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watching my parents master new technologies. First it was word
processing and e-mail. Then digital photography and cell phones.
A computer mouse once baffled my father -- now he uses it as naturally
as a steering wheel. When my mother began using e-mail, she would
send a message, then pick up the phone and call the recipient
to make sure it got there. She doesn't do that anymore.
Indeed, my parents are far more sophisticated than I am with
some new technologies. That heartens me. Maybe they're proof that
analog-era creatures can live happily in a digital world.
What impress me more, though, are the habits of mind they developed
before computers. My father loves to tinker with physical things
and has an architect's eye for symmetry. My mother devours long,
complex novels and writes elegant letters. They're both prone
to quiet reflection.
Today's so-called digital children have much to learn from those
of us who grew up before computers were so heavily infused into
our culture. An increasingly vocal montage of educators, psychologists,
scientists, and writers are making that point.
One of them is Alan Warhaftig, a nationally recognized public
school English teacher in Los Angeles. Warhaftig told me his students
used to protest when he played classical symphonies or jazz as
background music during some of his classes. The kids wanted the
sounds of hip-hop, rap, and alternative rock. But Warhaftig said
no. His classroom was his world, a place where the sounds of J.S.
Bach and Miles Davis and the words of William Shakespeare and
Ralph Ellison are revered.
"My role is not to go and meet the kids in their world and hang
out there," says Warhaftig, who teaches at the Fairfax Magnet
Center for Visual Arts and is one of a select group of high school
English teachers certified by the National Board for Professional
Teaching Standards. "My role is to drag them into my world."
By pushing and prodding students into his world, Warhaftig believes
he will teach them lessons that will last a lifetime. By and large,
the lessons the digital child can learn from the analog adult
are commonsensical. Unfortunately, these lessons are also easy
to lose sight of in our technology-driven culture:
The tortoise learned more than the hare
Faster isn't always better. In The Child and the Machine by
Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement, Karl Pribram, an internationally
recognized brain researcher, points out that rats learn faster
than humans. But the complexity of their learning is limited.
Unlike humans, rats are not prone to ponder. Rather, they simply
react.
"... Some skills need to be developed slowly," Pribram told
Armstrong. "[For humans] it is the level of complexity which is
important."
Particularly now, in this speeded-up world, educators need to
be reminded of that, says William L. Rukeyser, director of Learning
in the Real World, a nonprofit network of educators seeking
balance in the pursuit of educational technology. Rukeyser, a
former California state education official, says one of the more
dangerous assumptions floating in education circles is that digital-age
children process information faster than those of us who grew
up before computers.
It's tempting to buy into that assumption if you've watched
young kids zoom around the web or navigate a computer game. They
appear to have a natural knack for "mind speed." But Rukeyser
says there's no definitive research showing that the brains of
today's children have somehow evolved to better fit the parameters
of a digital world. He cautions educators: "It should not be accepted
as a given that [digital age] kids ... think differently than
we do."
Learning to read, for instance, is a methodical, oftentimes
agonizing process. It takes years to master the skill, but once
mastered, it is one of the best predictors of success in life.
I've watched my 8-year-old son develop his reading skills -- step
by plodding step. There was nothing speedy about it. Now, he's
reading well above his grade level; getting him there was mostly
a matter of good teaching and good books.
Years ago, I was struggling in a college chemistry class. In
today's vernacular, I'd be labeled "scientifically challenged."
My father, a chemistry professor, advised me to slowly copy over
my notes after each lecture. "Slowly" was the operative word,
he told me, because it would force me to think about the concepts.
I followed his advice and got a B+.
Says Warhaftig: "Learning to read, learning to think -- I don't
think any of that has changed."
Stay grounded in the real world
When kids are involved, there are certain scientific experiments
that are best conducted in the simulated worlds of computers.
A nuclear chain reaction comes to mind.
Arthur Eisenkraft, a physics teacher in Bedford, N.Y., and president
of the National
Science Teachers Association, says he can think of several
other scenarios that work best on computers. What would happen,
for instance, if the law of gravity behaved differently?
But, Eisenkraft cautions, spending too much time in simulated
worlds is a mistake. "The problem with computer simulations is
they are not real," he says. What's more, "computer simulations
can make mistakes. Nature cannot." In other words, nature is what
it is. A simulated version of a forest, no matter how well designed,
is still fake.
Simulated worlds, Eisenkraft says, do not provide the serendipitous
learning experiences that occur in the real world. To study the
laws of motion, for instance, students might examine how a block
of wood slides down a plane. In a simulated version, the perfectly
programmed block slides neatly down. But a real block of wood
might roll off the side of the plane. Why? What happened? What
laws of physics made it fall? The student must figure out what
happened, and that's when learning can take some curious twists
and turns.
