Beliefs in the “Goodness” of Technology: Those Talkative Kids in Ads

Have you seen those 30-second ads by AT & T with six year-olds sitting around a table answering questions from an adult about whether more is better than less and whether faster is better than slower?

The kids, cute as buttons, answer that faster is better than slower and, of course, more is better than less. If you have not seen the ads, see here and here. They highlight AT&T’s  speed and services in a humorous way.

And the ads have been hits, according to market researchers. Ad agency BBDO released the series–called “It’s Not Complicated”–last November and they have soared in ratings as measured by how many times tweets mentioned the ads.

I have watched these ads many times and I finally put my finger on what bothered me about them. What got to me was not that the values of speed and quantity were being reinforced with kids–hey, the first-graders’ responses are cute and you gotta smile when you see a gap-toothed little kid jump up and down in excitement. What bothered me was the degree to which the pervasiveness of beliefs in technology and its generous fruits are held in America and is now peddled to all of us explicitly without a blink or doubt… by first graders.

Not only in “Silicon Valley” (CA),  Austin (TX), Seattle (WA), Boston (MA), and New York (NY) where high-tech businesses and culture flourish but also in small towns, leafy suburbs, and along Main Streets elsewhere are these strong beliefs in the power and glory of technology prized. What are some of these social beliefs?

*New technologies can not only solve global warming, cancer, and low reading scores but also entertain us daily and make life at home easy.

*New technologies spur change, altering old and familiar ways of doing things. Thus, change means improvement. Improvement leads to  progress and progress  is good.

*Fast is better than slow.

*More is better than less.

None of these beliefs and the values they mirror, of course, is new. They were in the DNA of  colonists in Pre-Revolutionary America, mid-19th century pioneers,  homesteaders and entrepreneurs, early 20th-century captains of industry, and greenhorn immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island. Relishing the use of new technologies from the plow to the mechanized reaper, from canals to railroads, from the stethoscope to the X-ray, from the classroom blackboard to the iPad–Americans have seen these inventions as unvarnished progress in solving vexing problems. It was America on the move, creator of the new and destroyer of the old.

What’s new is that these beliefs have been converted into facts and made explicit; they are so commonplace as to appear in ads where six year-old foils shout them out.

So what?

No rant against technology here. After all, I have a full array of devices in hand and at home to use for work, play, and managing my life. What bothers me is that the taken-for-granted  acceptance of these beliefs now made explicit has silenced serious examination of their flip side, the negatives of these entrenched views.

Where, for example, can issues of how new information technologies erase boundaries between work and home, where you are on call 24/7, be examined?  Where can issues be discussed of new communication technologies not leading to more democracy but being used by dictatorships (e.g., Syria, North Korea, China) to stay in power  or how new technologies worsen existing problems (e.g., fracking for oil, loss of privacy)?

In the home already saturated with labor-saving and entertainment devices? Hardly. Few families can examine openly beliefs they cherish.

Perhaps in the old media of newspapers, television, and books where such opportunities do exist but, unfortunately, they are largely ghettoized into newspaper op-eds, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) programs, and seldom read academic studies.

Sure, there have been some academics and public intellectuals from Langdon Winner to Neil Postman to Evgeny Morozov who have pointed out the political and social downside to a technology-rich culture viewed as crucial to economic growth and solving age-old problems. Moreover, a few social scientists have compiled experimental evidence on multi-tasking, distractions, and the perils of doing things speedily. And some philosophers have laid to rest the deeply embedded notion of inevitable progress as a positive good. A nano-fraction of the public read these studies.

Where, then, can the pluses and minuses of technological innovations  be examined? Perhaps you have already guessed where I am going for an answer. Public schools.

There are some schools and teachers who within the disciplines of science, math, history, English get students to think critically about past and present issues including analysis of media ads, technological innovations, and the beliefs students hold about these issues. Not many, however.

Most public schools are enmeshed in a standards, testing, and accountability regime aimed at sending everyone to college. Critical thinking, media literacy, and analyzing the pros and cons of technological innovations are seldom in evidence in most school settings, given the past three decades of making schools an arm of the economy.

I do wonder about those six year-olds who made those ads for BBDO and what they learned while the camera was on. What if their teachers asked them whether faster was better than slow in doing a school project or helping a friend or eating dinner with a parent? I do wonder.

Framing the School Technology Dream

I wrote the following commentary for Education Week. It appeared on April 17, 2013. The printed ads appear in a slideshow. See below.

For more than a century, educational technology ads have glistened with hope. Newly invented devices from the typewriter to film projectors, from the overhead projector to instructional television, from the Apple IIe to the iPad, have painted pictures of engaged students who will learn more, faster, and better. They have pictured teachers using new technologies to teach effectively. Of course, it is the nature of advertising to promise a rosier future, appealing to what policymakers, administrators, and, yes, parents yearn for … a better, easier, and even enjoyable way for teachers and students to teach and learn. And that is what these ads do. They assure readers that both teachers and students will be better off using these machines.

Take the Royal Portable typewriter ad from over a half-century ago that shows a joyful teenager looking at a report card with Mom and Dad in the background beaming. The ad announces: “A new Royal Portable can raise her marks up to 38%.” The first paragraph adds: “It happens every day! Many so called ‘slow students’ learn to type and then show up on the honor roll.”

Or consider the 1960 ad for a new filmstrip projector. Next to the image of the projector are reasons for buying this cutting-edge device. “Your teaching efforts are more effective. … Pupils comprehend faster with the brighter, more detailed image.” (See the film-projector ad and others in an online slideshow.)

Or the recent ad for the All-In-One iPad app that swears the application “seamlessly combines interactive instruction, formative assessment, progress tracking, and longitudinal reporting against standards with ANY content so the quality of instruction is measurably better and students make authentic performance gains.” Engaged students, higher achievement, and effective teaching are constants in ads for new technology over the past century.

