The issue here (as it often is when folks talk about technology in the classroom) isn't the technology per say, but rather the kind of teaching that it's being harnessed to reinforce/usurp.

For about one hundred years (yes ed tech has been around that long) there have been essentially two (sometimes contradictory) arguments for bringing technological innovations into the classroom.

The first sees these innovations primarily for their ability to efficiently deliver content and assess student work more efficiently. This view is seen in Thomas Edison's 1913 quote that "Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture," to B.F. Skinner's "Teaching Machine" from the 1950's, to most of the commercial Blended Learning programs on the market today. See this youtube mashup [www.youtube.com] to see how apparent it is.

The second approach sees computers through a constructivist lens, as powerful learning machines that can be harnessed by the student. The most important proponent of this view is Seymour Papert, a student/collaborator of Piaget's, the inventor of LOGO, who articulated his ideas most completely in a 1980's book called "Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas" (and yes -- the LEGO robotics kit is named after his book).

In the former of these approaches, the computer does things to students. In the latter, the computer empowers them to do things, often beyond (and sometimes in tension) to a pre-defined curriculum. In Papert's words: “In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In [a constructivist] environment the relationship is reversed: The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think. The experience can be heady: Thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologist, an experience not even shared by most adults.”

The problem of course is given the grammar of our schooling environments it's exceedingly difficult to get away with that in your standard classroom. This is compounded by the fact that the training we provide to teachers on how to use these computers in an effective pedagogical way is often non-existent (see Larry Cuban's "Overused and Undersold: Computers in the Classroom" or look to your own or your peer's experiences).

So what we end up with instead is teachers/administrators defaulting to implementing technology in a way that merely creates efficiencies, which yeah, makes us more efficient, but doesn't do much to actually move the needle on increasing student outcomes. Put another way, if you're merely swapping kahoot or tinytap/jiTap with your multiple choice exam/worksheets, are you really expecting a massively different outcome? If you're merely replacing your old school lecture or fancy overhead projector sheets with a powerpoint or smartboard presentation with a few more bells and whistles, are you really expecting a massively different outcome? If your students are merely reading the same texts you've assigned on Sefaria instead of from several sforim on the table, are you really expecting a massively different outcome?

That's not to say these tools can't be useful in creating constructivist experiences that give students the opportunity to engage with real material and real issues and solve real problems, but it requires us to stop mistaking "using shiny stuff" with "effective instruction," and it requires us to not start every educational technology discussion today as if all of this stuff is new and that there's no historical use, philosophy or evidence of efficacy of any of this. And that in turn requires a heck of a lot more work, a heck of a lot more training, and being honest about our actual use of technology in our schools -- not to mention eschewing thought pieces that present ed-tech as a binary "Good/Bad" decision.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/05/2017 07:12AM by mlb.