EdTechTrek

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Why do we learn? Many learn because they have to. It’s the law up to a certain age in this country. Others learn because they are expected to. Yet others learn because they are interested or even passionate about a topic. Some learning is a by-product of other life activities.

While reading the latest issue (August 2008) of Learning & Leading with Technology, I ran across something that made me think. If you are not familiar with this periodical, for a while now they have had a current issue in educational technology where opposing views are represented. This issue’s topic: “Is educational technology shortening student attention span?” (PDF)

David Marcovitz, an associate professor at Loyola College in Maryland presents the “Yes” argument (I suggest you read it. He has worded it quite well) while the CIO of a school district and VP of that state’s association of technology coordinators presents the opposing view.

Now, there is no doubt that the use of current tools by students in schools is a motivating factor for them. For some reason, when a traditional worksheet is digitized and put on line for students to complete with a few glitzy animated graphics and a little feedback, it is a whole new experience for students. They attend better and persist longer. However, this form of learning is no more meaningful and certainly no more powerful than the paper/pencil activity done at their desks. So much with educational technologies can be described this way… simply digitizing traditional forms of learning and calling it innovation - 21st Century Learning… Blah! Is it just about controlling students… getting them to do what we want in the easiest way possible… even if that way is inferior to others, less messy… almost “effortless”?

What bothers me most about the “NO” view presented here is the following quotation:

“Technology has the power to capture our children’s attention by making learning interactive and fun. I have walked into classrooms where students were using technology to share, create, and explore. Those students were excited and engaged in the content being presented to them.”

The latter part of the quotation has some merit in the right contexts. However, the first part of the quotation is what does not sit well with me. Yes - technology does have the power to capture children’s attention by making learning interactive and fun. But what worries me is the seductive nature of this. Let me add a few words to this statement:

Technology has the power to capture our children’s attention by making (disguising) disconnected, rote learning interactive and fun.

The result - we are able to maintain the status quo and change very little simply by making it more fun and interactive.

Later in in this same issue, there is an article on Mathcasts. To make this contrast even greater, a quotation from this piece states:

“Perhaps the greatest motivation for your students will be their increasing self-confidence and improving attitude toward math. Students who regularly create mathcasts take ownership of the math concepts they explain. Mathematical ideas become more meaningful to students…”

So, what do you think? Is motivation best when it results from increased self-confidence and improved attitude that comes from meaningful learning? Or, do we just shoot for “interactive and fun”, keeping kids entertained?

Back to the initial arguments about technology and shortening attention spans… which type of learning described above may lead more to shortened attention spans? As David Marcovitz and Neil Postman suggest (in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business), that every technology is a Faustian Bargain (and here)- “for every positive benefit, there is an often unseen and very serious downside”.

So, how best are we to motivate children? With technology or with powerful, meaningful, relevant learning opportunities (that may or may not involve newer technologies). Sorry, I know the question is redundant. I have always told my preservice college students who want to put “fun” first in their lessons that “fun” is a result of developmentally-appropriate, relevant and meaningful learning. Engagement comes from that. Fun is a by-product - not a goal.

I would really like to hear your thoughts on all of this, as I am thinking out loud here.

I have been thinking lately of the onslaught of new tools and related learning potential that they hold. Over the past few years there has just been an onslaught of new tools and services out there. Some are still around, some have fallen by the wayside. Many of these tools fall in the Web 2.0 category. (here and here, to list a “few”). The discussions and implementations with EdTech folks have been just as numerous. I totally understand the desire to find those “perfect” tools and tools to transform “same-old” learning into learning that is culturally relevant and personally meaningful. I get that. I think about these things all the time. However, there is something innate in the tech “geek” that drives us on to try every new thing coming down the pike and to abandon tools that worked just fine for newer, shinier, cooler tools that have that one (or 100) extra feature that just makes it superior. Yet, often they are not advantages that the average teacher would take advantage of - or would even care about. Sometimes I think we are doing the typical teacher a disservice with our insatiable appetite for new tools. And, I do get the need in this time to be able to quickly adapt to new tools as old ones become extinct. However, many teachers need simple tools tied to powerful learning opportunities. I think that they feel the same inundation of innovation and simply shut down. We need to sell them on the pedagogical, not the technical. On the true learning innovation, not the innovative tools. On the passion and excitement of being in control of learning, not on controlling learning. On the power of creative production of meaningful learning artifacts, not on glitzy but empty products.