Not to be ignored, however, is the explicit message of lower costs. Consider a 1986 Apple ad (not shown here or online; Apple did not grant permission to republish its advertisements) for a network package connecting the teacher’s desktop station to as many as 30 students’ computers. The ad proclaims: “Now Apple makes it easy to become attached to your students.” Best of all, the ad went on, the Apple SchoolBus network does “it all at 20% less than the cost of individual standalone systems.”

Sure, it’s easy to analyze and even poke fun at ads for high-tech devices ranging from overhead projectors in the 1930s to interactive whiteboards in the early 2000s. I do not want to do that. Instead, I will ask two simple questions about these ads: Who are they aimed at? Why do these ads for new technological devices over the past half-century have these constant dreams of students learning and teachers teaching more, faster, and better?

The answer to the first question is easy. An overwhelming majority of such ads are directed toward those who have the money to buy these devices: school board members, administrators, and parents. The claims for the new technology, including visuals of engaged students and the prospect of higher achievement at less cost, clearly attract school policymakers and administrators. For parents who seek an edge for their children in climbing the ladder to economic and social success in life, these machines shine with that promise. These ads are seldom aimed at either children or teachers (one exception is the filmstrip projector).

If parsing the words advertising copywriters create is important because the words stir hopes of educators and parents, and if knowing that the primary audiences for these ads include policymakers, administrators, and parents, then why do these ads decade after decade cling to the same message of enhancing classroom effectiveness and efficiency?

What helps explain the half-century of promises made in these ads is knowing about the love affair Americans have had with new technologies in life and in schools. Consider the early-19th-century Frenchman who wrote of his travels in America. He said: “Every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them” impressed Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville saw the practical side of this nation in the early 1830s when he toured it with a companion. Americans’ subsequent embrace of steam engines, railroads, turbines, telephones, assembly lines, automobiles, airplanes, and one technology after another right up to the iPhone 5 and beyond is a history of falling in and out of love with the latest device that will “lead to a shorter road to wealth.”

Inventors from Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have become iconic heroes in this country. Each developed a device, a process that “spares labor … diminishes the cost of production … [and] facilitates pleasures.” As for schools, it was Edison who said in 1922:

“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years, it will supplant … the use of textbooks. … I should say that on the average we get about 2 percent efficiency out of schoolbooks. … The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture where it should be possible to obtain 100 percent efficiency.”

Those who produce ad copy and images for the newest laptop, tablet, and smartphone, aimed at enabling students to learn more, faster, and better at less cost, tap into a technology-filled past where heroes spun dreams of using the newest of new tools to advance both the individual and society.

____________________

For a visual tour of the school technology products and pitches aimed at educators since the 1950s, view an online slideshow, “The Promises of Ed. Technology Ads.” To view, click here ….

A Parent Dilemma That Won’t Go Away: Toddlers Using Technology

Ads show infants and toddlers finger-swiping smartphones and tablets.

Parents, as usual are caught in the middle. A recent article by Hannah Rosin–a Mom herself–looks into the dilemma facing parents. Called “The Touch-Screen Generation,” Rosin explores the choices that largely educated, middle and upper-middle class parents face when it comes to deciding whether their infants and toddlers should have the devices and, if so, for how long should they be swiping screens each day. (See four minute video in Rosin article).

On the dilemma facing parents and how much time children should be using devices for games, talking, and facing a screen, Rosin opts for parental judgment on a child-by-child basis. She does not see high-tech devices for toddlers as an enemy to be fought and conquered. She does not, however, speak to the plasticity of the brain and the capacities of new electronic devices altering how toddlers learn, what they retain, and the habits that children accrue.

About a year- and-a half ago, I posted my thoughts on the dilemmas parents face over  young children using devices.

I begin with the statement that, like teaching, there is no one best way of parenting. Good parenting comes in all sizes and colors.

Saying that, however, does little to help those parents who, surrounded by mind-altering noise hyping new technologies, face the persistent dilemma of deciding which high-tech devices they should allow their infants and toddlers to use. The value of having children handle devices and become with-it technologically competes with the value of active children playing and working with others and not passively watching television or playing the same game hours on end on gadgets. Values conflict. What should parents decide?

Parents have three choices in managing the dilemma of how much screen time and high-tech devices should their children use at home and at school. Doing nothing and going with the flow–acceding to their son’s or daughter’s request for the newest device is what many parents do. A second option is to make deliberate choices based on parents’ values–rules for television watching, ditto for cell phones and Wii. A third choice is to decide on a case-by-case basis. Obviously, combinations of these choices get made as children get older and parents experience untoward events (e.g., unemployment, divorce, illness, death).

Parents of infants, toddlers, and young children are faced with choices daily because of the array of screens that their children have access to as no other generation has had. Although I know this from reading articles and watching younger colleagues and friends raise their children, nonetheless, the facts of how much screen time young children spend with computers, television, and games still surprised me. From a 2005 study of 0-6 year year-olds:

“On a typical day, 75% of children watched television and 32% watched videos/DVDs, for approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes, on average. New media are also making inroads with young children: 27% of 5- to 6-year-olds used a computer (for 50 minutes on average) on a typical day. Many young children (one fifth of 0- to 2-year-olds and more than one third of 3- to 6-year-olds) also have a television in their bedroom.”

In 2011, a survey of parents reported that:

“[K]ids ages 2  through 5 watch more TV (including DVD and videos) than kids ages 6 through 11 do. And between the ages of 7 and 9, children shift to more interactive pastimes: 70% of 8-year-olds play video games, whereas less than half of 6-year-olds do…. Computers are accessed even more frequently with 85 % of parents reporting that their children use them. But the oldest medium we inquired about remains the favorite: 95% of 3-to-10 year-olds watch TV.”

What do professionals recommend? Like parents, professional opinion can be arrayed along a continuum. At one end are those teachers (e.g., Waldorf educators) and scholars (e.g.,  Jane Healy) who advocate little exposure for infants, toddlers, and young children. The Alliance for Childhood, a group of educators and parents, for example, published “Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood” in 1999 (see researcher Doug Clements estimate of that publication– critique Fool’s Gold).

