Technology and the Culture of Learning

Ruminating on Recent Conversations with leading technology developers, M.I.T. Technology Review editor Robert Buderi came to a stark conclusion: "[D]espite being at the forefront of technology, nobody cites technology as a tool for thinking better." Considering the source, this observation should have been enough to vaporize educational technology initiatives from Maine to Hawaii. Whatever else technology was supposed to do in schools, wasn't it supposed to make students think better?

Well, maybe.

Anyone who has followed educational technology knows that many educators, inventors, journalists, and even sci-fi writers have been touting the latest classroom gadget as the gateway to greater student knowledge and/or deeper understanding since at least the era of silent films. But as Larry Cuban has shown in Teachers and Machines (1986), educational history in the last hundred years is also littered with the wreckage of "cool tools" designed to make learning and teaching easier and better.

Indeed, it is not hard to find prominent voices expressing caution or even outright dismay about the impact of technology's latest evolution — the digital computer, the Internet, and a raft of chip-based gadgets for communicating, gathering and processing information more readily, and (it is supposed) increasing our output of work. The subtitles of two recent books tell all: Jane M. Healy's Endangered Minds (1999) informs us that technology is "Why Our Children Don't Think," and Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind (2003) reveals "The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved." William Pflaum in The Technology Fix (2004) and Larry Cuban in Oversold and Underused (2001) sum up the least aggressive of the critiques by suggesting that the problem with technology in schools is not that there is too much of it, but rather that students spend too little time using it.

The message from all these worriers is clear. Whatever is wrong with educational technology, it is very wrong indeed. It comes down to deciding between extremes — demagoguery, or just negligence? Too much, or too little? And what, exactly, was the "promise" of technology in the first place?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that technology-heavy instruction can lead to important improvements in student performance and understanding. "Research" backs up these claims (although the Jeremiahs can cite anecdotes and studies that demonstrate the opposite). For their part, schools generally put faith in the promise of technology. Since the early 1980s, few schools have failed to sink vast quantities of capital into developing technological infrastructure and large amounts of staff time into technology training.

But the question remains: What has been the total impact of technology on the landscape of education and the culture of schools? The answer, it seems to me, flows from three premises. Each premise invites analysis not simply from a practical point of view but from a moral one as well. In all events, we can agree that technology has profoundly changed the way in which "school" happens.

Schools, especially independent schools, tend to see themselves as intentional communities, little utopias if you will, that thrive when they have a great amount of control over the influences on their members. The fewer the variables, the more limited the inputs, the more the school's intent can be realized. While this concept does not preclude a school from establishing rich and varied contacts with the world beyond, it does speak to the desirability of being able to manage their extent and nature.

For this reason, it has been a significant issue for schools in the past decade or so that the Internet, while a useful tool for research and learning, is also a playground for those who would exploit, distract, or even physically harm children and adolescents. These are facts of life, and so schools and the vendors who serve them — the educational defense industry — have developed many versions of Hadrian's Wall to keep the electronic barbarians at bay. Firewalls, air-tight acceptable use policies (AUPs), content filters, and a world of tracking and monitoring systems give schools the illusion that they have the capacity to exclude moral threats that travel by wire, or at least to track down and punish incursions.

But technology renders the supposedly secure world of the school simply one more dimension of the external environment, and the internal life of the institution is, regardless of AUPs or filters, open to forces without. We can prohibit instant messaging at school, but firestorms will still break out when malignant home IM-ing inflames the world of children, drawing parents, counselors, and teachers into the blaze. Blogging teenagers, or teachers, can find their anonymity blown and themselves held morally responsible not just for what they might have written but also for how others responded. And even the best filtering software, like the most iron-clad AUP, has loopholes. Risk management in such a world either demands the continual updating of Byzantine (or Machiavellian) preventive stratagems or simply invites schools to give up. The "prudent person" of legal mythology would unplug, turn off, and drop out, but schools cannot do this; instead, we become more vigilant, and more nervous.