Here is a iPhone product called FriendBook that caught my eye and drove me on to write this post. I used this example in one of my comments on Will Richardson’s latest blog posts titled, “What I Hate About Twitter“. It is an interesting conversation on the value of a tool like Twitter. It is interesting to the the diversity of responses to Will’s initial thoughts. But back to my point - Friendbook allows iPhone users to “beam” to each other their contact information/address book cards.
The headline of the promo states “Business cards are so last year.” There will always be new (communication) tools out there that have advantages and disadvantages. However, we all need to get past those and seek after what is important - not simply cast aside old tools in search of the latest greatest ones. It’s not the business card per se, but the message it conveys and the audience it reaches. I think it is the same with Twitter. It is not the tool per se, but the messages that get conveyed and the audiences who choose to listen and participate.

No tool will do it all FOR us. There is no “Holy Grail” of tools that will make good teaching easy. It takes sweat, tears, devotion, passion, dedication, intelligence, skill, professionalism, continued learning and growth, collaboration, risk-taking, networking, wide reading, deep reading,… and you could add many attributes to this list as well. It does not require a trendy approach to computer applications. There is nothing wrong with the traditional business card if it gets desired results. I fear we are communicating too much that “traditional” = bad and that “cutting edge” = good. This is so wrong, so distorted, so deceptive. My previous post on Good Vs. Effective relates to this a great deal here.

So, let’s get more passionate about learning and less passionate about needing to be “up” on every new tool that gets churned out. Let’s help reading teachers become more effective and passionate about teaching the language arts in powerful and relevant ways. Let’s help math and science teachers become more effective and passionate about teaching and reaching kids in effective ways - in realistic ways. Yes - these ways should include relevant technologies. Don’t abandon digital microscopes or data probes just because they don’t carry a Web 2.0 label. Don’t ignore programming just because it is not your thing. And, don’t get so hung up on tools like Twitter. Get hung up on powerful learning.

To quote Mariana Umaschi Bers who cites Seymour Papert:

“The power of computers for education lies in their potential to assist children in encountering powerful ideas and to engage them in experimenting with and testing these ideas”.

Is there a difference between a “good” teacher and an “effective” teacher? The LA Times recently covered an english teacher who made a significant impact on a tough group of students in one year. The story is worth reading, but here are a few quotations that struck a chord with me.

This 35 year teacher veteran coming from a prestigious prep school into a tough urban school is described in the following situation:

“Holmes had nothing unusual planned (for a lesson where a student asked to be excused for what she thought was a good reason). He considers every lesson, every minute of class time, to be important, and, at age 66, he often stays up past midnight preparing for the next day’s lessons.”

No one can say that being an effective teacher is easy. No one can say that effectiveness can be routine. No one can be effective in the classroom without a great deal of dedication, passion, conviction, knowledge, and skill.

The article goes on to describe various attributes of this teacher in his last year of classroom instruction and also reports on a number of anecdotes. The article goes on to end with this statement describing his last class teaching:

“There are no fireworks, no speeches, no round of applause. Just this: As he walks out the door and heads to the parking lot, Phil Holmes knows that today he delivered a good lesson. He didn’t waste a second. He made the students think.”

Now I know some would take up issue with the word “delivered” and take the philosophical viewpoint that instruction should not be “delivered” but rather experienced and socially constructed, but those same folks would often sacrifice “effectiveness” for poorly implemented cooperative learning, differentiated learning, on-line learning, project-based learning, technology-mediated learning, social learning, problem-based learning… The list goes on. All of these pedagogical structures have merit. But, the bottom line is measurable results that validate effectiveness as a teacher. Here is a teacher that perhaps takes an unpopular approach to teaching. The article does not even mention all of the technology-based tools that he uses to reach a digital generation. I suspect that he uses few to none. But, he gets results… excellent results. Students care about him and appreciate his skillfulness in the classroom.

How do you define effectiveness? Is technology really a required prerequisite? Or, should we let effectiveness and results speak for what should be required?

Edweek discusses a  June report released by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers that surveyed close to 2,000 K-12 public school educators from across the US. It finds that although there have been increases in technology in schools overall, there are still “significant disparities” when it comes to access to computer tools and networks. It also reportst that while many schools have computers, they are often out of date and unreliable. Here are some more statistics that are reported:

• 83% of educators report having 5 or fewer computers in the classroom; > than half report no more than 2.
• > half surveyed use computers for daily administrative tasks
• about half use them to daily communicate with other educators (communicate what?)
• about 40% use technology to monitor student progress (electronic gradebook?)
• about 37% use technology for research and information gathering
• about 32%  use it to teach lessons
• < a fifth of teachers surveyed use technology daily to post student and class information online or to communicate with parents electronically.
• a majority feel that professional development that they received was most effective for noninstructional tasks (hence, the second bullet point here)
• a majority were “highly optimistic about the impact of technology on their jobs and on their students” and that technology positively impacted student motivation

Yet…

• 89% said they view technology as essential to teaching and learning.

