us conceive of the high school of the future”, as if they’re really open-minded about it. It’s like one of those lame meetings where the facilitator jots down everyone’s ideas on a big pad and then stuffs it in a drawer after the meeting. No way to turn the sow’s ear of eclectic, half-baked comments into a silk purse. I’m sure Jobs’ widow has her own pre-established ideas that will be executed…and promptly fail. Here’s some good advice she won’t take: you can’t improve the high schools without improving the elementary schools first (not that she’d know how to improve the elementary schools either). Folly marches on. If only we’d soaked Apple with taxes and used the money to fund road repairs instead!
Students are saturated with technology all their waking hours. I think schools should greatly reduce it and provide to them a tech-free oasis where they can cultivate other skills, which are noticeably underdeveloped. Of course as a Latin teacher, I tend to emphasize 1st Century skills. 😉
Another Technology Overreach
Today in staff development, the English teachers were asked what we needed to implement the new online textbook (without being told a rep from Big Textbook Company was nearby taking notes). Part of the scripted lessons of the textbook involve videos with actors, playing students, performing scripted literary discussions. Model discussions. In addition to taking about the disorder of the textbook website, I mentioned that my real students were turned off by the over the top bluff of the actors.
Just now, I was thinking about what advice I would give the company to improve the videos. It wouldn’t be enough to suggest better acting. The actors playing students would have to speak to the students. They would have to know their audience. They would have to interact with their audience. Each class is a different audience. They would have to visit and get to know each class, each student. They wouldn’t be able to do that. The videos will never work. That’s just one part of what teachers are for.
What? Oy!
Wouldn’t it be better, instead of having the students watch these fake, scripted videos, to engage students in, you know, actual, live, unscripted literary discussions, with the teachers’ input and guidance?
What are the students supposed to be getting out of these videos, anyway?
I felt compelled to try the full program with an open mind. I did so for two and a half weeks. Now I know with certainty upon experience how I must proceed: using the readings provided with my own lesson plans. Oy is right, though. The district could’ve just bought textbooks and left the teaching up to me in the first place. I hope no one in mine, the second largest district in the country with a notoriously top down administration, is being forced to follow the script… Oy vey.
So true. I am in for-lang (world-lang) ed. The videos that supplement McGraw-Hill et al mainstream FL-texts are incredibly lame. How are they going to strike the right cultural note for every local student body? They can’t & shouldn’t even try; their Stepford-like portrayals of tourister teens are obsolete w/n days of hitting the screen. Any live role-play in class would work better.
Lucky for me I am a smalltime free-lancer– most of my work is PreK/K level, so youtube is my oyster & can always find culturally-authentic videos made in Mexico or wherever which strike the right note. But I have a few tutor-families whose kids are mid/ hisch age. Again, I have free reign (unlike pubsch teachers?)– youtube is alive w/smart & funny videos for preteens & teens which teach grammar & content, like SeñorWooly.com.
Yep. McGraw-Hill is the company to which I referred. My school “got to” choose between it and College Board’s online junk.
Part 1
As some have noted, technology is a valuable tool. The problem is that it’s too often misused, and not necessarily for the better–– think texting and selfie-taking while driving, political and corporate hacking, nanosecond stock trading.
Anyone who’s become relatively adept at using technology knows something about becoming involved in multi-tasking.
Consider the following, reported in 2008 by Christine Rosen:
“Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, ‘Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.’ The psychologist who led the study called this new ‘infomania’ a serious threat to workplace productivity.”
The threat to workplace productivity is not made lightly. Rosen added:
“One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.”
Public schools are not exempt from this cautionary information.
In his 2003 book, The Flickering Mind, Todd Oppenheimer wrote that
technology was a “false promise.” That is, all too often technology is no
panacea to improving learning and often undermines funding that might have
gone to reducing class sizes, and improving teacher salaries and facilities.