In Minnesota, "hands on" learning made national headlines about
five years ago. (See "Getting Science Right," American School
Board Journal, January 1998.) Le Sueur, Minn., biology teacher
Cindy Reinitz took her middle school students on a hike to examine
a pond. The students found frogs with missing or extra legs and
one with a small eye staring out from its throat. The students
dissected some of the frogs, conducted water and soil studies,
interviewed geneticists at the University of Minnesota, and --
in a splendid example of the appropriate use of technology --
documented their findings on the Internet for other students to
see. Their discovery drew the attention of scientists, who are
currently studying frog deformities in Maine, Minnesota, and Vermont.
"... Computers should enhance, but not replace, essential 'hands
on' laboratory activities," says an NSTA position paper titled
"The Use of Computers in Science Education." Adds Eisenkraft:
"I would certainly not want to see a pilot trained on a flight
simulator flying a plane without real flight experience. Most
experiences which can be done in the real world should be done
in the real world."
Style should never overshadow substance
To be fair, this adage applied long before PowerPoint presentations
and multimedia razzle-dazzle. Years ago, William L. Blundell,
a Wall Street Journal editor and author of The Art and Craft of
Feature Writing, described what he called "well-written failures"
-- poorly reported stories told in perfectly polished prose. Inevitably,
he said, such writing was noticeably uninspiring.
In today's classroom, the problem is more likely to be "well-produced
failures" -- multimedia presentations that put more effort into
glitzy graphics and entertaining video clips than the substance
of the topic. "Too often," says Rukeyser of Learning in the Real
World, "we tend to reward sizzle rather than steak."
Others agree. "One thing we're seeing a lot of these days is
kids are making a zillion PowerPoint presentations," says Margaret
Honey, director of the Center
for Children and Technology in New York City. "Where is there
value added?"
Sometimes, of course, PowerPoint is the perfect tool. Honey
says a student or teacher who is doing a presentation on the power
of persuasion -- particularly in advertising -- could use PowerPoint
to show how certain colors, sounds, and images convey a message
better than others. But, she warns, it's a mistake to use the
technology simply because it's a novel way to convey information.
The style-over-substance problem is also evident in students'
almost compulsive toying with computer fonts. In The Child and
the Machine, the authors point to a research study of eighth-graders.
As the students wrote first drafts of papers, screen-recording
software kept a record of the computer functions they used. The
feature used most frequently was the format, not the edit, function.
Last year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released
a discouraging report on the quality of students' writing. It
found that only about one of every four students at each grade
level tested (four, eight, and 12) performed at or above the proficient
level -- only 1 percent of students in all three grades performed
at the advanced level. This lackluster performance cannot be blamed
on computers, which can have a very positive effect on the quality
of students' writing. But one thing is clear: Students need to
pay greater attention to what their words say and less to how
they look.
Don't heckle the Sage on the Stage
Educators like to rail against the so-called Sage on the Stage
-- the teacher who knows a subject well and imparts that knowledge
through lectures. To be sure, droning on or arrogantly pontificating
is a colossal turnoff to kids, especially today's digital children,
who have so many alternative ways to soak up knowledge and understanding.
But the ability to present a thoughtful lecture is still a valuable
piece of any teacher's repertoire. A good lecture provides a foundation
of knowledge for students to build on and helps improve their
listening skills. The best literature teacher I ever had stood
at a lectern holding an old paperback copy of Dostoevsky's The
Brothers Karamazov. He picked through the nuances and complexities
of that novel carefully and slowly. He asked probing questions
and demanded thoughtful responses. He was, in other words, a sage
on the stage.
Hard-line constructivists -- those who believe teachers should
be primarily "guides on the side," encouraging students to construct
their own knowledge -- would likely deride my literature teacher.
For them, learning should be student-centered, freed from the
authoritarian grasp of teacher/lecturers, oriented toward exploration.
That is an important part of instruction. But Warhaftig laments:
"The constructivists have taken over education to a shocking degree."
And he is skeptical of their notion that students are clients
who can design their own reading lists and surf the web to understand
the complexities of literature, history, science, or mathematics.
"Student-centered learning can often end up reinforcing misinformation
or misconceptions," adds Christopher Cross, president of the Council
for Basic Education. "If you look at the web, there's so much
information out there that is without reference to quality. Students
could end up with shared ignorance rather than enhanced wisdom."
Jeanne S. Chall made the same point in The Academic Achievement
Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom. Chall, a professor
emeritus of the Harvard School of Education who died last year,
argued that students learn more in teacher-centered (not student-centered)
classrooms. Teachers who use student-centered learning exclusively,
she wrote, are doing a particular disservice to children who are
struggling in school.
Ideally, educators need to strike a balance between the two
approaches, says Honey: "There's never just one effective way
to teach. Sometimes, it makes sense to do an overview lecture;
sometimes it makes sense to break into groups. Teachers who lecture
all the time are just as problematic as teachers who throw kids
into groups all the time."
Linear thinking works
This year, I tutored a community college student in writing.