In the same vein, 24/7 cell-phone contact between children and families penetrates a time-honored barrier between home and school. Despite the rules at most schools limiting such communication during school hours, students relay information on their school experience to parents in real time, and parents can respond — to the child or to the teacher — just as swiftly. Even as many independent schools are embracing the notion of parents as partners, instant communication based on immediate reaction, rather than dialogue, can stress that relationship. With some schools making assignments and even gradebooks available to parents online, the boundaries between the child working on independence and the parent or guardian learning to let go are at risk. In Family Matters (2004), Robert Evans describes a crisis of confidence in American families, and it is at least worth considering that technology might be furthering this crisis by giving insecure parents new and better means for playing out or fueling anxieties about their children's academic experience.

Last but not least, technology has made identity itself a variable rather than a constant. Chatrooms, blogs, and the instant message make it possible for anyone to hide behind an electronic curtain and to manufacture a persona, or personas, suited to the moment. Qualities once thought to be essential to one's being can now be elided, hidden, or changed; age, sex, race, class, ethnicity — all are in play when one chooses to become an e-person. For schools, this means that students — and it must be said, teachers — can experiment with different selves in environments beyond institutional control. Educators strive to develop students' capacities to consider issues from multiple perspectives, and the anonymity granted by technology can free students to find unusual and exciting vantage points. By the same token, however, the masking of identity can enable both the denial of responsibility and the abrogation of empathy.

Although this permeability of the membrane between school and the outside world seems to be all threat, it is not. The downsides discussed above are merely some unintended consequences of the expansion of opportunities for research, for students to connect with resources outside their school, for parents and teachers to engage in communication about children, or even for schools to seek — in a circumspect, protective manner — wider audiences for student work. That school cultures have been evolving in response to concerns does not minimize the degree to which they have also rightly embraced the phenomenal potential of technology.

In the early 1970s, the digital calculator represented a quantum leap over the slide rule in generating precise numerical answers. In the past few years, Google has become to fact-gathering what the calculator is to arithmetic. PowerPoint, even if it has become the whipping boy of the moment, is a pretty good tool for organizing and displaying certain kinds of information. And no business officer reading this would really want to give up the spreadsheet, no development officer the database. Productivity software even more than operating systems has made Bill Gates the world's richest man.

Automation in schools has had truly amazing effects. As a teacher, I am enabled to write more detailed reports to parents than I could (or at least did) with a ballpoint pen and carbonless paper forms. Ten years ago, we mapped our curriculum using notecards pinned to a bulletin board; software now allows us to generate a comprehensive, linkable, searchable document. My ability to create and then improve teaching materials is a hundred times greater than when I had to rely on cleaning up after my own poor typing before cranking out copies on a spirit duplicator (although I miss the smell). Sitting at my desk, I can easily search out the title of that book that I vaguely remember, track my professional development budget, or paste my school's mission statement into a document for teaching candidates. I am able to communicate with colleagues, parents, and students quickly and reliably using voicemail or e-mail. If I used a Smartboard, or if I worked in an environment where all my students had laptop computers or PDAs (Palms and their ilk), my ability to get things done would be even greater, I am sure.

Some among you are now wondering whether all these things are "worth it." I sometimes wonder myself. As teachers, we have a long and proud tradition of making students perform tasks that we have deemed worthy of sweat, many of which are now (some would say, Alas!) history. Long division, spelling exercises past the fourth grade, drawing graphs, calculating chemical equilibria on paper, and writing high school English essays in longhand come to mind. While we may still make students learn to do these things "by hand," as soon as they have mastered the skill, or the basic idea, we permit them to use technology to apply these skills in the service of learning how to solve more complex problems. Any secondary science teacher will tell you that improved instruments of measurement and calculation allow the teaching of concepts that would not have been covered in the Eisenhower era. And anyone teaching in the humanities knows that the Internet and online subscription databases, even as a supplement to the printed works in the library, allow students to see, and force them to consider or reject, points of view that they might never have encountered in decades past. As teachers, we believe we know what are the fundamentals of our work, and we ought to trust ourselves to know when we are doing this work better with technology and when we are simply doing it, or doing more of it, because technology makes it possible to do so.