At the other end of the professional continuum on technology are those schools who have yet to meet a high tech device they didn’t adore. They buy up iPads as if it were Halloween candy. And in the middle are most early childhood educators who try to figure out what is best for infants, toddlers, and young children in a world where keeping up with changes in high-tech communication and information is nearly impossible.

Take the National Association for Education of Young Children (NAEYC)–a group of educators and parents committed to the intellectual, psychological, emotional, physical, and creative growth of children. They published a position statement on technology in 1996. In 2010, a draft of a new position paper was published for comment (4-29-2011-1 ). They, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, urge parents (and teachers) to be thoughtful and deliberate in the use of high-tech devices that are matched to the age and intellectual and psychological development of the child.

So where are we in helping parents with young children and early childhood professionals decide what to do in the midst of new technologies aimed at young children as toys and learning machines much less school professionals buying iPads for preschoolers?  Spread across a continuum are groups and individuals who question any use for toddlers to those who urge thoughtful, case-by-case use, to those who queue up to buy the latest learning gadget.

The good news is that there are choices that parents can make if they know what they value and calculate the tradeoffs in making decisions–actually negotiating compromises among themselves and with their toddlers–on any one high-tech device; the bad news is that conflict-filled dilemmas in raising children have no solutions; they can be only managed again and again.

No End to Magical Thinking When It Comes to High-Tech Schooling

Few high-tech entrepreneurs, pundits, or booster of online learning, much less, policymakers, would ever say aloud publicly that robots and hand-held devices will eventually replace teachers. Yet many fantasize that such an outcome will occur. High-profile awards to entrepreneurs, the occasional cartoon, and  advocates who dream of online instruction anywhere, anytime transforming education feed the fantasy.

Consider Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University (United Kingdom). He recently received the TED award of $1 million for creating learning environments where illiterate Indian children had access to computers in actual holes-in-walls on streets of New Delhi slums. Some of the children told him: “You’ve given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English.” Believing that children’s sense of wonder and intrepid curiosity would spur them to use computers and learn English, science, and whatever else they were curious about on their own, Mitra said to his audiences and funders: “My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online.”

The million dollar award is not an accident when so many vendors, enthusiasts, and dreamers are willing to spend large sums of money to advance the spread of Mitra’s initiative and similar ones through both the developing and developed world.

More magical thinking–another noble dream–occurred nearly a decade ago with the  One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative (OLPC). Nicholas Negroponte, MIT professor and former director of the MIT Media Lab, designed the project to put inexpensive, solar-powered laptops (running now around $200) in the hands of children and youth in least developed countries in Africa, Asia, and South America.   

No shortage of critics, however.

Thus far, the largest distribution of laptops, nearly a million, have gone to rural and poor children in Peru over the past few years. A recent evaluation of the effort concluded:

*The program dramatically increased access to computers
*No evidence that the program increased learning in Math or Language.
*Some benefits on cognitive skills

Results for other developing countries such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Uruguay have similar mixed results. At best, it is too early to say what the benefits have been; after all, laptops are slowly becoming obsolete since smart phones and cheaper devices have nearly replaced them in many parts of the world; at worst, OLPC approaches what Mike Trucano, ICT specialist for the World Bank, listed as one of the 9 worst ed tech practices in the developing world: Dump hardware in schools, hope for magic to happen.

I certainly saw that with instructional television in the 1960s, desktop computers and labs in the 1980s, 1:1 laptop programs since the mid-1990s and I now see a similar pattern with iPads, other tablets, and smart phones. Magical thinking about transforming teaching and learning–dumping teachers and traditional schools disappearing–is close to make-believe even when children have these powerful devices in their hands.

Vendor-driven hype and wishful policy thinking over robots, increasingly sophisticated artificial  intelligence software, and expanded virtual teaching feed private and public fantasies about replacing teachers and schools. Taking a step back and thinking about what parents, voters, and taxpayers want from schools–the social, economic, political, and individual goals–makes magical thinking more of a curse in the inevitable public disappointment and cynicism that ensue after money is spent, paltry results emerge, and machines  become obsolete.

I end with the obvious point that magical thinking and the accompanying curse afflicts not only educators but also the rest of us, as these homeowners found out:

MOOCs and the Mechanization of Education: Widening the Gap Between the Haves and Have-Nots (Greg Graham)

Greg Graham teaches writing at a midwestern university. This appeared November 8, 2012 on his blog

 Sebastian Thrun left his tenured teaching job at Stanford University after 160,000 students signed up for his free online version of the course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” The experience completely changed his perspective on education, he said, so he ditched Stanford and launched the private Web site Udacity, which offers online courses. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” Thrun said. “You can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture to your 20 students, but I’ve taken the red pill and I’ve seen Wonderland.” (Thrun is staying at Stanford as a research professor, but will not be teaching there).

What exactly was the “Wonderland” that Thrun saw that sent him into such euphoric zeal that he discarded his position at a premier institution of higher education like he was trading in an old clunker at the car dealer? He saw those phenomenal numbers signing up for his class, and it made him dizzy with delight. Anybody with a Twitter account or Facebook page can understand the feeling. Your number of followers or friends can be a source of affirmation, proof that what you have to say is important. I was on Twitter for several weeks following anybody I found remotely interesting, and then someone told me that it is better to have more followers than followees, so I promptly started culling my list. I didn’t want to be a Twitter loser. But surely those adolescent impulses don’t affect scholars like Thrun.

I teach writing at a mid-level university in the dead center of fly-over country; if 160,000 people signed up for an online course I was teaching, I’d probably take my shirt off, write 160K on my chest, and run around campus whoopin it up. But Thrun is above that, right? He’s driven by higher ideals, right? Well, I don’t know about you, but the longer I live, the more I realize people everywhere are just as likely to be driven by ego as by higher ideals.

We’ve Got Discounts!

Perhaps Thrun and others like him have made the classic mistake of valuing quantity over quality, believing that more is better. Those huge numbers on their screens have made them drunk, clouding their judgment about what is wrong with our education system and what it will take to fix it. Folks often say technology is value neutral, when in fact there are many values inherent with technology, and one of them is volume. Like Wal-Mart, online education promises greater numbers reached; to hell with customer service and quality, we’ve got discounts!

