How the Tech Guys Blew It

A continual question that we who think that computers can and will make a big difference---and improvement---in how people teach and learn in schools have to consider is why have we not seen these big gains? As Cuban and others point out, we have networked virtually every classroom in the country and have more computers what do we have to show for it? Where's the revolution? This piece proposes several answers to that question and some ways to jump-start the revolution.

Many innovations that were expected by many to make dramatic transformations in education did not deliver. Cuban (1986) pointed out that there were great hopes that film and radio would change things. Edison, believed by many to be intelligent, believed that the motion picture would revolutionize schools. Instructional television was to be a big boon. Papert, seeing the excitement that his turtles brought to students proclaimed that "the computer will blow up the school." No one expected any of these things, including Papert's LOGO, to revolutionize industry or business. Why did anyone expect them to revolutionize schools?

Today few would deny that computers have revolutionized how businesses work. I, like many, think that computers will change schools. I am not surprised that they haven't. I don't think the problem has to do with not providing teachers with sufficient training. The problem is just that the infrastructure necessary for change isn't widely available yet. As Cuban points out, even in schools with the best technology resources, students use computers in schools for only a few hours a week. And, as I argue later, they can't use them in the same ways that people who use computers productively do.

First, though, it is important to remember that technology-drive revolutions take time. They don't happen until the innovation is widely available and even then, there's still a lag while other systems can be re-designed to take advantages of the new technology. This "Computer Paradox," attributed to Robert Solow, who said "We see he computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics," was still being discussed by economists as late as 1990 (check on this, probably later). One explanation, offered by Paul David is that innovations historically take time to change how things happen. David points out that electricity and more specifically electric motors, widely recognized to have changed manufacturing, did not make inroads over night. It took 40 years. When it did, the benefits had to do with how it changed construction, allowed factory layouts to be designed with materials handling in mind, and it allowed maintenance to be done in only one part of a plant instead of having to shut down large parts at once. Forty years.

I don't claim to know how and when we'll see revolutions in schools that are akin to the revolutions like those that computers have afforded businesses. What will be the changes analogous to having telephone tech support outsourced to India? Walmart immediately notifies its suppliers the instant one of their products is sold so that they know to make another one (and more importantly, when not to). How can similarly distributing instantaneous access to data transform our schools? I don't know, but I wager that changes like those will not come soon. Keeping an eye out for those changes is important and exciting, but so too is knowing what we can do tomorrow. Or this afternoon.

Chances are that if you're reading this you use a computer, productively, for a significant part of your day. Chances are that you have your own computer (or several). On your computer are your files, your bookmarks, and increasingly less likely, your email. You likely have a picture of your pet, child, or vacation spot as your desktop background. On the occasions that you use a computer that's not yours you are hindered because these things aren't there. It's hard to be productive. You can't work on editing that paper you were writing, or that test you were working on because it's not there. You can't get to your favorite web sites as easily as you normally do. You can't remember the URLs for your favorite blogs. And what about the dozens of passwords you have for all those web sites that your browser on your own computer remembers for you? That's how most students feel when they use computers at school. They are itinerant computer users.

This problem is relatively easy to solve technically. It's possible to set up a file server and enable roaming profiles in Windows. An easier solution, beyond the scope of this writing, is to set up a Linux terminal server. (And yes, setting up a Linux terminal server really is easier than setting up a bunch of Windows machines and a file server, but I digress.) For most teachers, however, doing either of these things is impossibly difficult. The chances that someone will do it for your students are slim. The people who can set up these systems or have power over those who can have their own computers and don't really care that students are itinerants.

Here's what people who use computers productively have: (1) access to their files, (2) access to email, (3) access to their web bookmarks, (4) the ability to publish stuff on the web, (5) reason to believe that their data won't be lost if their hard drive dies. If you take this list to your tech staff and ask what it'll take to provide these basic tools to all of your students, they'll say it's impossible. And that assumes that you can somehow have a conversation with someone on your tech staff. Forget them. They blew it. If they come to you with a grand plan to buy a new server and software and consultants to make it all work. Say "No, thanks. I have all of that stuff without your help, just make sure my web browser works. And don't bother installing any other software. In fact, don't renew any licenses."

Everything your students need is now provided for free on the web and better than is possible with traditional tools. This whole "Web 2.0" thing isn't about some revolutionary way to work and communicate. It's about giving students what they should have been given long ago. Forget desktop applications.

People started making the switch to web-based email years ago. Hotmail, Yahoo! and dozens of others let people set up their own email accounts. Sure, school districts and universities provided people with email accounts, but getting a Hotmail account was easier and it worked everywhere. You probably know that reading and writing mail with Eudora or some other desktop-based application affords many features not available in a web browser, but the advantages of being able to read your mail from anywhere that there is a web browser makes up for the inconveniences. Today most people read their email with a web-based client, and few know how much they're missing. (You're probably an exception.) And then Gmail came along, and in many ways it out-performs desktop-based applications. At my university faculty have only 100MB of storage for their email, this means that many people are constantly having to figure out what it is that they can delete. That's a tremendous waste of time. Every message that comes in, one must think, "am I going to need this?" Gmail provides an arbitrarily large amount of space. It tells me this: "You are currently using 1673 MB (62%) of your 2718 MB." There is no reason to worry that you'll delete a message that you mighty need. Everything gets archived. How is it that Gmail can do this so much better than a major state university? The answer doesn't really matter, but if anyone asks me whether we should put more money into supporting our mail system, I'm saying "no."

Each semester in my "Introduction to Computer Applications for Education " class the first assignment is the same. "Put a document on the web that describes how to put a document on the web." They can use any resources at all. Even getting someone else to do it. I don't give them any help or hints other than the name of my university's web publishing system. Almost every semester someone cries. I'm not making this up. I give an assignment that fairly reliably makes graduate students cry. This past semester, in the wake of this horrific assignment, I told students that they should now set up their own blog. Several balked. Since I had never set up a blog somewhere like Blogger.com I didn't really know what was involved. "Fine," I said, "spend no more than 30 minutes on this assignment. If you can't do it, just be prepared to tell us what you did that didn't work." The next class everyone reported that they had done it in no more than 5 minutes. Five minutes. Why are we teaching people to use desktop-based web development applications? Why is it that people can set up and post to their own blog in less time than it takes to figure out how to enable their university-provided web site, not to mention the time it takes to learn how to put files there. If someone asks me if we should upgrade our web services, I'm saying "no."

I'm writing this article with Writely, a web-based word processor. Wherever I have a web browser, I have an up-to-date word processor and all of my files. I don't have to worry about whether the computer I use has my word processor installed and whether it's the same version that I used in the last place. It's everywhere. And so are my files. When I'm done, I can publish it and send you a URL so that you can read it. Or I can publish it to my blog. Writely also lets me collaborate with other people. I don't know of anyone who collaboratively works together with someone by keeping files on a file server where they both have read-write access. More often they email a file back and forth. Maybe they use a "track changes" feature to keep up with who changed what when, but more likely only once the document's been sent to the second writer, the first doesn't work on it anymore. Writely lets multiple people work on the same document at the same same instant. (OK, I'll admit that this is the first time I've used Writely to write more than a couple sentences, but I'm finding it surprisingly useful, and somehow less annoying than Word or ooWriter.) So if someone asks me if we should set up a file server and train people to learn how to set up permissions to let their colleagues have access to the same files, I'm saying "no."

So never mind, tech staff. You, for whatever reason, have failed to provide the essential services that are now available for free. Of course in K-12 schools the trick will be getting you to stop blocking access to them with web filters.