I was impressed by his ability to surf for information, hypertexting
from here to there and virtually everywhere. If there was pertinent
information on the Internet for a topic he was writing about,
he could find it.
What he couldn't do was synthesize that information and attend
to the task of writing a well-structured, cogent paper. He seemed
lost. Whenever he got frustrated, he'd return to the web, searching
for more information, distracting himself from the real task.
It is students like this young man who worry Jane Healy, an
educational psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How
Computers Affect Our Children's Minds and What We Can Do About
It. In today's digital world, Healy says, learning how to use
hypertext (nonlinear thinking) to navigate through mountains of
information is a necessary thinking skill. Yet so is reading a
book from cover to cover, listening to a teacher read a story
aloud, writing well-organized research papers, designing coherent
oral presentations, or mastering multiplication tables.
Linear thinking, Healy argues, develops the mental discipline
necessary to stick to a task even if you're not thrilled about
it. "It's a terrible mistake to give that up," she warns. "Both
types of thinking (linear and nonlinear) are important."
Assuming everyone is naturally a nonlinear thinker is a mistake,
says Gary Bloom, a former superintendent who is associate director
of the New Teacher Center at the University of California at Santa
Cruz. Different students have different learning styles, he says.
Some students, he points out, perform best in structured environments
where they can focus on one task at a time. Others can thrive
while doing multiple tasks in highly distracting environments.
For example, Bloom says, one child might feel perfectly comfortable
doing homework with music blaring or the television turned on.
Another might need to be blanketed by silence to concentrate.
But Bloom suggests even the "multi-taskers" need to learn how
to slow down, pause, reflect, and focus on one task at a time.
"What will we lose if the next generation doesn't have the patience
or skills to read a novel?" he asks. "I'm convinced we lose something."
Learning isn't always fun
Rarely a week goes by without our magazine offices receiving
some new piece of software promising to make classroom learning
"fun." My 8-year-old loves activities that are fun. That's why
he plays his Game Boy whenever we let him.
But learning isn't always fun. Often, it's difficult. In the
end, it's our ability to overcome the difficulties and frustrations
that make learning meaningful and satisfying.
When educators talk about a student's "zone of proximal development,"
says Bloom, they're talking about an area of personal discomfort
where a learner isn't fully competent. That's the experiential
zone, he says, where it becomes increasingly difficult to make
learning fun. Yet that is also when students learn the most.
Good technology used wisely can help students enter that zone.
A few years ago, I saw that in practice at a 3-D
animation lab at South Burlington High School in South Burlington,
Vt. One of the students developed a mathematical formula to show
how a spider walks. Before he could develop the program, he had
to master difficult calculus concepts such as vectors and cross
products. After some frustrating twists and turns, he created
a 25-line mathematical formula that programmed the virtual spider.
It wasn't easy, and sometimes it wasn't "fun." But it was absorbing,
and it was serious learning.
And it was enormously rewarding.
Human contact matters
Warhaftig told me about the "silent moments" that often occur
in his literature classes after he asks a question or makes a
point. That's when he pauses to read kids' faces. Do they look
confused? Are they shaking their heads in disagreement? Do they
try to avoid making eye contact? Then he knows whether he has
to try a different approach. But if he were teaching a cyber class
and all the students were at remote sites responding by e-mail
to his questions or comments, he wouldn't be able to read their
faces, and that, he says, would be a shame.
Says Bloom: "Digital advocates are deceiving themselves if they
think they can replace flesh and blood interactions between students
and teachers [with technology]."
One of the most ridiculous technological affronts to the importance
of human contact is the so-called brain-building software for
infants currently on the market, says Healy. "It's nonsense,"
she says. "Frankly, it shows how clueless the American public
is about what young children really need."
But it's not just infants who need regular human contact to
develop into happy, productive adults. Older children need it
too, says Healy: "The ability to get along with other people ...
to work with groups of people ... the personal skill of self control.
... Those are far more important skills than how we acquire information.
[Yet] those are all in danger of erosion if we use computers the
wrong way."
Honey says the school districts where computers are used most
wisely are both "technology rich and print rich." That makes sense
to someone like me -- someone who fits somewhere between a cyber
cynic and a technology evangelist. It's a perfect blend of the
new and the old. A place where learning would be as natural for
my parents as it would be for my 8-year-old son.
Kevin Bushweller is senior technology editor
of Electronic School.
Illustration by Robert Liberace.
Keep the Dialogue Going
Technology changes everything ... or does it? Think about it:
Technology is enabling great strides in education, but the steps
we take can be enlightened by lessons from the past.
If you could wave technology's wand, what's the first thing
you'd change about the way education works -- the one moldy old
practice you'd dump today, if not yesterday? And what's the most
important thing you'd keep and never want to lose sight of?
Thomas Layton and Kevin Bushweller have started the dialogue
in these pages. We hope you'll keep it going. E-mail your comments
to editor@ electronic-school.com.
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