Thrun isn’t the only one plunging headfirst into the digital pool. From Education Secretary Arne Duncan on down to my son’s 8^th grade teacher, the push for technology is relentless. If you’re not on board, the sentiment goes, you’re falling behind. Recent conversations have emerged about machines grading essays. Machines grading essays. Some are seriously asking if machines can match teachers in effectively assessing student essays. Peering behind the curtain of this essay-grading wizardry, here’s what I see: less demand on teachers, fewer teachers needed, somebody making money with a product. Believe me, as a teacher of writing at the college level, there are times I would give anything for a shortcut to responding to a pile of freshmen essays. It can be grueling work. But I am like most writing teachers — an idealist, in it for the love of learning. Why else would we do it?  So my colleagues and I plow through those papers, knowing we are giving our students the best chance at growth and success.

We’ve got to question the motivations behind these moves. I’m sure online educators are motivated by the sight of an abundance of learners, but what are the chances that over time those numbers will lose their meaning? Kind of like a person disrobing for a web cam or publishing a lewd video. Surely he or she gets excited about gaining an audience of hundreds or even thousands, but that thrill lacks the true fulfillment of a genuine loving relationship. I imagine such a person initially enjoying all the attention, but eventually continuing the practice for one reason only: money. Is this too extreme an analogy to apply to “Wonderland” Thrun and his internet colleagues? Is it possible that Thrun’s ecstatic experience with online teaching will eventually subside, that the huge numbers won’t provide the buzz they once did, and that all he will be left with is the money that can be made from his venture?

What the future holds

I don’t know Thrun, nor am I a psychologist or a shaman, so I can’t pretend to know what motivates him.  I certainly support his right to quit teaching at Stanford and start his own business, um, altruistic educational venture. I wish him the best in Wonderland. But I’m from Smallville, where the majority of Americans get their education, and it’s a million miles from Wonderland. The great majority of our students will never take Thrun’s course because, frankly, it would be over their heads. My concern is for them and the trickle-down effect that the furor over MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will have on their education. Though they are not the demographic Thrun is targeting, students like them, who are average or struggling, are the ones who will suffer if this trend continues to grow. Ironically, though the move toward the mechanization of education is being advanced by some of the nation’s most élite universities, in the end it will be the lower half of the student population that will be forced out of the traditional classroom, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

You might think I’m overreacting. Alarmists rise up every time technology takes a leap forward. But I want you to cast your mind 20, 30, 40 ahead. It is not hard to imagine a day when only the élite will experience a face-to-face education. The great masses will be educated online. Colleges will be the first to switch, but the change will slowly overtake secondary and primary education as well. How can this happen, you ask? Because the move toward the mechanization of education is driven by a holy trinity of interests forming an unstoppable alliance. Consider:

1)      State & Local Governments – As budgets are squeezed, state governments are cutting back education funding, looking for ways to cut education costs. Several state governments have already mandated at least one online course for high school students, paving the way for the future.

2)     School Administrators – As school budgets feel the pinch, administrators find that online classes are most cost effective. Money talks.

3)     Technology Companies – Big money comes to state and local government, school administrators, and teachers, offering goodies galore in exchange for using their products in the classroom. What better way to expand their market than by luring younger customers through the classroom? The infiltration of business into education is a problem that is only going to grow.

It is unlikely that our higher ideals will be able to stop these forces.

Changing Higher Education Forever

“The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Education Forever,” read a recent Wired Magazine headline about Thrun’s online class. Indeed, many universities are jumping on the MOOC bandwagon. Earlier this year, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced they were also feeling the love, and joined forces to offer a variety of free courses online in a partnership they’re calling “edX.” These changes may be exciting for intellectually driven people in the U.S. and around the world who will finally have access to the lectures of elite thinkers, but the impact on the average American student is murkier. What these students need most isn’t to hear amazing ideas from brilliant teachers – these students need immediacy.

Immediacy

The average high school and college student in the U.S. has a modest level of literacy. In order to thrive in education, they need immediacy. Teachers who practice immediacy call students by name, get to know them personally, and give the occasional pat on the back. As a college writing teacher with class sizes limited to 25 students, I’ve always prided myself on learning my student’s names within two weeks of classes starting. I go over a list of their names and recall their faces. My previous college provided me a picture roster, which enabled me to get a head start on learning names. One of my role models at that school was a woman who has taught there for over twenty years. One semester, she taught in the same classroom immediately after me. As I was gathering up my stuff after the first day of class, I was blown away as she greeted every student who walked through the door by name, treating them as if they were old friends. That’s immediacy.

More than mere friendliness, immediacy means students receive customized instruction. Teachers learn what makes each student tick, pushing and prodding one, giving space to another, according to each one’s needs. Teaching is an art form. An imperfect art from, no doubt, but an art form nonetheless. It requires the teacher’s entire person, all the senses, including intuition. And it requires every tool in the teacher’s bag, including tactile and other forms of non-verbal communication.

At a recent rally in D.C. protesting the Obama administration’s education policies that are centered on standardized tests, actor Matt Damon (whose mom is a teacher) summed up the role of teachers very well:

My teachers were free to approach me and every other kid in that classroom like an individual puzzle. They took so much care in figuring out who we were and how to best make the lessons resonate with each of us. They were empowered to unlock our potential. They were allowed to be teachers.

That kind of awareness and responsiveness is achieved at the highest levels in a face-to-face context. That’s why many Silicon Valley parents, including executives from Google, Apple, and Ebay, send their children to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, where no electronics are allowed in the classroom. They know what we know: the teacher motivating his or her students, and giving each of them the confidence needed to overcome every obstacle, is a very personal, creative, challenging task. Putting machines between the teacher and student (either online or in the classroom) alienates the ones about whom we claim to be most concerned: the struggling students.

