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 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

“Once the technology is sunk deep enough into the culture, the social effects that get built on it simultaneously require the technology and aren’t about the technology.”

~Clay Shirkey

So true.

Yet we must continually examine those “social effects” rather than get too giddy about the required technologies. Too many discussions are focused on these required technologies (and a google alternatives) rather than looking hard at the social effects that result from new technological “enablers”. Taking the view of Neil Postman and others, technology is not always enabling “good” things. Seamless, transparent technology is certainly the goal in the classroom so that it is the learning that is the focus, not the technology. Otherwise, learning outcomes become secondary to the exciting new technologies and users become blinded by the “technology delusion”. This reminded my of an article worth reading and thinking about, written by Todd Oppenheimer in 1997, titled, The Computer Delusion. Things have evolved since he wrote it, but it is still worth reading. I love this last quotation:

“The purpose of the schools [is] to, as one teacher argues, ‘Teach carpentry, not hammer,’” he testified. “We need to teach the whys and ways of the world. Tools come and tools go. Teaching our children tools limits their knowledge to these tools and hence limits their futures.”

A good reminder…

“…creativity is not universally valued. Many cultures and communities prefer training students to accept existing structures rather than training them to form new ones; they prefer memorization and copying to research and creative writing. These conflicts are likely to remain controversial.” (B. Schneiderman: Leonardo’s Laptop)

So which students are really most “at risk”? We must be educating ALL students to ask questions, who are curious, who challenge “authority” (ie. Joe Blo’s webpage, Wikipedia, conventional wisdom, bias, …), and who create new ideas and express knowledge and evidenced learning in new ways… ways that are personal, relevant, meaningful, powerful… creative.

Or, we can continue to educate students for a world that no longer exists.

Are these ideas controversial in your world?

I am beginning to read Blocks to Robots: Learning With Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom by Mariana Umaschi Bers. I have only read the foreward which is written by David Elkind, a favorite author of mine. I love how he writes. And this passage struck me as so clear and well-written that I would like to share it here. In describing constructionism, a theoretical framework built on the shoulders of Jean Piaget, Seymour Papert, and others…

“When children build their own mechanical/electronic objects, they have created experience from which they learn new concepts of space, time, and causality. Indeed, in this self-created virutal world, space has become portable, time has become retrievable, and causality has become programmable.”

I love how that it worded. Children of all ages so need learning opportunities where causality is programmable - where they learn through direct interactions with their environment, but where they hold the power over this environment and are able to manipulate it in so many ways. The fact that these interactions are both portable and retrievable makes it even more attractive. Opportunities for learning through construction are so vast. My graduate students felt overwhelmed by the endless learning opportunities and potential afforded by new technologies.

But tell me this - is the bigger challenge getting teachers to understand and value constructivist/constructionist principles, or is it getting them to use new technologies? It would seem to me that the former must happen before the latter, or at least, they must happen simultaneously. It is extremely hard to explain the learning power that can be leveraged with new technologies when the theoretical frameworks upon which these learning experience are built are so foreign, so uncomfortable to begin with.

I’m really looking forward to the rest of this book.