Based on his many classroom observations, Oppenheimer said that “more often
than not” classroom use of computers encouraged “everybody in the room to go
off task.” He noted that a UCLA research team investigating results from
the Third International Math and Sciences Study (TIMSS) reviewed video from
8th grade math and science classes in seven different countries. One
difference stood out: while American teachers use overhead projectors (and
increasingly now LCDs), teachers in other countries still use blackboards,
which maintain “a complete record of the entire lesson.”
A recent Texas study found that “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.” And the New York Times reported recently on classroom use of technology in Arizona, where “The digital push aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom.” As the Times reported, “schools are spending billions on technology,even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.”
But it is quite beneficial to the companies that peddle computers, software, and technological gadgetry. And the big push now is for “technology-enhanced instruction” and “innovation” and virtual schools (on-line instruction).
While I much prefer blackboards for certain purposes, electronic devices can save a complete record of a lesson as well and in fact, can archive it so you can pull it out later if necessary. My blackboard records were gone at the end of class although I suppose you could take a picture of it with a phone. What I really hated about the advent of Smart Boards is that they invariably covered the blackboard so it was no longer usable; I never had a blackboard malfunction.
As for multitasking…what a joke! Now we can all do three things at once…badly. While there are certain efficiencies to be gained from computers, doing something well still requires focus. Computers make it very easy to be distracted.
Part 2
A new player in this realm is Lauren Powell Jobs, who has “an M.B.A. from Stanford University‘s Graduate School of Business and experience as a fixed income trading strategist at Goldman Sachs, she is the founder and chair of the Emerson Collective. The collective, which does not maintain a website, focuses on using entrepreneurship to advance social reform and find solutions to help under-resourced students in America’s public schools, according to one description. She also serves on the boards of the New America Foundation and Teach for America.”
Powell Jobs is tied to the New America Foundation (funded by the Gates and Walton Foundations) and Teach for America (funded by a host of conservative foundations and big banks). She has helped to fund a “network of small private schools” that has extensive staff ties to Teach for America, and she helped to finance the purchase of Amplify from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It appears that Powell Jobs’ conception of “reform” is really not very different from that of Whitney Tilson, or Wendy Kopp, or the other ed “reformers.”
The network of schools Powell Jobs is helping to fund seeks to apply a “reform” formula “… to private, public, and charter schools across the country. Of course, they’re also money-making operations.”
See, for example: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/altschool/
About 10,000 public schools have applied for the Powell Jobs’ XQ Super Schools grants. I know of one in central Virginia that is under consideration for $2 million a year for five years, $10 million total. This school system touts itself as “visionary,” and has had strong, undisclosed connections to the tech company SchoolNet, which was purchased by Pearson. The school division has thrown millions at technology, and recently converted all of its high schools to STEM “academies,” never mind that there is a nation-wide glut of STEM workers. And people in the community don’t bat an eye.
The top executive at Powell Job’s “reform” entity is Russlyn Ali, a former top aide to Arne Duncan, who is also ensconced as a “senior partner” with Powell Jobs.
Ali formerly worked for the Education Trust and the Broad Foundation. She supported No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. She wrote that California should not suspend Common Core assessments because “The Common Core provides the promise and the opportunity for California to again lead the country in education.” Otherwise, she asked, “Will America be ready to compete?”
It’s pure nonsense. But many in public education have responded enthusiastically to it. They respond even more enthusiastically – it seems – when the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) bogeyman is invoked. Go figure.
Powell Jobs also heads up College Track, which “provides tutoring, SAT and ACT preparation and college counseling” to low-income students, Interestingly, according to its tax filings, College Track “qualifies as a publicly supported organization.” It receives money from the Emerson Collective – another Powell Jobs education enterprise, which is organized as a LLC and does not have to publicly report its donations – and from JP Morgan Chase, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Summit 54, a Colorado organization conceived in the wake of ‘Waiting for Superman’ and dedicated to the proposition that “Our education system is not preparing our students for jobs of the future” and “this is having a detrimental effect on our economy.”
Holy Mother of God. Why does anyone believe these people?
This is what education “reform” – especially technology-oriented “reform – has shaped up to be.