There’s No Place Like Place

Students not only need immediacy, they also need a place for learning. One aspect of the radical disruption Thrun and others are advocating is taking education out of the classroom and putting it on the student’s personal screen so the student can learn on his or her own time in his or her own place. But has it ever occurred to them that the students with the greatest educational needs often don’t have a place conducive to learning at their disposal? For those students, a place of learning becomes a haven, an escape from the chaos that otherwise characterizes their lives. I know this because they’ve told me so. Place matters. It always has, and always will. Just ask the thousands of people who pay hundreds of dollars to attend TED conferences rather than watch the videos at home.

Online courses from teachers like Thrun can provide excellent learning opportunities for many people. And students certainly need to develop competency using digital tools, especially for research. But that’s not what average students need most. Their greatest need is for mentors and teachers who can skillfully guide them through the learning process.

Magical Thinking

Unfortunately, Thrun is only one of many superstar thinkers who are getting caught up in the pizzazz of a massive digital audience. Giddy with their own potency (real or imagined), these thought leaders will add fuel to the fire in the push toward the mechanization of education.

But the mechanization of education is an exercise in magical thinking. Exhausted and desperate for answers, we are tempted to think that machines can save us. But they can’t. Wonderland isn’t the answer. The greatest things happening in education are occurring in classrooms around the world, as teachers look into the eyes of their students and find ways to bring learning to life.

It’s a sacred trust that we must not abdicate.

MOOCs and Pedagogy: Part 2

Hard as it is for me to keep up with the spread of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in higher education and the sizable issues accompanying how they are organized, taught, and what students take away from the experience, I have learned a few things from taking one course (although I dropped out), listening to a panel of professors who taught online courses, and reading extensively pro- and anti- MOOCs commentaries. Here is what I have learned thus far.

1.  At least three groups of academics and entrepreneurs have emerged in debating the merits of MOOCs: Advocates, Skeptics, and Agnostics.

Advocates (see here, here, and here) include those recent entrepreneurs into the world of MOOCs and academics swept off their feet by offering their expertise to  thousands–even hundreds of thousands–of students simultaneously as opposed to  hundreds in a lecture hall. Advocates also include those who have labored long and hard in distance learning, e-learning, and earlier incarnations of online courses.  With striking advances in technology, MOOC champions want to open up doors to anyone in the world seeking expert knowledge and skills–including credentials. Anyone, they say, with an Internet connection. In MOOCs, they see a powerful tool to make fundamental changes in the organization and delivery of higher education in the next decade. To them, MOOCs encapsulate a “disruptive innovation” that will transform higher education…for the better.

Skeptics (see here, and here) include many academics who, for various reasons, question the premise of learning online as opposed to face-to-face in lecture halls and seminars. A recent poll had nearly 60 percent expressing “more fear than excitement” for expanding online courses. Skeptics range from Henny Penny shout-outs that the Sky if Falling to some who urge the professoriate to take action or computer screens will emerge victorious, replacing professors.

Agnostics (see here and here) are often academics who question the hype of MOOCs revolutionizing higher education while seeing both pluses and minuses to virtual learning. They know that traditional higher education, specifically, lectures to hundreds of undergraduates, was in of itself a way for colleges to save money and do not defend such practices but they also see how mixes of teaching practices (e.g., face-to-face and online) might be pedagogically superior to live  lecture, video snippets, and demonstrations . Which brings me to my second observation about MOOCs.

2. A MOOC delivers a course to students but a teacher teaches it. What  students learn depends, in part, upon how teachers teach.  Online delivery of instruction is neither the same as pedagogy nor identical to student learning.

In an earlier post, I made the distinction between teacher-centered and student-centered instruction and hybrids of the two, arguing that teacher-centered instruction is the default pedagogy in higher education. In this post, I want to make clear this distinction between delivering a course and teaching it. I turn to Richard Clark whose work three decades ago helped me sort out this crucial distinction.

Personal computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—and here I would add online instruction–are vehicles for transporting instruction. They are not teaching methods. By teaching methods, I mean practices such as asking questions, giving examples, lecture, recitation, guided discussion, drill, cooperative learning, individualized instruction, simulations, tutoring, project-based learning, and innumerable variations and combinations of pedagogies. [i]

Conflating MOOCs with instructional methods misleads professors, students, and the public about what teachers teach and what students learn. Or as Clark has said: media like television, film, and computers “deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition.” Alan Kay who invented the prototype for a laptop in 1968 made a similar point when he said schools confuse music with the instrument. “You can put a piano in every classroom but that won’t give you a developed music culture because the music culture is embodied in people.” If, on the other hand, you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don’t “need musical instruments because the kids can sing and dance….The important thing … is that the music is not in the piano and knowledge and edification is not in the computer.” Or online instruction, I would add. [ii]

This mushing together of a means of delivering instruction (i.e., MOOCs) with how teachers teach (e.g., lectures, discussions, small groups, “connected learning” and the like) has distorted greatly policy discussions and blogosphere reactions of advocates, skeptics, and agnostics about MOOCs and their impact on teaching and learning.

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[i] Richard Clark, “Reconsidering Research on Media in Learning,” Review of Educational Research, 53(4), pp. 445-460; Richard Clark, “When Researchers Swim Upstream: Reflections on an Unpopular Argument about Learning from Media,” Educational Technology, February 1991, pp. 34-40.

[ii] Alan Kay, “Still Waiting for the Revolution,” Scholastic Administr@tor, April/May 2003, pp. 23-25.

The Past Lives on in the Present: Customized Learning then and Now

Pupils are working on their own. The second and third grade reading class of 63 pupils … is using a learning center and two adjoining rooms. Two teachers and  the school librarian act as coordinators and tutors as the pupils proceed with the various materials prepared by the school’s teachers and … developer, The Learning and Research Development Center at the U. of Pittsburgh. Each pupil sets his own pace. He is listening to records and completing workbooks. When he has completed a unit of work, he is tested, the test is corrected immediately, and if he gets a grade of 85% or better he moves on. if not, the teacher offers a series of alternative activities to correct the weakness, including individual tutoring, There are no textbooks. There is virtually no lecturing by the teacher to the class as a whole. Instead, she is busy observing the child’s progress, evaluating his tests, writing prescriptions, and instructing individually or in small groups of pupils who need help.*

The school is Oakleaf elementary near Pittsburgh (PA) and the time is 1965. Implemented across all grades, the innovative program was called Individually Prescribed Instruction or IPI (el_197203_tillman-2, p. 495).

