isaacmao.com: lifelong (e)learning

发表在Red Herrring 上的一篇文章无情地鞭挞了IT 企业夸大的技术对教育的作用。而从实际的应用来看，这些作用相对于投资来说显得微不足道，而且完全可以通过其他方式达到。那些甚至有点危机性的言论都是为了商业性服务，也反映了人们对技术的盲目崇拜。这非常值得我们反思，也正是“互联教育体系”应当关注本质的地方。

Is our children learning?
Each year more than $5 billion is spent on computers in the classroom. But it's the tech companies that benefit.
By Julie Landry
August 21, 2002

In a well-appointed classroom in New York City, a pair of sixth graders at Mott Hall School are doing what corporate executives the world over are doing--creating PowerPoint presentations. For the students, the purpose is to learn about the human liver. They are copying and pasting information from medical Web sites and selecting the right background colors and clip art. But after spending 20 minutes just designing the introduction page, the students still can't answer the most basic question: What does the liver do? "I don't know; we were supposed to do the gallbladder," answers a shy Latino girl with pigtails. They are learning how to use PowerPoint, but they have no idea what the content means.

Similar situations are playing out in private and public schools across the United States. Students are learning not just PowerPoint, but Excel and a host of other applications. They are doing so on the latest and greatest PCs and the sleekest laptops. One private Catholic school in New York City even has wireless connections throughout its classrooms and hallways. Yet, after hundreds of exhaustive studies, there remains no conclusive proof that technology in the classroom actually helps to teach students. In fact, in some cases it hinders learning. And even if there is a benefit, the amount of money and resources being expended to put technology into the classroom does not match the current or expected benefit.

Since 1990, school districts and states have spent more than $40 billion on computers, software, and network connectivity for schools. At least 50 cents of every dollar spent on educational supplies goes to technology. Meanwhile, at least 35 states are facing budget shortfalls for 2003, and any cuts to education are likely to hit arts programs or facilities improvements long before technology. "Getting money for technology is not a problem around here--they'd probably cut the electricity before they'd cut that," says one teacher at Marymount School, a private Catholic institution for girls on New York's Upper East Side.

The major computer hardware and software manufacturers are not only feeding this insatiable desire for technology, they are the cause of the hunger in the first place. Selling into the $350 billion education market, the tech titans get anywhere from 5 percent (Oracle and Texas Instruments) to 26 percent (Apple Computer) of their total revenue. They count on this market to add to the bottom line, even though they may be selling the 21st-century equivalent of snake oil.

OLD-SCHOOL IDEAS
Technology's claim to revolutionize learning isn't new. "Books will soon be obsolete in the schools," wrote Thomas Edison in 1913, just after he had invented the Kinetophone, one of the earliest devices to synchronize sound and a projected image. "It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge through the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years."

Nearly a hundred years later, technology companies are promising the same sweeping changes. While everyone agrees that there's a place for technology in schools (it makes record-keeping more efficient, helps teachers analyze student-learning trends, and is good for all sorts of back-office administrative functions), educational software and hardware companies have long boasted that their products are the answer to shrinking budgets and overcrowded classrooms. The right technology, they argue, can help educate the 53 million students in public and private schools in the United States. With technology, students can easily learn to read and write and do arithmetic. Without it, the companies say, students will fall behind, their analytical skills becoming as dusty and antiquated as a blackboard.

Nearly every tech company selling into the education market has commissioned independent studies that find, not surprisingly, that technology has a positive effect on education. Microsoft claims the use of laptops improves critical-thinking skills and "time spent on task." Apple has found that "students, especially those with few advantages in life, learn basic skills--reading, writing, and arithmetic--better and faster if they have a chance to practice those skills using technology." Texas Instruments says that "handheld graphing technology can be an important factor in helping students develop a better understanding of mathematical concepts, score higher on performance measures, and raise the level of their problem-solving skills." Even former junk bond king Michael Milken is pushing educational technology, through his foundation and a company called Knowledge Universe, which he cofounded with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

In closely controlled, short-term research studies, the tech companies' claims can be proven. The studies, however, tend to be tightly choreographed--monitoring everything from the time spent on a computer to what skills are practiced and what type of students are practicing them. But real classrooms aren't tightly controlled. They are a hodgepodge of different software and hardware, not to mention students. As such, it's hard to distinguish the influence of technology from that of enthusiastic teachers and supportive administrators.

A West Virginia study found that fifth-grade students who had access to computers for six years gained an average of 14 points on an 800-point basic-skills test. Researchers concluded that about 11 percent of those 14 points, a mere 1.5 points, were attributable to technology tools, which cost $7 million per year. Researchers also noted that the state spent $430 million to renovate school buildings and increase teacher salaries; they acknowledged these factors might have had an effect on teacher and student motivation. And, in fact, at places like the SEED (Schools for Educational Evolution and Development) School in Washington, D.C., a four-year-old charter boarding school, students show off their brand new dorms with far more pride than the computers they use in classrooms and labs.

In the last comprehensive study of its kind, a 1998 research project by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), a private testing organization that produces the Scholastic Aptitude Test and others, found that school computer use was associated with increasing math scores for eighth graders by one-third of a grade level. However, researchers cautioned, "the appearance of higher test scores in students who use technology more frequently may be due to the technology, or it may be due to the fact that such students come from more affluent families, and so are better academically prepared in the first place."