It’s not a pretty sight. And it cannot be healthy for public education.
I watched it last night. Most of it was fairly predictable. There was one principal who shared her “success” at her school. It was never stated, but it definitely appeared to be a charter school and the students appeared to be quite compliant. If students are sifted and sorted, and the school is a charter…..then there is a good chance it was a opportunity to promote charter schools and “reform”………I hoped PBS wouldn’t do that, but they did.
“”On Wednesday, Sept. 14, 9 pm ET, PBS and NOVA will air a two hour special called “School of the Future.””
Gates and the Waltons funding of NPR and PBS is paying off.
Yes, and they are buying influence everywhere. There is little left that their hands haven’t touched. “Follow the money…….”
The following postcard about the future of education appeared in 1910 http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2Vty94d0FPo/UhGl7653m1I/AAAAAAAAAi0/rPz8Dl_UGso/s1600/3_95b1.jpg
Here is another Memphian writing about technology in the classroom—emphasizing close learning as opposed to distance learning.
http://www.closelearning.org
What an exciting year for distance learning! Cutting-edge communication systems allowed colleges to escape the tired confines of face-to-face education. Bold new technologies made it possible for thousands of geographically dispersed students to enroll in world-class courses. Innovative assessment mechanisms let professors supervise their pupils remotely.
All this progress was good for business, too. Private entrepreneurs leapt at the chance to compete in the new distance learning marketplace, while Ivy League universities bustled to keep pace. True, a few naysayers fretted about declining student attention spans and low course-completion rates. But who could object to the expansively democratic goal of bringing first-rate education to more people than ever before? The new pedagogical tools promised to be not only more affordable than traditional classes, but also more effective at measuring student progress.
In the words of one prominent expert, the average distance learner “knows more of the subject, and knows it better, than the student who has covered the same ground in the classroom.” Indeed, “the day is coming when the work done [via distance learning] will be greater in amount than that done in the class-rooms of our colleges.” The future of education was finally here.
2012, right? Think again: 1885.
There is a right and a wrong about distant learning; and huge differences between appropriate learning contexts for (a) children and (b) adults. Polemics here won’t do–we have to be open to what is right about the “other” argument in order to expect thoughtful consideration of our own.
First, RIGHT: Mate Wierdl says: “. . . New technologies made it possible for thousands of geographically dispersed students to enroll in world-class courses.” This is true. For instance, people who hold full time jobs, and who have children to watch at home, could “attend” classes on their computers after the kids were in bed. People who wouldn’t otherwise be able to move forward in their formal education, can now do so.
Second, WRONG: “Cutting-edge communication systems allowed colleges to escape .” TIRED CONFINES? That’s one of the most misleading descriptions of traditional classroom education I have EVER heard. (Do you want everything to go online? I want to see your investments portfolio.)
PARTLY RIGHT: “Innovative assessment mechanisms let professors supervise their pupils remotely.” I taught online for several years as a regular (core) adjunct for a university in CA, for their Masters courses in education. While communications in my online classes were better than I first expected, I was still haunted by the potential for plagiarism, and for the possibility of student identity-changing. I ran all papers through the programs for plagiarism-checking, but still wondered. I felt like the plagiarism police. Also, the administration treated the 24-7 teacher-time and online availability with well-stated policy, but coupled with (what seemed like to me) a wink-and-a-nod about the time teachers REALLY spent on these classes and the complete difference (from the classroom) in our expectations for availability.
Also, there is the huge difference in the education of (a) CHILDREN or (b) ADULTS: While sick-at-home, hospitalized, or out-in-the-boonies children can benefit from off-site screen learning (better than none at all), there is so much more to child development that occurs in that face-to-face and classroom learning situation that cannot happen online. For growing children, rather than being a “tired confine,” the classroom and school context is a vibrant developmental cocoon that CANNOT be duplicated in the online experience.