Nearly a half-century ago, before there were desktop computers, university developers and school-site practitioners championed IPI as a program where students move through materials at differentiated paces until each achieved mastery of the content and skills to then continue on to the next unit of study.  Observers found students engaged in the process, pleased with the prompt feedback, and delighted that each could move at his or her pace rather than wait for the entire class to move to the next lesson.

Sound familiar?

It should. IPI was a more sophisticated version of psychologist B.F. Skinner’s “teaching machine” in the 1950s that evolved from “programmed learning” engineered by psychologist Sidney Pressey in the 1920s.

IPI was a prototype for subsequent online learning once electronic devices became widespread in K-12 and higher education. The DNA of present-day blended learning (e.g., Rocketship schools’ Learning Labs, Carpe Diem schools) and MOOCs in  higher education reaches back nearly a century into  “programmed learning,” “teaching machines,” and  IPI.

Alright, Larry, you made the self-evident point that earlier renditions of self-paced, individualized learning appeared nearly a century ago. So what?

At that time and now, those various incarnations of individualized, self-paced learning sprang from competing ideologies of what children and youth should learn and how they should learn it. Student-centered vs. teacher-centered ways of teaching and learning (and mixes of both) have competed for time and space in K-12 schools for the past two centuries in schools. Teacher-centered instruction (e.g., lecture, discussion, textbook, worksheets, quizzes and tests) has won time and again and dominates classroom lessons. Yet student-centered instruction challenged conventional practice repeatedly.

Connecting students to the real world, students working in small groups and individually, teachers acting as guides and mentors, and a host of other student-centered activities that blend different subjects and skills (e.g., math, science, art, and poetry) moved to center stage of public attention on different occasions (e.g., progressive curriculum and instruction in the 1920s; open classrooms in late-1960s). But after a brief fling in the spotlight receded to the wings in past decades.  Of course, there have been hybrids of both where many teachers hug the middle of the spectrum of instruction, but advocates for each pedagogical ideology continue to contest one another even today when K-12 battles erupt over different kinds of math content, reading textbooks, and early childhood programs.

In higher education, rival ideas about teaching and learning, albeit under wraps, drive  different versions of MOOCs.  The answer, then, to my “so what” question is that  pedagogical ideologies that drove earlier versions of individualized, self-paced instruction are active in current versions of MOOCs.

The prevailing version of MOOCs offers traditional, technology-enriched teacher-centered instruction, that is, lecturing to large groups of people, asking occasional questions, online discussion sections, and multiple-choice questions on exams. Such MOOCs possess advantages of efficiency in delivering information especially in particular subjects (e.g. procedural knowledge in computer science, mathematics). Computer science departments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard launched the initial MOOC offerings, not the Humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences, according to Keith Devlin, a Stanford University mathematician currently teaching a MOOC course on mathematical thinking.

There are other ways of teaching these courses, however. Some enthusiasts for MOOCs see opportunities for non-traditional forms of teaching where students learn from one another, form online communities, crowd-source answers to problems, create networks that distribute learning in ways that seldom occur in bricks-and-mortar colleges and universities. To Devlin, “the key to real learning has always been bi-directional human-human interaction (even better in some cases, multi-directional, multi-person interaction), not unidirectional instruction.” In other words, student-centered or learner-centered pedagogy.

So these rival ideologies contend with one another in MOOCs as they did when “teaching machines” and IPI were garnering public attention. Chances are efficiencies in cost and delivery will drive MOOCs toward teacher-centered instruction, as has occurred in the past. I would hope, however, that there would be attention to (and discussions of) MOOCs where benefits derived from student-centered ways of learning occur.

 

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*Thanks to Justin Reich and Dan Meyer for pointing me to IPI as a past reform that lives in the present.

Predictions about High-Tech in K-12 Schools in 2023

For the past three years, I offered predictions (see December 26, 2009, December 30, 2010, and December 29, 2011 posts) of what I saw around the corner for high-tech in K-12 schools. With weekly reports of schools adopting  iPads  tablets for kindergartners as well as high schoolers, with vendors touting interactive whiteboards, clickers, and tablets engaging children and increasing academic achievement, with policymakers mandating online courses for high school graduation, with the spread of blended learning in mostly low-income and minority schools, and with more and more  teachers blogging about how they integrate the use of new devices into daily lessons, including English and math Common Core standards–with all of that one would think that by 2023, age-graded schools and the familiar teaching and learning that occurs in schools today would be, well, passe’. I do not think so.

For nearly three decades, I have written about teacher and student access to, and instructional use of, computers in schools. In those articles and books, I have been skeptical of vendors’ and promoters’ claims about how these ever-changing electronic devices will transform age-graded schools and conventional teaching and learning.

Amid that skepticism, however, I have noted often that many teachers adopted the latest information and communication devices and software not only for home use but also to become more efficient in planning lessons, using the Internet, grading students, communicating with parents and other educators, and dozens of other classroom and non-classroom tasks. Nor have my criticisms of policymakers’ decisions to purchase extensive hardware (far too often without teacher advice) prevented me from identifying (and celebrating) teachers leading classes in computer graphics, animation, and computer science as well as classroom teachers who have imaginatively and creatively integrated new devices and social media seamlessly into their daily lessons.

My allergy, however, to rose-colored scenarios of a future rich with technology remains. I can only imagine how painful it must be for those hard-core advocates of more-technology-the-better who predicted the end of schooling years ago to see that public schools are still around. So what might 2023 look like?

Predictions about future use of computers are often made by projecting existing trends into the next decade. This tactic embraces a conservative view of the future since it is rooted in the here-and-now. And that is what I do.