It is worth noting, however, that the automation of educational tasks, even when it leads clearly to better experiences for students and teachers, is in itself the most obvious and ubiquitous form of change that educators and schools have experienced in recent years. Elizabeth Sky-McIlvain makes this point emphatically in her online essay, "The Flickering Teacher" (2004), and she suggests that having to make technology-based changes in practice can be a primary factor in driving teachers toward feelings of disorientation and inadequacy — and, ultimately, burnout. Often enough, such changes are thrust upon teachers with little or no evidence that improvement will follow, and, as any number of commentators have pointed out, schools have a tendency to provide too little time or too little support and, in the end, too little follow-through to properly implement such changes. The road to Hell, it seems, just may be paved with interesting technology initiatives. If my school decreed that each week I should turn in a spreadsheet of my grades, complete with distribution graphs, I would first wonder why and then I probably would say, like Melville's Bartleby (who was, after all, a human office machine, a copyist), that I would prefer not to. Most of us can identify a Bartleby or two in our schools, and it makes sense to consider the role technological change may have played in creating them. But if I could be shown some clear value in making this change, and if my experience were soon to confirm this, I could perhaps be convinced to comply.

In the end, one is forced to wonder whether the net effect of technology has been to relieve humankind of any burdens at all. But "labor saving devices" have always been about reducing one kind of labor to permit the performance of another that is deemed more valuable. As we gain more complex understandings of how children learn and of the subtleties of good teaching, it should not surprise us that that we respond by setting higher standards of productivity and quality in our students' work and in our own.
 

Thus far, I have considered mainly the uses of technology in school or in relation to schoolwork, but it is also entertaining and even a bit intoxicating to imagine how these things might change even more. Laptops will evolve to tablets, cell phones will turn to wrist or badge communicators (Dick Tracy or Star Trek; take your pick), textbooks will become e-books, and e-mail and Internet communication will take place in a totally wireless world. We can anticipate next year's fads by checking out Wired magazine's "Japanese Schoolgirl Watch" — a monthly feature on how technology is transforming teenage culture — and we can follow the serious science press as it considers the possibilities of nanotechnology, a field so new that its educational potential lies largely unconsidered. We need to consider that technologies far outside the realm of education have been known to intrude on the culture of learning, sometimes to a horrifying degree. At the same time that Walt Disney was producing "Our Friend the Atom," for instance, school buildings were being designed to serve as fallout shelters and classroom documentaries whirring on 16-millimeter projectors were showing us how to duck and cover.

More sobering is the thought that technology's next effects on the culture of schools may come as a result of the technological modification of children themselves. The first babies from the era of advertisements in Ivy League college papers calling for brainy, physically perfect egg donors should be entering kindergarten about now, and it is not unlikely that their affluent and ambitious families will consider independent schools. The next step may be genetically engineered superkids, whatever the legal and moral objections to the idea. If such children do appear, they will require, or at least their parents will think they require, some very special educational experiences. How will schools cope with a cohort of genetically modified "gifted" children? Who will teach them? Nancy Kress explores these questions in her dystopic short stories, but it is more than possible that our schools may have to respond in real life.

New technologies have seldom settled upon society in predictable ways, and the computer chip is no exception. As recently as 1978, the promise of technology involved programming classes and whiz kids performing wondrous mathematical feats. Few of us then would have predicted the prevalence of classroom word-processing or foreseen that translation sites in Denmark would facilitate cheating on Spanish homework. Fewer of us would have imagined the degree to which our worlds have been transformed by e-mail, mobile telephones, or the Internet, but we also have to consider the idea that our students can photograph tests with cell phones or hack into our school's administrative software. Our ability to create teaching materials and to give our students access to information is greater than it has ever been, and technology, though it has also led to a proliferation of standardized testing of uncertain value, can also be used to help us measure student learning.

Technology has changed, and will continue to change, the culture of our schools. By far the greatest lesson of the Digital Age so far has been its very unpredictability. Our attempts to control the direction of technological change, with the best will in the world, almost never succeed on our own terms. Equally unavailing are calls simply to declare the whole thing a bust; technology is with us even if we want it to go away. Whether, as M.I.T. author Robert Buderi suggested, technology fails at being "a tool for thinking better" may not actually matter. If it has not made us think better, it has surely done something else. That we do not yet know with clarity what it is does not diminish the effect.