Sorry. While online learning has its appropriate niche, it won’t fit in to a mechanistic, factory, or bottom-line model–not, and also be good for the student. Even with adults, it assumes a well-motivated and honest student. In my classes, I think most were, but there’s no guarantee for that. And the “tired confines” description is a huge clue of ignorance about anything named “educational.”
Catherine, please realize that the quote from the article is, in fact, from 1885, and it describes the brave new world of distance learning as they imagined it back then. It’S striking how similar the description to today’s advocates of distance learning.
To Mate Wierdl: Yes: “Strikingly” similar. Also, upon re-reading my note, I realize that it sounds like the article quote was a quote from you, though I knew it wasn’t. I’m glad to be able to say so. Thanks.
To anyone who has been following the money flowing into PBS, it’s long been clear that PBS has gone over to The Dark Side. Following the public funding cuts by Congress, PBS began taking money from the same billionaires who have bought just about everything we once valued as a nation. The money takeover of PBS became obvious when PBS’s flagship station WNET was caught creating an anti-public employee pension fund “documentary” funded by the Arnold Foundation. That documentary was shelved — not cancelled — because of the exposure…but give ’em time and it will reappear. In place of the documentary, the PBS News Hour — which bills itself as America’s most trusted source of news — began running feature “reports” by its financial “specialist” about how bad public employee pensions are for states, as well as running negative reports on Social Security, which is another target of Wall Street who wants to converts the $3 trillion Social Security reserve into those disastrous 401(k) accounts that are so lucrative for banks and investment firms. That’s the same reason for all the “unfunded liability” lies about public employee pensions, which also happen to collectively have about $3 trillion in assets that Wall Street wants to convert into 401(k) accounts.
Now the PBS News Hour has added a new sponsor: The XQ Super School Project. Like most of PBS’s sponsor deals in recent years, this could be yet another quid-pro-quo deal that will undermine public schools.
The Dark Side shadow is engulfing everything. Where is Luke Skywalker when you really need him?
PBS sold its soul a long time ago. This became blatantly obvious on Election Eve, November 6, 2000 when “Front Line” ran a so-called “documentary” on the two candidates that amounted to an unabashed puff piece for that all-around, fun-loving, good ol’ boy, George W. Bush, and a vile distortion of every fact about Al Gore’s life, record, and values. It was obvious then that some producer had been bought.
► http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2000/
I stopped giving money to PBS that day, and have never gone back, even though I continued to support it in spirit, for the sake of the non-political offerings.
Globalization seems like it has two interacting components – technology and communication. While our educational systems try to get computers or ipads for every student, the ways that I have seen them used in classes are not what I imagine will encourage students to go into technology fields. When considering the communication aspect, if at some point we do decide that computers should replace classroom teachers, what kind of social interaction will students get that teaches and allows them to practice both nationwide and global social cues?
The book I mentioned, The Village Effect, cites many studies. In one in Maine, 1 group of middle school teachers’ were given 2 years of training in how to integrate the laptops into the curriculum, in the other no training. Testing showed a 22% increase in scores in the former and a 20% in the latter. My thought is this: if the techies and reformistas are so data driven and bottom line, why are they spending millions for a 2% increase in scores?,
2old2teach: “While I much prefer blackboards for certain purposes, electronic devices can save a complete record of a lesson as well and in fact, can archive it so you can pull it out later if necessary. ”
The role of smart boards and other technologies in the classroom is the same as the role of television in a family. The television can make a family’s life more entertaining, but it’s far from essential for a great family evening.
Of course, too much television can screw up family relationships.
Thinking that education becomes more personal with exciting new technological advances is the same as thinking, family relations will become warmer, more personal with buying the latest smart tv.
In terms of family, advocates of personalized learning via technology say this:
Don’t think for a minute that the best way to handle your rebellious teenage daughter Julie is to talk to her. No, no, no. That thinking is so 20th, no, even 19th century. Instead, let us help you choose from all the great shows, created by experts, that can teach you 21st century family values in the 21st century way, and will inform you about the latest methods celebrities use to solve their family problems.
