or, don't mind me, I'm having a pessimistic day
Schools, god love 'em, are abysmally bad at embracing new technologies. But they're not, you know, equally bad at embracing all technologies. Some technologies get taken up right away.
The mechanical pencil: Immediate integration. (And Algebra teachers everywhere gave a holler of joy.) The word processor: once it got cheap enough, it got glommed onto by administrators. The increasing popularity of its successor, the desktop computer, was inversely proportional to its cost. Suddenly, there emerged a need for teachers to provide students with basic computing skills (and Mr. Towers, my 6th grade Computer teacher, gave a holler of joy). This included basic proficiency with word processing programs, and some computer teachers squeaked in some instruction in Logo or similar programming languages. Dry erase boards. Printers and copiers.
These are, of course, technologies that do not challenge the established norms and practices of the educational system--they are, as Joshua Danish recently put it, technologies that help us to do more efficiently what we were already doing.
Which explains, in large part, how new technologies are so often twisted all out of context, the meaning wrung out of them, when they're brought into schools. In their natural habitats, discussion forums can be some of the most rollicking, crazy, intellectually challenging, capricious and unpredictable spaces for intelligent discourse, places where people get so excited about discussion topics that they're willing to fight dirty if that's what it takes to win an argument. In schools, discussion forums are often used as IRE spaces, where students respond to simple questions and, to fulfill class participation requirements, post three comments that amount to "I agree." YouTube operates on the premise that open conversation, even at its most inane or vicious, is an essential component of an engaged, broad community; SchoolTube, its educational doppelganger, offers a limited number of canned "comments" in a dropdown menu, with no apparent option for adding a personal note of any sort. (There is value to this approach. In the wild, when you encounter a flame war in a discussion forum, you can close a tab and go elsewhere. If we require student use of an online network, then we're also responsible for protecting learners from forced exposure to trolls.)
I struggle over how to feel about new educational technologies that demonstrate gains in learning. Teachable agents, intelligent tutors--some of these technologies have proven to be quite effective in helping kids master difficult content. But to do this, these tools work within the established constructs of the institution. Here's how Kenneth Koedinger and Albert Corbett describe the premise behind "cognitive tutors," computer programs designed to aid instruction:
Cognitive Tutors support learning by doing, an essential aspect of human tutoring.... Cognitive Tutors accomplish two of the principal tasks characteristic of human tutoring: (1) monitoring the student's performance and providing context-specific instruction just when the individual student needs it, and (2) monitoring the student's learning and selecting problem-solving activities involving knowledge goals just within the individual student's reach.
Which is a fine and laudable set of goals, except for the fact that these Cognitive Tutors monitor performance and learning on school-based, decontextualized activities, offering tutoring on math problems like, for example, how to solve the equation 3(2x+5)=9:
This sort of technology works beautifully in support of overloaded teachers who can't provide individual instruction for students. In this respect, it's a useful technology, and one that I'm sure leads to gains on, for example, standardized tests. Maybe this sort of technology even works for the kid who's a fantastic scorekeeper at the bowling alley but flounders in math class. But it seems to me that what this technology teaches, more than anything else, is how to "do school"--how to perform well on bizarre, decontextualized math problems--without actually making explicit why doing well on bizarre, decontextualized math problems is valued.
Cognitive Tutors, in other words, don't really extend much of a challenge to the status quo; they just help schools do what they were already doing, just a little bit more effectively. In their recent book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America, Allan Collins and Richard Halverson write about schools' three-pronged approach to tamping down innovative technologies: condemn the technology, co-opt the technology, and marginalize the technology. According to Collins and Halverson, any innovative technology that gets taken up in schools must first have the innovation squeezed out of it. I wonder if intelligent tutors aren't just another example in support of their skepticism.
Sigh. Don't mind me. I'm just having a pessimistic day. Here's a diagram. Click on it to see a larger version. You can also see a .pdf of the diagram here.
5 comments:
Well, yes, you may be having a pessimistic day, but who can blame you? All this stuff that goes into decisions about what works well in the classroom assumes that we have some clue about what we should be doing. We are not teaching the things we say we want students to learn, and we are sure not measuring the things we say we want students to learn. We refuse to acknowledge that the system is broken.
My take is that the system may be so broken that it can't be fixed without obliterating the whole thing and starting over. Allan Collins certainly suggested that the educational system as we know it would disappear in the face of computer technology and the information revolution when he spoke at IU last fall (but, hey, we've hear that one before). Education is a behemoth of an institution with roots and runners that reach into all sorts of interesting places. I'm about to go home and help my 16-year-old son register for SATs. This single act resounds throughout our whole educational system.
So when a new technology comes along, and we can't figure out how it helps us reach educational goals (not the ones we want, just the ones we measure), we use all the strategies from your diagram to make sure it doesn't really change anything. God forbid the kids should learn to think. They'd all drop out by age 12.
Come on now Jenna. You really think schools that can't even handle Anne Frank in the classroom are goign to come within a parsec of open forums?
And as for cognitive tutors they automate the very thing kids hate most about school.
I like your wording: "how to perform well on bizarre, decontextualized math problems--without actually making explicit why doing well on bizarre, decontextualized math problems is valued." So true! So true!
BTW--"Anonymous" above is Lisa, from class
Oh, Ironicus! You're always good for a smarky comment. I hadn't thought about that aspect of cognitive tutors, but it makes absolute perfect sense.
Maggie, we are perhaps kindred spirits. I wonder if the computer hasn't already blown up the school--but we were too busy testing the bejesus out of each other to notice.
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