A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
Technology and Learning
Blog Entries
Last November, President Obama launched the Educate to Innovate campaign with the goal of moving our students to the top of the world in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) education. And in the coming days, the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology will release a report with recommendations on just how the federal government can accomplish that goal.
According to a preview by Erik Robelen on EdWeek yesterday, the report concludes that the federal government has lacked a coherent approach to STEM education for the last quarter century. The Council recommends the government take action to improve the standards, teachers and technology around STEM education. It recommends more STEM-based schools. And it calls for stronger leadership at the federal level, as well as increased opportunities to inspire a passion for STEM subjects in students.
I am anxious to see the report. After all, STEM has been a priority of LFA for years. Back in ...
Soon after I posted this morning's blog entry on technology, I got some emails that gave me second thoughts about the way I had advanced my argument. I had painted the ed tech community with a very broad brush, one person wrote. Few supporters of technology in schools are wild-eyed enthusiasts for every new gizmo that comes down the pike. Few believe that iPads or the internet can work miracles without serious attention to how students use these tools. And almost all value persistence, patience, deep thought and concentration.
I meant to argue that education technology is important because it can unite the interests and concerns of the ed tech supporters and skeptics. New media can be powerful aids to old-fashioned skills like reflection, research and reason. And ed tech supporters have the best interests of children at heart. People who use the internet to push all manner of garbage, on the other hand, do not. All the more reason for young people to learn how best to use technology.
So my previous posting may well have reinforced the false dichotomy I was trying to attack. My apologies. ...
If ed tech enthusiasts want to advance their cause, then they should embrace the curmudgeons. In the end, technology skeptics offer some of the best reasons for bringing schools into the digital age.
And the curmudgeons have been out in full force recently. Kathleen Parker mounted a passionate defense of good old fashioned books in her column last week. Malcolm Jones praised the slow reading movement in a recent issue of Newsweek. Brent Staples of The New York Times just described the internet as a sort of plagiarism superhighway, a tool that encourages young people to cut and paste other people's thoughts rather than to think their own. And David Brooks recently wrote that the internet culture is much shallower than what he calls literary culture, which prizes long study and intellectual heft.
I feel a certain kinship with the curmudgeons. Few other people are making the case for virtues like patience, focus, deep thought, and long, good books that demand time, attention and persistence.
I also pity the curmudgeons. They often get tarred as reactionaries, Luddites, bitter-enders and--worst of all--deadweights on school reform.
But the curmudgeons have a point. Recent research suggests that mere access to plain old books can boost students' academic performance, while access to high-speed internet can drag it down. And it turns out that video games, like TV, can shorten our attention spans.
This shouldn't really surprise us. If we simply hand every student an iPad, we just open the doors to distraction. Why spend the time reading a long and difficult text, or doing the hard work of grasping what very smart people wrote many years ago, when you have Hulu ...
We all know that new media are changing our lives. If there was ever a reason to hone our 18th-century skills, this is it.
Steven Pinker's recent piece in The New York Times drives this point home. "Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder," he writes:
But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.
And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at ...
Multi-tasking might not be all it's cracked up to be. So perhaps schools should do all they can to nurture students' mono-tasking skills.
ASCD's In-Service blog sums up a few of Richard Restak's concerns about multi-tasking. Two stand out for me:
- "The more you multitask, the worse you do those tasks and the more distractible you become."
- "Those who do too much multitasking often have trouble distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information."
Restak is one of a handful of authors and researchers who have been sounding alarm bells about kids' apparent need to do ten things at once. A few years ago, Walter Kim argued that people who do too many things at once lose their ability to retain information.
People tend to knock schools for for resisting new technologies and forcing children to conform to old models of schooling. But maybe schools should hold fast to a few decidedly anti-modern principles. Sustained attention and reflection ...
A new Kaiser Family Foundation study (PDF) suggests that young people are developing an unhealthy obsession with their TVs, laptops, mp3 players and cell phones. Some might see these findings as a blow to the claims of ed tech boosters. I'm not so sure.
The study found that children ages 8-18 spend every waking moment outside of school in the thrall of media. They're watching TV, playing video games, hooked to ipods, trolling Facebook, gazing at smart phones, or doing any number of other things that are a complete mystery to people over 40. And they're doing these things a staggering 7 1/2 hours every day, on average. That's up from just 6 1/2 hours five short years ago.
Even tech zealots should find cause for concern here. The more time kids spent on media, the more likely they were to get bad grades, feel bored, get into trouble, or feel unhappy. The KFF study didn't ponder the impact of all these media trends on public health. Just last week, an Australian study found that people who watch at least four hours of television a day were much more likely than moderate tv watchers to die of heart disease. (Shocking.) American students watch an average of four and a half hours a day. Not much time left over to go outside and ...
Emily and Bryan Hassel have an idea: Don't get too hung up on plans to make teachers better. Instead, figure out how to help the best teachers reach far more students. After all, they argue, the top 20 percent of teachers are three times as effective as the bottom 20 percent.
Try as they might, though, they cannot escape the need to support teachers through good old fashioned staff development, curriculum and assessment. It's time the education economists paid much closer attention to these critical areas, which are just so déclassé these days.
Of course, the Hassels' argument raises all sorts of questions. How do you identify the top 20 percent of teachers? Do we trust test scores? Will teachers stay in the top 20 percent from year to year? Are the "top" teachers good in every kind of school? Are they effective with every kind of student?
But the Hassels face an even bigger challenge. Their plan will require nothing short of a massive investment in all those things their fellow educonomists find oh-so tedious: Teacher training. New curricula. Much, much better tests. If we pursue the Hassels' brave new reforms the way we pursue most reforms--on the cheap--then we're going to be in a whole heap of trouble.
The Hassels, like so many of their ideological brethren, seem to believe that great teachers are born, not made. Hence their relatively dim view of staff development. (I've always found it curious that so many reformers who insist that every child ...
“Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education.” That’s the title of the latest national article to oversimplify school reform. Author Daniel Roth of Wired magazine offers the seeds of a good idea, but like so many other national commentators he doesn't add much to the conversation.
Roth’s general argument does appeal to me. I was a high school nerd long before Bill Gates and Sergei Brin made nerds cool. Perhaps nerds can help unravel the anti-intellectual marketing culture that makes academic achievement seem positively un-cool.
Roth also wins points for his healthy skepticism about the power of “disruptive” technological innovation. He describes a meeting of education entrepreneurs:
The businesspeople in the room represented a world in which innovation requires disruption. But [former teacher Alex] Grodd knew their ideas would test poorly with real disrupters: kids in a classroom. "The driving force in the life of a child, starting much earlier than ...
The history of education reform is strewn with the wreckage of dazzling new education technologies no one ever taught teachers to use. Hayes Mizell of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) sees history repeating itself in the Race to the Top.
Mizell suggests in a recent blog posting that RTTT's investment in powerful new data systems will founder on lack of teacher professional development:
The Department seems to have made two faulty assumptions: (a) improved data systems, in and of themselves, will result in improved instruction, and (b) educators currently have the knowledge and skills they need to use data to improve instruction. Unfortunately, the proposed requirements do not mention professional development. States applying for Race To The Top funds do not have to ...
Writing commentaries on the best use of stimulus funds has become a thriving cottage industry. Don’t fund the status quo! the general argument runs. Fund innovation instead!
I’m beginning to wonder if we should start using the word “improvement” instead of innovation. This strategy might help us counter the tendency of some innovation zealots to value novelty over quality.
Former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner offered an egregious example of that tendency late last year, when he advocated the abolition of all but the largest school districts. To him, innovation seems to mean doing something drastic and doing it now. ...
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