Can you imagine that your old fashioned and unqualified father-daughter conversations with Julie will compete in any way with the entertainment and educational value of these shows? Just ask Julie, if she’d rather talk to you or watch Pretty Little Liars or The American Teenager or even reruns of the Cosby Show or Oprah.
Do you feel guilty that when you come home late from work, the kids, wife are already sleeping so you cannot spend time with them? Seriously? Where is the problem? There is absolutely no reason to think, family members have to be together. No, no, no. Simply save the family show for the tine you can watch it. The TV can even record your personal, wise comments on the show the rest of the family can listen to first thing in the morning when they turn on their TV. It’ll make their day, we promise! And, unlike your in-person comments, these recorded comments can be played back over and over, even years later. Wow, isn’t it?
Are you pressed for time, and you just don’t seem to be able to watch all the shows necessary for a full personalized family experience? On today’s TV you and your kids can watch two or three shows simultaneously, improving the all important multitasking skills for y’all.
So don’t you worry. We take care of your family and we prepare your kids for the challenges of the 21st century so that they can join the workforce and become happy, hard workers like yourself.
So just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show(s).
“The role of smart boards and other technologies in the classroom is the same as the role of television in a family.”
Not quite but close. I never used one, but watching a math teacher hand a student who had been absent all the notes and sample problems the class had done showed me one of the powerful uses. In fact, I used some of those notes in my resource room when I couldn’t attend the class. (I was a special ed teacher .) I also saw the Smart Board used as a DVD player (too much) during my years as a sub. As you will note, I was quite happy with my blackboard. I learned to like the overhead, again, because it allowed me to prepare material ahead of time and have it all ready for the next time. If I had three classes who were going to interact with the material (i.e. write all over it), I didn’t have to rewrite it on the blackboard for each class. All of this stuff are tools to be used judiciously or not at all depending on available funding. Far too much money has been thrown at technology that does not live up to its promise and takes much needed resources away from other purposes.
Yes, the show is a platform to sell digital learning. The comments here seem to fear that coroporations wanting digitally skilled employees is some kind of evil thing. How dare they “impose” what they want in students becomng workers. It is not like Nabisco saying what the school lunch program is. But whether you’re going to develop students who can help them make better and more food. The idea that teachers can remain autonomous and teach the way they have forever without the real world influence seems like protectionism at its worst. Now hear me out, because I’m on your side.
What do I, as a corporate leader, want? For instance, someone who has project based learning to put into a workgroup and have a collaboratuve dynamic, USING DIGITAL TOOLS, that make them faster with better informed decision-making. Or these outcomes, Corporate-School intiatives should grow dramatically. I am in one with Purdue University Learning Designers and k12 districts.
Most teachers need to change. Yet most have excellent base teaching skills that need to be AMPLIFIED with ed tech. It does not displace their methods; it advances them. It is the reluctance or obstinance that is disheartening.
Teachers will always be needed. That backlash opinion of robotitron learning is foolish. e-learning reinforces the teacher-guided experience. As does 1:1, flipped, blended or other emerging approaches. The teachers role is changng towards the facilitator of learning; not the mere imparting of knowledge, because that is very available everywhere. That is the way it should be. I think Scorates would love the new tools.
True enough, in the past there has been a gap with ed tech buying of “stuff” to throw at the classroom and the internalization of use. We’re working to provide one of the shifts; method adapation. It is survival of the fittest this digital connected age. The music and pubishing industries experieenced the disruption. Well, here it is at our local school.level. Evolving means adapting to the new environment. The most flexible will survive. The movement is bigger than what corporations want. It is the evolution of humans.
REMEMBER- Educational Technology, with its digital age tools, is not just about what a tool does for you; it is about what it does to you. Alow it to.
Bill Mullin,
Your last sentence lost me.
I like to use digital tools. I don’t want them to use me.
ME 2!
William,
As long as tech companies bribe politicians to spend $ on their products instead of giving raises for teachers and profs, your survival of the fittest suggestion translates to “let the strongest win in the education war”. Don’t be then surprised if we are on the defensive and will think about how to strike back, instead of listening to what you are saying.
