www.slate.com: Lucas Matney, a junior at Northwestern University and columnist for the Daily Northwestern, is concerned that his school is not adequately preparing him for the challenges of today. In his experience, he says, “very few” of his professors “have used technology in the classroom in a way that offers a radically changed educational experience.” Instructors like me and my friends, he argues, “need to ponder what a 21st century education really means if they desire the University to maintain relevance as an institution.” Trust me, Lucas, most every professor younger than 75 (and a few older!) has pondered this question a-plenty. In the words of the great rhetorician Ali G: “Techmology … is it good, or is it wack?”
7 comments:
I agree with this article's point that often adding technology to the classroom isn't as useful as it initially appears to be. I remember back in high school, our school got a grant so we got "smart-boards" in every classroom (they were essentially giant touch screens that connected to the computer- a teacher could write on them and their work would be saved to the computer, or you could interact directly with a website or power point through touching the board). In theory it was pretty cool, but in practice, 95% of the teachers in my school just used it like a normal white-board that happened to require a projector to operate. They looked flashy, and it was something the superintendent of our school district could brag about, but we learned no better once they were installed than before (and if you added up all the time we spent fighting with them to get them to work, we probably lost a solid 3 days of class in total over the course of the year). In the end, the money would have been much better spent if it had been put into upgrading our facilities, or paying our teachers a little bit better. I'd agree that unless the class is actually about technology, we should be wary of throwing new technologies into it just for the sake of it. Sometimes just reading a real book and taking actual notes on an actual piece of paper is just the best way to do it.
Yeah, I kind of have to agree with Sarah. There isn't really any point of adding more technology into the mix just for the sake of having it. I feel like there really needs to be a concrete and thought out plan for how and why a new tool should get implemented. Too often in education, higher ups will foist new equipment and technology upon end users without fully understanding the use case. This is case in point in the LAUSD iPad recall fiasco. LAUSD was planning on going 1 to 1 with iPads for students in a 1 billion dollar plan to modernize the department. Most recently, the rollout has been put on hold after students just used the devices to play games.
I think this ongoing story should be a caution to administrators who think more technology is the way to success in the classroom.
I wholeheartedly agree with the author, but with the slight addendum that more technology is not necessarily a bad thing. This is not what Schuman tries to argue, but I think it's important to note that when used properly, technology can be an immensely useful tool for almost any purpose imaginable. That said, it seems rather bewildering to me that there are students who are asking for a "radically changed educational experience" in order to better prepare themselves. It is absolutely true that learning is not technology-reliant; sometimes the best thing for it is the "hard, uncomfortable thinking" that Schuman talks about. And sometimes technology really is a distraction -- adding technology just because there is a budget for it is much more likely to cause problems than solve them. In the end though, technology is not going away, and it should be taken at face value and used purposefully.
I definitely think that technology can be useful in education, but only as long as it doesn’t make the lesson or homework more complex, or hard to deal with. I agree with the article’s author that tools like Blackboard are very useful, because they significantly streamline the professor to student communication and grading process for all parties involved. I guess I’ve heard from professors that it’s hard to set up, but on the student end it’s very easy to use and interact with (possibly because most students are more tech-savvy than most professors…). A tool becomes useless when the acclimation period is more consequential than the time saved by using that piece of technology. Google Drive is great to use when collaborating on class projects because it’s easy to use and access, and very intuitive which means people can easily get the hang of it. On the other hand, a tool like Basecamp (a group project management cloud platform) might be counter-productive if certain people on the team aren’t as good at learning new methods and tools, because it is slightly less intuitive.
Technology in the classroom is great until you spend 15 minutes watching your professor wrestle with a malfunctioning computer to projector connection or a complex piece of presentation software. Mankind has gone on learning for thousands of years with technology, and while it’s important to take advantage of the new opportunities it offers, we cannot let it become the focus point of every single course.
Listen here Lucas Matney from Northwestern, you need to get your head out of your ass and your priorities in check. Some of the greatest minds in the world have remote to no access to technology. The advancement of technology though revolutionizing the modern world is really becoming detrimental to education. People need to work on exercising their minds, and not relying on technology to keep them relevant. "Learning requires hard, uncomfortable thinking, the kind where you swear you can feel gears turning in your head." This is not something that technology helps you achieve, this is something that personal motivation and effort is responsible for. So Lucas Matney from Northwester, maybe you should look at yourself for educational relevancy and and innovation before you start criticizing the institution that for the most part has been extremely successful.
I don't understand the emphasis on technology used for education. Oftentimes, the addition of technology does nothing to help to educate students better. I also don't understand what Lucas Matney is thinking when he claims that his university isn't teaching him life challenges of today by not incorporating technology into his classes. Students today often know more about technology than the last generation does because we have grown up with technology.
I mostly agree with the author's point. Having shiny new toys for the sake of having them isn't going to magically improve the quality of instruction or engagement for students. One pet peeve I have here is that, while it's amazing that we have access to the profound technology that we do, sometimes I worry that we may lose the ability to think about a lower-tech solution, a skill that will be undoubtedly necessary in the real world. However, I am starting to take issue with the term "technology" being used to exclusively to refer to modern computing advances, as if education has never faced a change in structure or tools available before now. pedagogy is a field of study, and changes and advances the way teachers teach and students learn with much more profound affects on the quality and type of instruction provided. Perhaps the question is not: should there be technology in the classroom, but: should new pedagogical research seek to maximize available technology to better serve students.
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