Like many school districts, our district is experiencing budget
difficulties right now. These problems
are leading to all kinds of suggestions for how to live within our means,
including cuts in staffing, services, and more. One of the drumbeats from some in the community is to cut back on technology – we spend too much on technology, they
say.
While I understand that budget problems call for wise
examination of district expenditures, I have to wonder if the call from the public to cut back
on technology is truly the result of wise examination.
Money is tight, so here are a few ideas: Let’s stop buying pencils. Get rid of paper. Eliminate textbooks.
What?! Schools
without pencils, or paper, or textbooks?! Can’t do that – they’re important tools. But here’s the thing: computers – especially computers with internet
access – are the most important tool of the 21st century. Of course, placing a computer in front of every
student doesn’t automatically lead to increased student achievement – but neither
do pencils, paper, or textbooks. It
depends on what we have students do with
those tools. And you tell me – what’s a
more powerful tool, a pencil, a piece of paper, a textbook… or a computer,
which can do all that those tools can do, and more? You really want to save money and increase
achievement in schools? Here’s an
idea: stop buying textbooks, and start
buying computers.
Do we really want our students on the losing end of the digital divide? Do we
really want to be limiting student computer access in the US, while the One Laptop Per Child
program is putting computers into the hands of kids in Afghanistan, Haiti,
Cambodia, Uruguay, Mongolia, and more?
In Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, he describes ten “flatteners”
– those developments that have led to our globalized world. Those are:
1. 11/9/89 – The New Age of Creativity: When the
Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up (the fall of the Berlin Wall and
communism, and the development of the PC)
2. 8/9/95 – The New Age of Connectivity: When
the Web Went Around and Netscape Went Public
3. Work Flow Software
4. Uploading – Harnessing the Power of
Communities (via open-source software, blogging, wikipedia and more)
5. Outsourcing – Y2K
6. Offshoring – Running with Gazelles, Eating
with Lions
7. Supply-Chaining – Eating Sushi in Arkansas
8. Insourcing - What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts are Really Doing
9. In-forming – Google, Yahoo!, MSN Web Search
10. The Steroids – Digital, Mobile, Personal, and
Virtual Tools
Nope, no computer influence in those flatteners, eh?
Lest there’s any doubt, Mr. Friedman says this:
“The convergence of the ten
flatteners had created a whole new platform. It is a global, Web-enabled
platform for multiple forms of collaboration… Going forward, this platform
is
going to be at the center of everything. Wealth and power will increasingly
accrue to those countries, companies, individuals, universities, and groups who
get three basic things right: the
infrastructure to connect with this flat-world platform, the education to
get more of their people innovating on, working off of, and tapping into this
platform, and, finally, the governance to get the best out of this platform
and cushion its worst side effects.”
(Friedman, The World
is Flat, p. 205)
One of the things I find most strange about the call for
less technology in our local schools is that this call comes often on the local
newspaper’s website – people post to the paper’s blog about the schools having
too much technology. Uhh, do any of
these computer-using blog posters even recognize the irony in that?
On my campus – as, I suspect, on many campuses – the thing
that gets people most upset is when the air conditioning is broken. The second biggest problem? When the servers go down.
Every board member has a networked computer right in front
of them at the dais. Every district staffer has a networked computer on their
desk. Teachers and administrators all have computers, and
email accounts, and internet access, and networked folders. Their use has become vital in the "business" of running our schools - why would we think their use is not vital in the classrooms? What kind of uproar
– and rightfully so, I’d like to be clear - would there be if every one of
those computers was taken away? Or even if we just took away 3 of every 4, so there were 4 staff members sharing every computer? And yet,
four computers in a classroom is “enough”? One-to-one laptop computing is “excessive”?
I know that some believe that Marc Prensky’s concepts of Digital
Natives, Digital Immigrants are used too much, and letting people call
themselves digital immigrants becomes an excuse for teachers to allow
themselves to be technologically illiterate – but I have to think that it's digital
immigrants suggesting that it’s wise to minimize computer access in
schools.
The power of computers in the classroom is only beginning to
be explored in most districts – most are just beginning to dip their toes into
the water. Even at my school, with its
strong technology focus, I think that most of our classrooms range from being
ankle deep to waist-high in meaningful embedding of computers to transform
teaching and learning, when we ought to be swimming in it.
That’s part of what makes it so easy to call for their
reduction – because people don’t yet see their immense value in the
classroom. But that’s what happens
whenever a tool is introduced – it takes a while for the innovators to
master the tool’s use and incorporate it meaningfully, and it takes even longer
for those who come behind the innovators to accept, embrace, and learn its
value.
Thomas Friedman has something to say, too, about
technology in schools:
“Give me a kid with a passion to
learn and a curiosity to discover and I will take him or her over a less
passionate kid with a high IQ every day of the week…Some kids are just born
that way, but for the many who are not, the best way to make kids love learning
is either to instill in them a sense of curiosity, by great teaching, or stimulate
their own innate curiosity by making available to them all the technologies of
the flat-world platform so they can educate themselves in an enormously
rich way…So schools had better make sure they are embedding these tools and
concepts of collaboration into the education process.”
(Friedman, The World
is Flat, pp. 304 and 315)
One of the worst things we could do is to pull
back from this powerful tool, rather than help our teachers to embed its use.
Computers are ubiquitous in every industry, in most homes, in most lives, in
just about everything. Everything, that
is, except in education. According to
the U.S. Department of Commerce, education is the least technology-intensive
enterprise among 55 U.S. industry sectors (Digital
Economy 2003). That’s something to
correct, not something to be proud of. If you think technology is expensive, try technology ignorance. THAT will really cost ya.
I’ve worked myself all into a tizzy. Time to go lie down…
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