One of the mistakes techies make is to think, we resist technologies because we don’t want to keep up with the times, that we are lazy. Not at all. In fact, it is the educators who know what to do in the classroom so that the students graduate and are ready for life, ready for the times. This knowledge is the very essence of our job.
The tech changes coming to education come from above in the form of orders by unqualified people. It’s clear why: Tech companies’s world is the economy. They want to sell their product; the more the better, the faster the better, so they want to use the not exactly democratic means of a capitalist economy.
Education, on the other hand, changes slowly since many of our goals are eternal, and our methods have been tried out for centuries hence they are much more mature and much more stable than the methods used to develop the newest gadget. As a result, we have much less bugs to iron out, and we need very compelling reasons to change.
So instead of telling us, we shouldn’t resist the tech influence, you guys need to get off the high horse and develop some serious understanding of the basic ideas of education. Let the goals of education influence you and not the other way around.
Mate W. has it right. It’s a matter of cross-field communications and the openness and respect that should go along with entering a field of discourse different from your own, especially where different data, methods and goals, are concerned.
FIRST, you have to recognize that there might be something you don’t know about that other field. The “DATA” are not computers. They are conscious, questioning, developing, self-other relating people who have several dimensions, including political (like all tech and business people). I’ve said this before here but again: It’s a matter of rank ignorance to assume the principles, methods, and goals that inform technology and/or business can be applied to another field of “data” as if all data were the same, and without expecting gross problems.
In my experience, many teachers in K-12 are busy teaching their students, and harboring the same set of assumptions: that their students’ education is the most important thing–that may be a mistaken idea–that everyone else, including policymakers, understand and feel the same way. That may make many of them naive. However, it;s why often they are not able to clearly say WHY they are so offended at the ignorant, aggressive, and sometimes ill-meant encroachments on their field, and its horrible effects on their students.
Yes, this, too, Catherine. All data are not the same, and we need to recognize that people are people.
Thank you, MW. An excellent comment, and exactly so.
And as I have said before, if the billionaires and the tech companies would spend their money to fix those crumbling public schools, and to improve the poverty-stricken neighborhoods, a whole lot more could be accomplished. For the kids, for the families, for the neighborhoods, and for society.
William said “survival of the fittest” and “adapting to the new environment.”
Yes, kids need to learn about and use the “new technology.”
But what the he!! good is this going to do for kids who come to school hungry, who don’t know where they are going to be sleeping tonight, for kids who come to school from neighborhoods that still have violence and gang warfare, for kids whose parents have to work two (or more) jobs just to pay the rent and aren’t even home in the evenings?
What does William propose to help these types of children? Technology is not going to solve their problems, but an excellent teacher, who can influence and actually teach and inspire these kids, can help, at least some of them. Of course, even a great teacher can’t solve the economic and social problems that exist, but depending upon technology as the be-all and end-all certainly will not help.
What are we going to do with the children of poverty, the very disabled children? Throw them under the bus and ignore them?
MW, Zorba, et al. Good responses. Perhaps our Mr. Mullin will take my class for a semester while I run his company during that time.
Hey, Zorba, didn’t you know that it’s “survival of the fittest”?
Well, 2old, I would have hoped that we would have gone way beyond that now.
But apparently, we haven’t. We are still naked plains apes.
The study of history is one of those out of favor activities right now. It’s such a shame that we have to repeat the mistakes of the past because of some bogus race into the future. Does everything have to be a race or a contest?
2old: It’s the zero-sum-game mentality. For that mentality, everything is framed in terms of win-lose. Guess what that does to the notion of collaboration?
Our schools are in a terrible tilt, and they’re about to topple on our children.
At the moment, the rarest word in all of education is “kids”. And the most ignored phrase in this giant jungle of jargon is “common sense”.
Long-revered pedagogical precepts have been blue-penciled by classroom-allergic theorists leveraged by profiteers who see public schools as the next sustainable profit-producing mother lode. And the political class … put into office by all of us … has mocked our vote and deserted our children in a flash of cash.