Others have predicted the disappearance of schools and classrooms–a highly unlikely outcome. Such scenarios leapfrog the present and stretch unreasonably the potential of new technologies, thereby painting utopian (or dystopian) pictures. So given my allergy to rosy (or grim) scenarios, I will stick with current trends–the evidence at hand–acknowledging that they, too, may end up in a pile of debris should major unplanned events occur.

Clear trend lines for U.S. classrooms in the next decade are the continued growth of digital textbooks downloaded on hand-held devices and tablets (smartphones, iPads, eBook variations), spread of computer adaptive testing, and expanded online learning (also see: goingthedistance). But not the slow dissolution or “disruption” of public schools.

DIGITAL TEXTS

Small and powerful devices in the hands of students will permit digitizing of texts. Student backpacks will lighten considerably as $100 hardbound books become as obsolete as the rotary dial phone. Homework, text reviews for tests, and all of the teacher-assigned tasks associated with hardbound books will be formatted for small screens. Instead of students’ excuses about leaving texts in lockers, teachers will hear requests to recharge their devices. I noted last year that Korea has already committed itself to digitize all texts by 2015 even though there have been subsequent hiccups in the plan.

COMPUTER ADAPTIVE TESTING

Used a great deal in the private sector for employment and other purposes, over the past few decades, computerized testing has now entered many public schools. In Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), for example, students sit in front of computer screens and take tests that are tailored to their ability. When a student answers an item (usually multiple-choice) correctly, then the student is given a harder item to answer. If the student gives a wrong answer, then the screen shows an easier question. This goes on until the computer bank runs out of items to administer students or the computer has sufficient information to give the student a score. Whichever happens first, then the test is over. Highly touted by promoters and vendors–see McGraw-Hill YouTube segment for an example of hype–CAT is part of the package that new national tests accompanying Common Core standards will include by 2014. So within a decade, as more and more tablets and hand-held devices become ubiquitous, both national and state testing via computers will become commonplace.

ONLINE COURSES

Advocates boost this form of teaching and learning as a powerful innovation liberating learning from the confines of brick-and-mortar buildings. Estimates (and predictions) of online learning becoming the dominant form of teaching turn up repeatedly yet somehow, fade. Surely, there will always be students and adults drawn from rural, home schooled, and adult populations that will provide a steady stream of clients for online courses. And even more evident is that many schools, particularly those catering to low-income students, will have blended programs of classrooms with teachers and computer labs with aides where online instruction is tailored to individual students. But do not expect much blended learning in middle and upper-middle class districts.

Even with this expansion, by 2023, well over 90 percent of public school students will be in places called schools where teachers teach at least 180 days a year in self-contained classrooms.

The error that online champions make decade after decade (recall that distance learning goes back to the 1960s) is that they forget that schools have multiple responsibilities beyond literacy. Both parents and voters want schools to socialize students into community values, prepare them for civic responsibilities, and yes, get them ready for college and career. Online courses from for-profit companies and non-profit agencies, while creating imaginative short-cuts to achieve these ends online, overall cannot hack those duties and responsibilities.

So by 2023, uses of technologies will change some aspects of teaching and learning but schools and classrooms will be clearly recognizable to students’ parents and grandparents. Digital textbooks will surprise the older generation but turning in homework, taking teacher-made quizzes, students asking teachers questions will remain familiar.  Even with exposes of for-profit cyber-schools, online instruction will continue to expand incrementally, particularly for certain kinds of students but, overall, will still be peripheral to regular K-16 schooling.

For regular readers of blog, I am curious as to what you see for high-tech use in schools for 2023?

From Quill Pens to Computer Adaptive Testing: Old and New Technological Devices

There are many definitions of instructional technology. One concentrates on devices teachers use in classrooms.  Another definition focuses on the different ways that teachers have used such devices as tools to advance learning in lessons. Even other definitions frame technology as processes, ways of organizing classrooms, schools, and districts.

I examine the second definition in this post: the connection between writing tools students used and the perpetual demand over the past two millennia of teachers in every culture to find out what students have learned. Here I consider the quill and steel-tipped pen, pencil, ball-point pen, and yes, the computer.

I begin with the quill pen.

Here is how Robert Travers (1983, pp. 97-98) described quill pens.

The quill pen was first mentioned in the writings of Saint Isodore of Seville in the seventh century…. The quill seems to have been by far the best writing instrument invented in its time for it displaces all other forms. It became the main instrument used in schools, apart from the slate…. Even in the late 1800s, the quill pen was still the most widely used instrument for writing. Quills [came] from the wings of geese, but swan quills were also highly valued. For fine work, the quills of crows were sometimes used.

In 1809, an inventor, Joseph Bramah, developed a machine for cutting quills into lengths, and the short lengths were then inserted into a wooden holder….The separation of the point and the holder led to many inventions, and one of these was the [metal-tipped pen]….The first factory for the mass production of the steel pen was established in New Jersey in 1870….

When the steel pen entered education, a revolution in school practice [occurred]. Writing with the quill had been a slow, unhurried art…. [T]he writer had to stop frequently in order to reshape and sharpen the quill. Since writing was a slow art, pride was taken in it….The steel pen changed that. The steel pen made it possible to write continuously over long periods. There was ever increasing pressure on the pupil to produce written material in quantity. The new medium for written work then became used for examinations, which became substitutes for the form of oral examination provided by the recitation [where students would be quizzed in public for their knowledge]….

By 1890, students had become so used to the steel pen that examinations were commonly administered using this writing instrument as a tool to produce rapidly written answers.

In the Pittsburgh (PA) public schools as an elementary school student in 1940 at a now demolished Minersville elementary school, I sat at one of the above desks with the hole for the then-defunct inkwell.

What about pencils? Like metal-tipped pens, mass-produced pencils did not appear in most classrooms until the early decades of the 20th century. And with pencils, teachers assessed what students learned through hand-written homework, quizzes, essays, and multiple-choice tests (introduced in the U.S. during World War I). These inexpensive devices–mass-produced ball-point pens arrived in schools in the 1940s—made assessing students’ knowledge inexpensive–after all, no one pays students to take tests or for lost time learning–and efficient in judging promotion, retention, graduation, and other high-stakes outcomes.

