Technology infusion, a silicon obsession

Many technology boosters say that people who resist the onslaught of silicon gadgets are motivated by fear. I don’t accept their diagnosis. Criticizing or rejecting something isn’t the same as being afraid of it. I’m afraid of drunk drivers and riptides, but I’m indifferent to most motorists and fond of the ocean.

I doubt we all need to be in constant radio contact, I’m concerned about how much time we spend staring at liquid crystals instead of at real people, and I consider Facebook an exercise in narcissism that’s corrupted the word “friend.” But I don’t think that every teacher who uses a smartboard is plotting to destroy the intellects of American children.

On the other hand, there are those, in school and out, who worship a silicon calf. That idolatry does trouble me.

I take antibiotics, I drive a car, and I abandoned my Smith-Corona decades ago. I simply recognize technology’s limitations. Despite the relentless storm surge of hype, the latest version of every big, shiny new thing isn’t a wonder drug. If I write more coherently than I did when I was in college, it’s not because I changed keyboards.

Despite those things that technology does well, students and educators are typically so distracted by the “trending” gadgetry that learning often suffers. Consider the computer teacher, writing in an education journal, who lets her students email each other instead of giving them specific assignments. While she concedes she has “little control over the content” of their messages, she’s “happy” they’re “so comfortable communicating electronically,” as if adolescents who can text surreptitiously in their pockets need help getting comfortable. She seems unconcerned that she’s traded her curriculum, her purpose, for what we used to call passing notes.

My computer keyboard is superior to my old typewriter, but that doesn’t justify teaching kindergarteners to type, any more than the existence of electric cars justifies teaching them to drive. Crayons and pencils need to come first. Otherwise you wind up with children who can’t write.

I’m convinced that education technology on balance has done more harm than good, but I’m even more troubled by the bankrupt ideology that commonly marches along with the machines. Standards promoted by the influential International Society for Technology in Education are typical of the 1970s zombie reforms that still haunt our schools.

ISTE proudly “partners with forward-thinking corporations who share our passion and commitment to education and education technology.” Since those corporations include Adobe, Apple, Cisco, AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, and Google, it’s not surprising that ISTE and its partners envision education technology as a positive and profit-generating addition to as many classrooms as possible. In that spirit ISTE prescribes that teachers “incorporate digital tools and resources” in their classrooms and embrace a “vision of technology infusion,” whatever that means.

But you can’t blame the silicon world’s corporate masters for ISTE’s bad education ideas. Like most reform position papers, parts of ISTE’s manifesto sound upbeat and benign. Who could object to “creative and innovative thinking” or students who learn to “communicate information and ideas effectively”? It isn’t until you translate the educationese that you can fully appreciate ISTE’s classroom vision.

Linked, for instance, to ISTE’s call for “creative thinking” is its imperative that students should “construct knowledge.” Constructivism is the theory that students learn from personal experience and therefore should direct their own education, with teachers serving merely as “facilitators.” Its offspring includes “student-centered learning,” also championed by ISTE, where children “pursue their individual curiosities,” “set their own educational goals, manage their own learning, and assess their own progress.”

This folly has bred a host of unsound practices, from schools’ current infatuation with student projects to the touted science program where science books are eliminated, teachers “get out of the way,” and 12-year-olds just “follow the science.” Reformers’ Information Age disdain for directly teaching children information accounts for why so many American students know so little about so much.

ISTE’s standards incorporate “critical thinking,” another reform favorite. Unfortunately, having campaigned for years against teaching content, reformers have left most students with little or nothing to think critically about. You’ll also find “authentic” learning, code for a shrinking role for textbooks and the rise of allegedly realworld instruction and assessment like Vermont’s “authentic” portfolio program that replaced old-fashioned “two trains leave New York and Chicago” algebra problems with, “A community of gnomes in the magic forest is upset because their forest is being bulldozed for a shopping mall…”

When ISTE endorses teaching students to communicate “using a variety of media and formats,” it really means less writing and more PowerPoint presentations. Requiring children to “work collaboratively” in “teams” is code for cooperative learning, aka “teambased learning,” where students spend class working in groups without direct teacher supervision and interaction.

In short, ISTE exalts our silicon obsession, which has left children increasingly unable to distinguish between friends and “friends” or focus for more than milliseconds on anything that doesn’t glow or move — witness the current obsession with fidgetspinners. It then combines that mania with public education’s 40-year disdain for fundamental skills and knowledge, and wraps it all in misleading, rose-colored rhetoric. Until we recognize the lethal flaws in campaigns like ISTE’s to “advance educational excellence,” the fortyyear “cure” we’ve been forcefeeding students and schools will only sicken them further.

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This folly has bred a host of unsound practices, from schools’ current infatuation with student projects to the touted science program where science books are eliminated, teachers “get out of the way,” and 12-year-olds just “follow the science.”

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