Never has American education been in such a moment of willful destruction of revered pedagogical principles. Never before have the wishes and concerns of those most vested in public schools been so summarily disregarded by bureaucratic double-speak and political bunk.
Beyond the view of skirmishes now underway across an array of states, is an emerging reality that … in a very short while … this destroying reform will have razed an American institution to a mound of rubble.
And in its place … for as far as the eye can see … will stand drive-thru learning centers offering kiosk-educations from a B. F. Skinner touch-screen that will supply the finger-pointer with all they need to succeed in a life of rich monotony.
That’s what your now titling schools are going to look like. And that’s your child’s purgatory. Dante would have had devilish fun imagining the distinct horror levels of academic hell that await children in their most crucial years.
Kindergarten is now the Boot Camp Moment. Classroom drill instructors seem unbothered shoving 70 month-olds into a rush-hour of academic traffic … because some basement gnome alleges it’s the ideal moment to vaccinate them with “grit” and “rigor”. And these academic tykes are denied recess and songs and giggles … because those would be indicators of unseriousness. And education is, above all else, an extra-serious business. Even for cherubs still ill-at-ease knotting their own sneakers.
The elementary time seems destined to be called the Tablet Years. The Mario Bros. Educational Principles will rule the day as students win points and pile up Magical No. 2 Pencils as they are prompted from one level to the next. Competency-based-education will erase all of those annoying human variables and every learner who reaches Level Extreme will see their names glitter in on-screen pixie dust. And an 8 X 10 screen-shot of that conquering moment will become the new moving-up document.
Middle school will usher in The Skinner Stage … when on-screen accountability and specially-tapered curricula designs will suffocate all of those aggravating teenage twitches and quirks. School magistrates will homogenize this stage of maturity so that no nail stands up … and individuality is mocked as antithetical narcissism that is thoroughly unacceptable. Creativity will be dubbed a day-dreaming activity … time-consuming musing more symptomatic of a sloth than of genius.
High school will be The Divergent Time… when, at long last, the future of every young adult will become crystal clear. Youngsters will be endlessly nudged in this or that career pathway … justified by the overwhelming mounds of data that can be Hansel and Greteled all the way back to the days when joy was first run out of their very brand-new lives.
And at every level, parents will lose more and more control of their children. They will be less and less invited by school authorities to take part in the joy-remembering rites of passage we all associate with growing up. And that is all by design because the very last thing these new educational absolutists want is any mother or father acting as though they have any regency at all over their own child’s education.
Orwell yourself beyond the moment and come to terms with what awaits us all on the horizon of touch-screen scholarship. Huxley yourself into the world of tomorrow when your children will have been programmed and plugged into lifetime situations based not on their passions but on some algorithmic prescription burped out by some electronic-ouija-motherboard.
If you are doubting of this .. and too, too many are … examine what the last half-decade has wrought. In the blink of an eye, schools have been systematically transformed, childhood recalibrated, and parents richly tattooed as adversaries. Government now dictates to the schools, and politicians have morphed into carnival barkers for every profiteer determined to get their slice of the Big Education pie.
And all the while, half-a-generation has already endured this child-abusing gauntlet of educational malpractice as they are guinea-pigged into blazing trails in the brave new world of scholastic madness.
And that is the great tilt. What is it you are going to do about it?
And if you decide to do nothing … then stand ready to watch their lives topple into misery in a very grave new world.
Denis Ian
Note the use of Mr. Mullin’s term “facilitator”, what he thinks a teacher should be (a lot of us thought we had been doing that for some decades). So it was chilling to read in The Village Effect quoting Warschauer (Learning in the Cloud). “However the dark side of virtual schooling is also on display in the state, with students in Miami-Dade County now being placed into teacherless online classes against their will. When students report to class, a “facilitator” assigns them to work at a computer. The new system was put in place not to improve instruction but to save money, since virtual classes in Florida, unlike classes with teachers, have no maximum class sizes.” p. 281.