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The Challenge

We in the field of educational technology need to pay more attention to finding ways to provide students in teachers with the tools that they need to increase identifiable learning outcomes. Too often we can be pulled in by the sirens of cool toys or be convinced that if only we could train teachers to understand how to use them, students would learn better. I posit that teachers and students now know quite well how to use computers to increase learning, but that the computers they have do not provide even the simplest supports that they need to do so.

Framing the Issues

Though evidence that technology supports improved efficiency in the workplace is now self-evident, it took quite a while to do so. For nearly two decade, business researchers bemoaned the “productivity paradox” (Baily & Gordan, 1988). Though economists seemed to think that businesses were more productive due to computers, their methods were incapable of detecting any benefit of all of the computing power that was now commonplace in business. In spite of this, businesses continued investing quite heavily in computers. One explanation for this is that it has historically taken businesses a long time to adapt to new technologies, as their affordances are not immediately exploitable. The invention of the dynamo was not able to transform manufacturing until the buildings and production lines were able to be re-tooled to take advantage of them (David, 1990). Educators have been suspicious of new media since the introduction of text. Socrates, considered by many to be something of a role model, though that those use used text to remember things did not really know those things, further, one could never know for sure whether one understood words affixed to a page, and since there was no way to be sure whose words were on a page, the written word was inherently unreliable (Churchill, 2003).

The Media Debates

Clark's claim that media are “mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition” (Clark, 1983, p. 445)) very much misses the point. Trucks have a dramatic affect on nutrition. I, for one, will not eat seafood that has not been delivered in a refrigerated truck. Even one who adheres to a transmission model of education must admit that certain media are capable of transmitting some things better than others. At the time, Clark's response was pushing against what some called the “exposure model,” of educational technology. He argued that mere exposure to technology confers no particular educational benefits. Schrum et al. (2007) agree, stating that the same is true of any technology. “To use Clarke's rather prosaic analogy, in order for the grocery truck to be effective in improving a person's nutrition, the person has to be on the truck's delivery route and the truck also has to be delivering something besides doughnuts and French fries” (p. 457). It is true that these technologies are necessary, but not sufficient. The thing that we seem to be missing is that they are not in place. The most shocking thing to me about the IES report that showed that certain reading and math programs were not significantly better than the other methods is that students typically used these programs for less than an hour a week (Dynarski et al., 2007). It is difficult for me to imagine activities that will make significant gains in so little time.

What We Do Not Know

The real problem with our schools is that they are based on an assumption that is clearly erroneous. Beyond basic math and reading skills we simply do not know what our students will need to know in five years. Many of jobs five years from now do not currently exist. Even those with a firm belief in the value of information transmission have to recognize this as a problem. It is pretty difficult to do a needs analysis of a situation that does not currently exist. Though pedagogical content knowledge gets lots of credence from people whom I respect, I propose that it is largely unimportant. One of them most-respected pedagogical models is that of the apprenticeship. This is how people learn most of what they need to know to be doctors, lawyers, plumbers, carpenters, and professors. Unfortunately, this model breaks down in K12 education. Teachers are not mathematicians, scientists, historians, or (usually) writers. One camp attempts to solve this apprenticeship problem by using the term “cognitive apprenticeship” (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). I take this concept a bit further and suggest “learning apprenticeships.” I suggest that the skills that students most need are learning what the basic questions and assumptions of a field are and then learning how to acquire them and that most teachers are good learners. A complaint about project-based learning is that it requires much more work for teachers because they have to know the learning trajectory of the project rather than just the things that we expect students to learn. I posit that if teachers are to model learning, the best way for them to do it is to have them learning right along with the students. If the task is to model learning, then there is no shame in not knowing up front. If teachers are indeed learning along side the students (or at least pretending), then the response “I don't know, but this might be a good place to start looking for an answer” becomes exemplary rather than embarrassing.

What Tools Do We Need?