In some cases, introducing technology into the classroom may actually have a detrimental effect. In her controversial book Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds for Better and Worse (Simon & Schuster, 1998), former principal Jane Healy argues that computers should be used sparingly in schools. She finds that heavy visual emphasis could be harmful to early childhood development because pictures require less effort to process than text. She also cites the instant feedback of computer applications as a possible factor in children's increasing inattentiveness. Ms. Healy warns, "Some of the 'habits of mind' fostered by this software are dangerous. . . . Attention is guided by noise, motion and color, not by the child's brain."

THE EDUCATION PRECEDENT
In a nod to the questionability of technology as an effective teaching tool, the Bush administration says it plans to adjust its policy on education and technology. As part of a new law that takes effect this fall, the U.S. Department of Education will launch a five-year, $15 million project to study the effects of technology on education. Though the study is slated to kick off this fall, the structure and depth of the study is still being decided--typical of the "build it first, think about it later" government mentality. The new law, called No Child Left Behind, also requires that 25 percent of technology funding be allocated for training teachers to use the new tools. Prior to the law, federal policy tended to have a single mission: outfitting schools with technology and getting them connected to the Internet. For instance, the E-Rate program, introduced by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 1996, has been funneling about $2 billion each year to schools and libraries in low-income communities for discounted Internet connectivity.

"What you have seen with No Child Left Behind is a real shift away from just providing increased access, which is still an important priority, toward making sure that teachers and administrators know how to use it effectively," says John Bailey, head of the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Education.

Technology companies, in fact, are more than happy to step in and guide teachers in how to use their software. Some firms offer free training as an incentive for schools to buy their products. Gateway, through its corporate giving program, and the WorldCom Foundation both provide free Internet training to thousands of schools, and Intel's Teach to the Future program has set aside $100 million to show 400,000 teachers how to integrate technology into their teaching.

Training teachers to use technology, however, doesn't turn technology into a better teacher. As the ETS study points out, "Apparent higher achievement levels of students with teachers who are computer-proficient may be due to this proficiency, or it may be due to these same teachers having more teaching experience and knowledge of their subject matter."

The new federal law also places an emphasis on testing and uses test scores to determine the allocation of federal funds. Naturally, technology companies are angling to make sure their products support the new federal emphasis. Nearly every new offering--from traditional education publishers like Scholastic to startups like educational-software maker Lightspan--comes packaged with claims of raising test scores. In the short term, such a sales pitch may persuade superintendents to buy, but in the longer term, the basic question of whether technology is an effective teaching tool is still not answered, and further, it's unknown if standardized tests themselves adequately measure learning. "Test scores are pretty brutal proxies for success in the workforce," says Roy Pea, a professor of education at Stanford University. "What kids need to know and be able to do is changing as the world changes."

THE OAKLAND GRADERS
California's Oakland Unified School District has been trying to save its troubled schools for years. The majority of the district's middle schools rank in the lowest 10 percent in California on statewide Academic Performance Index tests, and its high school graduation rate for the 2000-2001 school year was just 40 percent, compared with about 80 percent statewide. Oakland's students, urban and predominately African-American and Asian, are exactly the type of students technology is supposed to help, and it does. Numerous studies have indicated that technology does have the power to engage students who aren't interested in books or lectures, and that engagement sometimes results in better grades and test scores. As a result, Oakland is looking to programs like online teacher collaboration to give students living in the poorer areas of the city the same advantages as students in wealthier areas.

"In this district, technology is probably the only way, because we haven't been able to provide a consistent quality of instruction across the schools," says Derek Mitchell, director of technology and student achievement for the Oakland school district. "We're confident about technology's ability to provide our students with opportunities and resources they couldn't get otherwise."

Educational software companies agree. "We've got 72 percent of children that aren't reading at grade level by third grade and that still aren't by ninth grade," says Andrew Morrison, founder and CEO of Cognitive Concepts, a literacy training firm in Evanston, Illinois. "If you can [get them up to grade level] for $1,000 a class and it's proven to work, I don't see how you could afford not to. Shy of hiring more teachers and putting them one-on-one with the kids, it's hard to have the same effect without the technology."

Startups like Carnegie Learning, which makes math tutoring software, say that when technology has a sound basis in learning research, it can make just as much of an impact as an attentive teacher. Carnegie Learning says that its software, which uses techniques based on ten years of cognitive research at Carnegie Mellon University, has helped boost test scores by as much as 30 percent by adapting its lessons as the student progresses through each question.

Yet, students who are engaged are not necessarily learning to think. It often takes an expectant look or an encouraging smile from a teacher or tutor to motivate students--something they'll never get from a computer, no matter how advanced. That's why it may be more effective in the long run to train and hire additional teachers, although that is clearly more expensive. The authors of the West Virginia study determined that reducing average class size from 21 to 15 would cost $636 per student--$191 million in salaries alone for 5,739 additional teachers--while adding computers would cost only about $86 per student. It's also difficult to imagine how some states justify their emphasis on technology when many schools struggle to build enough space to house all their students, often resorting to trailers in the parking lot as ad hoc classrooms.

Schools need more substantial proof that their investment in technology has made learning better--not just cheaper or faster. They should take computer and software sellers' claims with a sizable grain (boulder?) of salt. Tech companies aren't likely to change their tune; they're raking in money from the education market. Schools should also consider whether the modest gains achieved with expensive technology are worth the sacrifice in funding to other programs. After all, the only skills the Oakland students are sure to learn is how to surf the Web better and design PowerPoint presentations.

Write to Julie Landry.

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