"Gizmo High"

T. C. Williams High School teacher Patrick Walsh writes a terrific, impassioned argument against educational "technolust". Some of the fine passages:

"They would rather have a cyborg teaching than me," one young English teacher complained to me. "It's technology for the sake of technology -- not what works or helps kids learn, but what makes administrators look good, what the public will think is cutting edge."

"Teachers shouldn't have to change how they teach to fit some technological device," said Peter Cevenini, who heads up the K-12 education division of Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group. "Teaching is a craft, and many great teachers instruct in totally different ways. Too many school systems are becoming device-driven -- they're buying computer devices because they're there."

Kids certainly aren't fooled by all the gizmos. "The most effective teacher I have is Mr. Nickley," said senior Jamal Stone. "He isn't into all this computer stuff. All he uses is the board -- the whole board. He's lively, energetic, witty and really knows his math. He forces you to pay attention; you can't drift off even if you want to."

Says one math teacher: "Math grows out of the end of a pencil. You don't want the quick answer; you want students to be able to develop the answer, to discover the why of it. The administration seems to think that computers will make math easy, but it has to be a painful, step-by-step process."

A social studies teacher agrees. More than ever, he says, "our students want to push a button or click a mouse for a quick A, B or C answer. Fewer and fewer of them want to think anymore because good thinking takes time."

Comments

[david foster]

See these thoughts from Michael Schrage, a guy who knows quite a bit about technology, its applications, and its misuses:
http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_photoncourier_archive.html#114315083660034414

[david foster]

The URL in the comment above didn't take, but you can find the excerpt at my blog by searching for "cognitively spoilt children"

[Caldwell]

...."technolust' is bad, but technology is good.

Who decides & implements the 'right way' to educate ?
{self-serving politicians & bureaucrats, of course}.

Choices of 'how' and 'what' to teach our are certainly not made by parents or students.

Teacher-bureaucrats like well established job routines -- and they absolutely love the antique 'teacher-mediated' method of 'schooling'.
They fear real change & improvement, with good reason (job security).

Effective education without the Teacher/Classroom model is widely used in industry and the military; computer based education/training does work.

The fundamental problem is a ponderous & inefficient American education bureaucracy that cannot reform itself... no matter what other technical or social options are available. They 'play' at technology (technolust) but always fail.

[Brent]

Think about how advances in technical tools have made more knowledge available to researchers.

Regression models that might have taken months to calculate with paper and a slide rule now take seconds: copy the data to excel, hit a button, and your done.

At the college level, teaching students to use these tools effectively to complete research projects is very valuable.

However, knowing how to use Excel tools and undertanding the theory behind them are completely different. At the highschool level, they should be learning the algebra and calculus that will give them a basis for understanding higher level math taught at college.

I am pretty sure that the basics of algebra and derivatives are better taught with a pencil than with Excel.

[Ira Socol]

Mr. Welsh's article is entirely based on a false assumption - he does not understand that chalkboards, books, pencils, papers, calculators, etc... are technologies. So are classrooms, roofs, lighting, desks, and chairs. Any decent teacher makes use of the technologies available to advance learning, and any teacher that does not change their teaching in response to new technologies is a fool.

Would you teach science differently if you had no lab equipment? Would you teach Shakespeare differently if you had no books for students to read? Would you teach maths differently with no chalkboard?

- a more detailed response -
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2008/02/too-much-technology.html