As I suggested earlier, one problem that we technologists have is that we are quick to adopt the most cutting-edge tools. These tools are not only difficult for teachers to understand and hence, be trained to integrate into their teaching, they are often simply missing from classrooms. I often hear teachers complain about a technology training session about pod-casting or some other such technology when their classroom has a single computer. As it turns out, none of their students' pencils will play the pod-casts, much less record them. The tools that we need in classrooms are the simple ones. They're the pencils and books of the twenty-first century: word processors and web browsers. Everyone now understands these tools. Few people—even in service professions not considered part of the “information economy”—could conceive of doing their job with access to a computer for only a few hours a week, but this is precisely what we ask our students to do. They know that they are not going into a world where they will be writing five paragraph essays by hand, and asking them to do so is offensive. It seems to follow that a student with a computer at home, asked to write anything, will opt to wait and do it at home. Why write by hand if you can do it on a computer? Related this is the fact that the personal computer is completely missing from most schools. In most schools—if students are lucky—they have access to computers that are generically configured and devoid of any of their documents or settings. For most people, it is an uncomfortable invasion of privacy to use—or have someone else use—one's computer. Research has shown that these personalizations are an important part of computer use K12 students (and most college students) are itinerant computer users.

What About Laptops?

One solution to this problem is providing students with laptops. Though these examples are increasingly common and fairly successful, they are outrageously expensive and not a solution for many schools at this time. One such study in Texas, a “scientifically based study” using random assignment gave one group laptops, and depending on the number of students up to $950,000. The control schools received $50,000 for professional development and the other costs required for collecting the data necessary for the study (Interim Report on the Technology Immersion Pilot (TIP), 2006). This begs the question whether these students might have been better served by having higher salaries to attract better teachers, more teachers, more planning time for teachers, or food to feed hungry students. Such research is even more meaningless than the media studies that Clark complained about. Schools are very rarely in the position to, on a whim, decide to spend several hundred or thousand extra dollars per student. The teachers that I have been interview lately all know what they would do if they had enough computers for their students to be able to do their work on computers. They do not need training to make dramatic shifts in how kids work in their classrooms. For the most part, the teachers who refused to use computers are gone now. The rest of them gave in when they learned that email was the only way to communicate with their grandchildren in college.

So What?

For three years I have been putting Linux Terminal Servers in teacher's classrooms. Terminal servers use one computer as a server (in one school, I used the computers on teachers desks three years ago, so the server does not need to be very powerful by today's standards) and have thin-clients that boot over the network. Since the clients only display programs, they need very little power; in one school I used old iMacs that were literally collecting dust because they were deemed too to be useful. In spite of never having used Linux before, the students had no problem whatsoever navigating the system and using OpenOffice.org and Firefox. In one case, a teacher who had previously refused to use computers now has his students on-line and writing almost every day. Since these pilots used hardware already in the schools or destined for surplus by my university, these pilots have been done with virtually no budget. My model of intervention has been to go into a classroom, install software, create accounts for the students and walk away. Having been working with teachers and technology for twenty years, I was sure that putting computers in classrooms without training was a mistake, but it appears that I was wrong. I do not yet have data to show whether students are learning more, but anecdotal reports suggest that they are. One teacher said that her students scores over 10% higher than those in other classes. Most of them report that students are spending more time working and less time sitting passively at their seats. Merely having computers in the classroom does make a difference, but students have to use them for more than a couple hours a week.

References

Baily, N., Martin, & Gordan, R. J. (1988). The productivity slowdown, measurement issues, and the explosion of computer power. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2, 347-420.

Churchill, J. (2003). What socrates said to phaedrus: Reflections on technology and education. Midwest Quarterly, 44(2), 211-221.

Clark, R. E. (1983). Reconsidering research on learning from media. Review of Educational Research, 53(4), 445–459.

Collins, A., Brown, J., & Newman, S. (1989). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing, and mathematics. In L. B. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, learning, and instruction: Essays in honor of Robert Glaser (p. 453-494). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

David, P. A. (1990). The dynamo and the computer: An historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. The American Economic Review, 80(2), 355-361. (Papers and Proceedings of the Hundred and Second Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association)

Dynarski, M., Agodini, R., Heaviside, S., Novak, T., Carey, N., Campuzano, L., et al. (2007). Effectiveness of reading and mathematics software products: Findings from the first student cohort (Tech. Rep.). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.

Interim report on the technology immersion pilot (tip) (Tech. Rep.). (2006). Texas Education Agency. (Retrieved June 17, 2007 from http://www.tea.state.tx.us/technology/lrpt/lrpt_progress2006.html.)

Schrum, L., Thompson, A., Maddux, C., Sprague, D., Bull, G., & Bell, L. (2007). Research on the effectiveness of technology in schools: The roles of pedagogy and content. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 7(1). (Retrieved http://www.citejournal.org/vol7/iss1/editorial/article1.cfm.)