What’s missing here?

• No mention of teacher personal learning networks to share and collaborate
• No mention of teachers using technology to further their own professional development
• No mention of students using computers for learning in powerful ways
• No mention of students using networks for collaborative learning

What I find most curious is that the survey itself is so minimalistic in terms of what technology can bring to the teacher-learner. If focuses on access and administrative tool use, research, and teachnolgy as a teaching tool. It does not see the larger picture of the need for systemic change, the need for lifelong teacher learning and growth, and the full potential of networks and computer technologies. What is sad is that it would appear that we, in general, are failing at such a basic level. Although there are certainly pockets of innovation and change, they are not sweeping in scope. Here is a quotation from the report’s executive summary:

“The findings of this study reveal that although all educators and students in public schools
have some access to computers and the Internet, we have few assurances that they are able to
use technology effectively for teaching and learning.”

Well, that’s certainly less than encouragine, isn’t it.

So, we have schools lacking in current tools, lacking in networked access, lacking in professional development, lacking in vision, lacking in systemic change, and overwhelmed with the incredibly diverse burdents placed upon them. What do we need then? Leaders. We need leaders who are willing to put their necks and reputations on the line district by district, building by building. We need leaders who have a powerful vision of what learning can and should be and who can effectively communicate it to others. We need leaders who can inspire by example. We need leaders who reward risk-taking. We need leaders who understand the learning potential afforded by new tools and learning networks. We need leaders who understand what meaningful learning is and looks like. We need leaders (at all levels, including governmental) who value all forms of assessment - not just formal standardized assessments. We need leaders to support urban schools. We need leaders who understand the value all pedagogies. We need leaders who help their teachers be all that they can be.

We need LEADERSHIP. Without it, we will continue fulfilling this report’s outlook - “The findings of this study reveal that although all educators and students in public schools have some access to computers and the Internet, we have few assurances that they are able to use technology effectively for teaching and learning.”

I am reading the book, Blocks to Robots, by Marina Umaschi Bers, and I must say - the first few chapters do a fantastic job at putting technology into perspective as it applies to not only young learners, but adolescent learners as well. In particular, the second chapter presents to perspectives of how children should learn with and about technology: computer literacy and technological fluency.

Computer literacy “relies heavily on developing instrumental skills” whereas technological fluency “focuses on enabling individuals to express themselves creatively with technology.” Both are important and compliment each other. But what I appreciated in addition to this was the following statement that brings much needed balance to many on-going discussions today.

“While developing technological fluency is important for understanding the world of bits and atoms around us, it is just as important to provide children with the vision that technology can also be used to make a better world.”

So often this important dimension of ALL educational practice gets lost in our philosophical discussions and rants about which tool, pedagogy, style, approach, perspective, system, etc… is best. One of the primary goals of a democratic education is to contribute to humanity and make the world a better place for all. With this perspective, we need to think long and hard as to the purpose of our students’ PowerPoint on ________________ (you fill in the blank).

But amongst other great points, Bers  presents six assets or characteristics of thriving individuals taken from the work of applied developmental scientists whereby learners not only learn content, but also “to contribute in positive ways to themselves, their communities, and the world.” These six assets are:

1. competence - in intellectual endeavors and the acquisition of computer literacy and technological fluency
2. confidence - in their own learning potential through technology and their own ability to solve technical problems
3. caring - about others expressed by using technology to engage in collaboration and to help each other when needed
4. connection - with peers or adults to use technologies to form face-to-face or virtual communities and social support networks
5. character - to become aware of their own personal values, be respectful of other people’s values, and assume a responsible use of technology
6. contribution - by conceiving positive ways of using technology to make a better learning environment, community, and society.

This set of assets puts to shame any list of skills and proficiencies that have been generated over the years. It contextualizes isolated skills and gives them meaning. Aren’t we all looking for meaning? Do we really need to evaluate students’ ability to right-click or highlight rows, cells, or columns on a spreadsheet? Are we communicating to teachers and students alike that isolated skills make up learning? ISTE has spent countless hours developing, revising, rewriting, and “refreshing” a list of standards. On the NETS page, there it is: “What you and your students need to know to be tech savvy” and “Today’s Students Need Digital Age Skills”. How about a book that contextualizes skills and gives them meaning… gives them purpose.

Learning should be a gateway to better things… a better world. We forget this far too often. I forget this far too often as I get caught up in the “stuff”. Technology brings so many valuable tools to empower the learner. But meaningful learning contexts are still required.

So, what problems face your students and your community locally that they could tackle? Could they prepare a presentation to present to the school board, the town, the city… It makes me think of this video of a young girl presenting some compelling ideas at the UN titled, “The girl that made the UN silent“…. all done without PowerPoint, too