I remember how disgusted I was that evening. I was watching the evening news and I heard an interview with a middle school principal here in BC. He was complaing about the lack of funds for finishing the new middle school library and he said something to the effect: "When we were all done putting in the computers, we didn't have enough money left for books."
Why was I disgusted? Priorities seem out of whack in education today, particularly when it comes to the subject of technology.
We are in such a hurry to be 'up to date' we don't have enough information or in-staff training to support the technology that we buy. So there are no books and the computers collect dust.
When I was in high school, personal computers were just starting to make headway into the everyday lives of consumers. Our school had just aquired what was then considered pretty good technology - TRS-80's from Radio Shack. My friends and I called them "Trash 80's". Now my high school is no slowch when it comes to having staff that is well-trained and 'with-it'. It did not rise to become one of the best Christan Schools in the US by being lazy and 'out of it'.
However, at this time, even the staff was in a quandry with how to even use these computers within the school. The computers were kept in a room (hooked up, ready to go) within the large library.
My friends and I, having recently discovered the loophole in the PE teachers curriculum in High School, spent most of our PE periods there learning how to program the computers using the BASIC language. We would purchase books that would be full of computer games, only you would have to literally type in the BASIC program into the computer. Then you could play the game (provided that you didn't have even ONE typo or skip one of the hundreds of lines).
After about a year of this, one of the math teachers, a dear lady who I absolutely dispised at the time, but now I see that she was an incredible teacher (her name escapes me at the moment) - she had to teach us basic computer skills. We kept our tongues out of respect (in other words - FEAR) of her stumbling. Finally, she turned parts of the class over to my friends - I was more of a follower in this endevour, so couldn't say much. Turns out, one of my friends, Mark Milbourne, actually was paid by the school to write the first program to catalogue the school library. He went on to DuPont, I think...
There are certain cautions about technology that have been brilliantly pointed out by Neil Postman and others. First, there can be no true community through computers. Schools are about being communities of learning and technology is about individuals interacting with the technology. We need to be very careful as we look at technology in our schools and remind ourselves that technology cannot instruct students how to work and live with others. Secondly, computers are a tool and not an end in themselves. We can teach more about computer skills actually by using them as tools and ignoring the 'computer skill' curriculae. For example, in order to teach students to write, I want to use a classroom blog as well as on-line student written book reviews. The computer is just a tool. All the skills for computers are taught incidentally as one goes about the job. The advantage of this is I don't need to worry about being 'up to date' (let's face it, we never will be - unless we have money to burn..). I can just work with the technology given and use what I can.
An incredible article came out in a recent edition of , Educational Leadership, which also gives some caveats that we, as parents and educators need to think carefully about. I'll close this post with just a few quotes from this article:
"...the more access student had to computers in school and at home, the lower their overall test score were....computers more likely distract them from their studies."
" For example, although we know that computer programs can help small children learn to read, we also know that face-to-face interaction is one of the most important ingredients in reading readiness. As a result of increased time spent with computers, video games, and TV the current generation of elementary students will experience an extimated 30 percent fewer face-to-face encounters then the previous generation."
Makes you think, doesn't it??
Bibliography:
Groothuis, Douglas. The Soul in Cyber-Space. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1997
Healy, Jane M. Failure to Connect. New York: Simon& Schuster, 1998
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. (and other works)
Monke, Lowell W. "The Overdominance of Computers" Educational Leadership Dec'05/Jan '06, Vol 63, No. 4. pp 21-23.
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