I'm still trying to make sense of technology in schools. A classic work is Cuban's (1986) Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. In it, he discusses how educators, or educational researchers, have believed that film, radio, television, and computers, would change everything. They didn't. The curious thing to me is why people thought these things would revolutionize schools. No one thought that they were going to revolutionize much else. Sure, they created industries and jobs, but no one was saying "Radio is going to completely change the way that we practice law" or "television is going to revolutionize the way that we design bridges." They didn't even say it about psychology, sociology, or anthropology. But yeah, it's totally going to change schools.

Cuban subsequently made the same can't-change-schools argument about computers and the internet in Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2001, see also this journal article or here). He did this work in some schools in Silicon Valley, arguing that if the computer stuff wasn't making a difference there, then it probably wasn't anywhere else. That seemed right. And it was. Even in these privileged schools with tech-savvy kids in a tech-savvy district with what counted as lots of computers, stuff was pretty much the same.

His "high-access" schools had student-to-computer ratios of 4 and 5 to one, as compared to 6:1 nationally in the 1998-1999 school year. 64% and 84% of classrooms had internet connections as compared to 44% nationally. Today, nearly every classroom has an internet connection, but the student to computer ratio hasn't changed much. And the 4:1 or so that's in most schools often counts computers that students don't have access to, as well as those that are not actually working or capable of running an up to date OS or web browser.

Outside of schools professionals often have more than one computer: a desktop, a laptop, a PDA or iPhone, perhaps another computer at home. And we are not apologetic if we do not use them in a particular, technologically advanced ways. Outside of a school, no one would ever say, as one of Cuban's teachers did, ``If we're just word processing, we may as well have typewriters'' (p. 814, in the article above). Did you get that? This "we're not using them in `good enough' ways" notion is fairly common in studies of schools with laptops.

An article in the New York Times describes several schools who were abandoning laptop programs because they didn't show increased learning. There were studies that showed that computers didn't result in increased learning in the 1980 that showed increased computer power didn't result in increased productivity (e.g., this one, also here). But people didn't really take it seriously. No one thought, well, maybe we just shouldn't use computers. But if we're talking about schools, it's completely reasonable to say, "Yeah, computers really aren't worth the trouble."