Now arrives computer adaptive testing (CAT). Used a great deal in the private sector for employment and other purposes, over the past few decades, computerized testing has entered schools. In Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), for example, students sit in front of computer screens and take tests that are tailored to their ability. When a student answers an item (usually multiple-choice) correctly, then the student is given a harder item to answer. If the student gives a wrong answer, then the screen shows an easier question. This goes on until the computer bank runs out of items to administer students or the computer has sufficient information to give the student a score. Whichever happens first, then the test is over.

Highly touted by promoters and vendors–see McGraw-Hill YouTube segment for an example of hype–CAT is part of the package that new national tests accompanying Common Core standards will include by 2014. There are, as with any new technological device, clear advantages and disadvantages of this form of assessment (see Computer Adaptive Testing).

Like quill  and steel-tipped pens dipped in ink, pencils, and ballpoint pens, here is another technological device that is being bent toward finding out what students know. Ideally, of course, there would be no need for CAT or the mountain high summative tests currently in vogue across the country were the nation’s teachers sufficiently trusted to use the many ways teachers assess daily what their students know and can do. And further, for districts to build and increase teacher knowledge and skills in assessment That kind of time investment in teacher knowledge and skills and the accompanying trust in teachers and schools to assess and report the results are, sad to say, missing-in-action.

So watch computer adaptive testing become the new steel-tipped pen of the late-19th century.

MOOCs and Pedagogy: Teacher-Centered, Student-Centered, and Hybrids (Part 1)

In writing about all of the hype surrounding MOOCs, I saw this photo entitled “University Classroom of the Future.”

From instructional television in the 1950s through updated versions of  “distance education, “a professor professing in front of a camera is familiar and surely will dominate many of the newly established platforms (e.g., Coursera, Udacity, edX). Whether it will be the “University Classroom of the Future,” I cannot say for sure. But the photo makes the professor front and center in teaching content and skills.

The prevailing version of MOOCs offers traditional, technology-enriched teacher-centered instruction, that is, lecturing to large groups of people, asking occasional questions, online discussion sections, and multiple-choice questions on exams. Such MOOCs possess advantages of efficiency in delivering information especially in particular subjects (e.g. procedural knowledge in computer science). Computer science departments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard launched the initial MOOC offerings, not the Humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences, according to Keith Devlin, a Stanford University mathematician currently teaching a MOOC course on mathematical thinking (and the “Math Guy” on NPR).

These courses, in the words of George Siemens, a Canadian professor at Athabasca University–Canada’s Open University–who started an early version of MOOC in 2008, duplicate knowledge for learners who then replicate that knowledge.

“In a traditional course, the instructor creates knowledge coherence by bounding the domain of knowledge that the learners will explore: i.e. this is the course text, here are the readings, quizzes will validate that you’ve learned what I think is important, etc.”

There are other ways of teaching these courses, however. Some enthusiasts for MOOCs see opportunities for non-traditional forms of teaching where students learn from one another, form online communities, crowd-source answers to problems, create networks that distribute learning in ways that seldom occur in bricks-and-mortar colleges and universities. In other words, student-centered or learner-centered pedagogy.

Again, George Siemens:

“In all of the MOOCs I’ve run, readings and resources have been used that reflect the current understanding of experts in the field. We ask learners, however, to go beyond the declarations of knowledge …. Learners need to create and share stuff – blogs, articles, images, videos, artifacts, etc…. Our first MOOC … started by being primarily centered in a Moodle discussion forum. As the course progressed, interactions were scattered over many tools and technologies. We ended up with many spaces of interactions: Second Life, PageFlakes, Google Groups, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, blogs, wikis, YouTube, among dozens of others.”

To Keith Devlin, “the key to real learning has always been bi-directional human-human interaction (even better in some cases, multi-directional, multi-person interaction), not unidirectional instruction.” He believes that:

“while the popular image of a MOOC centers on lecture-videos and multiple-choice quizzes, what Humanities, Arts, and Science MOOCs (including mine) are about is community building and social interaction. For the instructor … the goal in such a course is to create a learning community.  To create an online experience in which thousands of self-motivated individuals from around the world can come together for a predetermined period of intense, human–human interaction, focused on a clearly stated common goal.”

And hybrid versions of teacher- and student-centered instruction is about “flipping” classes ala Salman Khan, that is, undergraduate students view the professor’s lecture in dorm rooms or at home and then meet with teachers and fellow students face-to-face for closer examination of the concepts in the lecture, and deeper inquiry into the content. What others call blended learning. (For a taxonomy of blended learning types in K-12, see Classifying blended-learning2 .

In MOOCs, of course, “flipping” cannot be done easily even with teaching assistants, email exchanges, and the like although Devlin, Siemens, and others see social media–the Facebook model–as the instrument for creating peer learning and communities of learners in “flipped” models of blended learning.

Here, then, at the early stage of the hype cycle–somewhere between the “Technology Trigger” and the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” are three kinds of pedagogy vying for attention among MOOCs. Which will prevail?

Based upon my experience in higher education and the research I and others have done, technology-enriched traditional teacher-centered instruction will continue to dominate MOOCs for the following reasons:

1. Professor-centered instruction in courses where procedural knowledge and skills are expected to be learned (e.g., math, computer science, entry-level social sciences, engineering) is easier to deliver to students and, after initial start-up costs are factored in, cheaper than in face-to-face classrooms. At least to one researcher, it will be shown that students learn as much from such technology-delivered instruction as if they were listening to a professor in undergraduate lecture halls. See Bowen lectures SU 102-1 .

2. In those institutions where faculty are expected to do research and publish, the incentives of tenure and promotion drive faculty behavior. Professors are rewarded for spending far more time on  research than spending time on developing and teaching student-centric courses and learning communities. Thus, in research-driven institutions, most professors will not invest in designing and teaching student-centric courses.

For these reasons, chances are that the photo at the top of this post captures a typical higher education classroom in the years to come.