The Economist recently held a series of online debates on its website, the first one of which, now closed, was on technology in education. (The second, on university recruiting, is also closed, but the last one, on the value of social networking, is still ongoing.) 56% of voters opposed the motion that "the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education." The end result, although favorable to technology, doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, and the vote might also reflect some wishful thinking on voters' part (technology has to be good because it is technology and at some point it will be useful in education so let's vote yes now) rather than a hard look at the facts.
Technology does help a lot on the periphery of the learning environment: I post course materials, assignments and grades online, and if I want to clarify a question in the homework I don't have to wait for the next lecture to do it - I can put an announcement on BlackBoard. In the classroom, however, staring at slides can quickly become boring for the students, and technology then brings an advantage to the teacher rather than his audience because it helps him avoid preparing the lecture: you can always read last year's slides in a very authoritative manner even if you don't remember what you're talking about. (I gave up on using slides a while back - chalkboard for me and paper for students; welcome to the twenty-first century.)
One issue with technology, especially when it comes to online course archives such as OpenCourseWare, is that many students don't feel any pressure to pay attention when it's just them and the computer, the few who do have limited ways to check whether they've understood the material, and students tend to put more effort in courses where they will be held accountable by a real person. But education isn't all about teacher-student interactions, and technology has played an important role in making more resources available. Students taking a course in finance, for instance, and eager to learn more on the topic can now browse Amazon.com and pick a book that suits their interests based on users' reviews; in the past, they had to rely on their university library, which often does not carry popular books aimed at a large audience, or their local bookstore, which cannot stock many books in each category due to space constraints. Others use the Web to gather information - Wikipedia has become popular for quick definitions of math concepts. Sometimes technology can be used against education too, when students text-message under the table or check the latest updates on Facebook from their laptop, although laptop problems mostly arise with MBA students as opposed to undergraduates.
At the same time, it's well-known by now that the predicted market size for PCs was a number I could count on my fingers, because no one believed consumers would have any interest for that kind of machine. The usefulness of technology is particularly tricky to estimate because the limiting factor is on the teacher's side. Granted, instant-messaging is not going to replace face time during office hours (math equations and IM don't go well together). But assignments are handed in on paper because that's the way it's only be done, not because there is something intrinsically better about it - especially in industrial engineering where students write down their model by hand and print the output sheets. Then they complain because they lose points for things that they had incorporated in their model on the computer but forgot to write down on paper. Emailing a spreadsheet puts more work on teachers or graders because we have to learn the conventions used by the students (what's cell B6 again?) and it is harder to write remarks and highlight mistakes. But maybe down the road some assignments, in some courses, will be podcasts or video clips (oops, they're called vodcasts now) where the student explains what he's done in addition to presenting the end result. When students who grew up with their iPod and YouTube become teachers, it seems likely that they will use these tools in their work life too.
The first generation of these teachers is already at work, and for once high school might well be teaching a lesson or two to higher education, since these new teachers are for now predominantly in the secondary system (if only because they haven't had the time to get a PhD and start teaching in college yet - iPod was launched in October 2001, and YouTube in February 2005). Some teachers have begun to use blogs as course webpages and link to course wikis so that the students can contribute too, i.e., take exams, post assignments. Of course that one course - if you follow the links above - is on web design to begin with, but borrows topics from history and literature, and TeacherTube and VoiceThread provide many tech-driven resources on non-tech courses. (I learnt about those sites through Angela Maiers' blog, and in turn Dave Sherman's.) One Dan Meyer even records his lectures when he has to be replaced by a temp, in quite an amazing way. (GarageBand? iBook? Final Cut Pro? But how is the media going to keep portraying high school teachers as a bunch of unionized oldies opposing merit pay while waiting for retirement with people like that?) The Web is becoming a two-way, rather than one-way, tool.
Of course not everyone has a webcam to do vodcasts with, but in the late 1990s not everyone had a cell phone either - you can now date a movie based on whether the main character drops by a pay phone when he has to make a call. Many students have iPods just six years after Apple's product launch, and one of these days teachers putting up with hours of commute on the California freeways will start requiring students to submit their assignments as podcasts they can listen to while sitting in traffic jams. Given YouTube's popularity, in a few years one could also expect webcams to become ubiquitous - and once technology supports rather than replaces face-to-face interaction, it'll be time for Web 3.0, whatever that is.
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