Confessions of a Cyber Teacher
What's at stake in the education technology debate
By Stephen Leonard
“Instructional technology” has become one of the hottest new education buzzwords among elected and academic politicians. When President Clinton launched his Technology Literacy Challenge back in 1996, he gave official high-level sanction to a “cutting edge” movement that has now become part of the mainstream of American education debate. Today, politicians of every stripe – including university, college, and local school administrators -- have been running to jump on the techno-education bandwagon. The standard mantra now is that increased use of computers, the Internet, and technology education are critical for improving American schooling.
Back on many campuses, these beliefs have been translated into dismantled roadways, sidewalks, ceilings and walls. Infrastructure is being prepared so that the local school or college can “ramp-up.” Armies of workers are pulling wire, new “IT” personnel are being hired, computer shipping boxes are being off-loaded from vans, and faculty mail-boxes are filling up with advertisements from technology vendors. For those of you who haven’t yet seen this happening where you live and work, you can get a glimpse of what your future looks like by visiting any well-funded university, college, or public school system.
Meanwhile, for faculty the picture is a little different. Most seem slightly bewildered by all of this activity. Some seem positively annoyed by the noise of air hammers pounding through walls during class time. And there are quite a few who have begun venting a kind of unfocused hostility to the very idea of techno-education. Such reticence has not endeared the faculty to the digital literati and their politician friends; today, faculty ignorance and intransigence is often cited as one of the last major obstacles to the success of the education technology revolution.
But believe it or not, some faculty have been out there on the cutting edge all along. We have been trying to put the techno-education dream into practice. We are the prototypes of the cyber faculty. I am one of these thousands, and I am here to tell you that you will be assimilated. But I am also here to tell you that resistance is not futile, and may well be necessary.
My own experience using and studying the use of digital technologies for teaching suggests that they can be good for our schools and our students – and that most of the hype you hear from academic and elected politicians is extremely dangerous. Panglossian hyperbole notwithstanding, computers will not make students smarter, they won’t make teaching easier or better, and preparing students to compete in the “information economy” may not be everything it is cracked up to be. The bottom line is that education technology and technology education has an appropriate place in our schools, but if the current hype continues the investments we make could have effects worse than the problems they are supposed to remedy. And in many places, they already have.
The terms of education technohype
Anyone familiar with the history of American education knows that our schools exist in a state of nearly perpetual crisis. Every generation has had reformers who found American schooling deficient, and most of them also had plans at the ready for making things better. Up until the late 19th century, education critics focused almost exclusively on matters of substance – on what was being taught in the schools. But with the emergence of mass education and rapid technological change, substantive critiques began to share space with criticisms about pedagogical form, which focused on how schooling was conducted. This makes sense; more and different kinds of students required rethinking pedagogical methods; and new technologies offered opportunities for addressing these challenges.
The effect has been a subtle but nonetheless profound transformation in the content of education debates. To issues of effectiveness, critics of method and form have added issues of efficiency. As a result, technological innovation began to generate a tradition of education critique in which advocates insisted that the latest invention or discovery would not only make education better, but faster and cheaper. Sound recordings, radio, film, film strips, television, videos. You name it: if someone could figure out how a new technology could be weaseled into the classroom, it wasn’t long before someone, somewhere, was arguing that there was a new way to save America’s schools.
This is the reform legacy that today’s education technology advocates have inherited. Better, faster, cheaper. But this isn’t all there is to the story. Whatever the persistence of the liberal arts ideal, the fact of the matter is that for a long time now, education reform has also been touted for its economic benefits. When a new technology came along, advocates were quick to note that it could help better prepare students for the changing labor market. For example, the use of sound recordings could help workers develop better instruction-following skills, or educational television might teach workers how to be more effective on the assembly line. But learning to use the technology itself was not the goal of these innovations. Ed TV was not sold to schools with the goal of teaching students how to operate a television or make television programs.
This has all changed. With the new digital techno-hype, learning to use the technology itself is perhaps the most important skill being taught. The new education technology arguments thus combine claims of effectiveness and efficiency with claims of economic necessity.
The (in)effectiveness of techno-education
Certainly the most important consideration in any education reform effort ought to be effectiveness. Do kids learn better? should be the first question we ought to ask of any reform proposal. But with the new digital technologies, this seems to be the one question in which people are least interested. An overwhelming number of the extant studies on the effectiveness of digitally assisted education do not support the inflated claims of the digital literati. Too many are riddled with serious problems in conceptualization and methodology – and that even includes the studies that haven’t been paid for by the techno-education industry.
My colleague Ed Neal, Director of Faculty Development at the UNC Center for Teaching and Learning, reviewed some of the so-called state of the art research on technology in teaching, and found that it was little more than an “artless state.” In one article, Lawrence Baines called the research he examined “future schlock_ involving the use of _mythologizing data._ Another colleague of mine described his research into the evidence as “a 10 minute task.” Even the best study to date – which was published back in September of 1998 -- hardly provided unambiguous support for the kind of education reform fever that has infected many our education leaders.
Written by Harold Wenglinsky of the Education Testing Service Policy Information Center, "Does it Compute" examined the use of computers in mathematics education and came to the conclusion that the best evidence available indicates "that technology could matter, but that this depended upon how it was used."
For experienced cyber teachers, Wenglinsky’s conclusions are little more than unremarkable. We already know that good students do good work with or without the computers and Internet, and the production of poor work is also unrelated to the use of digital technologies. (Some of my colleagues insist that computers have actually made students’ work worse, but I don’t believe that to be the case, either).
But if this is true of computers and software, it is also true of paper, pens, blackboards, books, films and videos, globes, atlases, posters, models, and anything else in the classroom or the home. The difference is a good teacher and a committed student. In the hands of a good teacher and an attentive student, a $10 aquarium full of goldfish in the corner of a classroom, or even a pile of mulch at the back of a schoolyard, can be an “effective” learning tool.
At the next local school board meeting, see how far you get with parents and politicians if you advocate the allocation of instructional funds to hire dump trucks to haul mulch to the local schoolyard. But mention the (unsupported) “promise” of techno-education, and you may already find that tremendous sums of money are being committed on little more than myth and faith.
Of course no self-respecting supporter of education would insist on spending more money to make our schools less effective than they already are. Even some technology advocates might agree that this would be foolish. But for others effectiveness may not be the most important concern. Even if education technology can’t do it “better,” it still has the virtue of being “faster” and “cheaper.” Or so it might appear.
The (in)efficiency of techno-educationMake no mistake about it. Digital technologies can make it easier for some students to get access to information and education they wouldn’t otherwise have. The Internet is a tremendous resource for students on and off campus. Email and "asynchronous discussion" can be useful ways to communicate. For students (such as working adults or those in rural areas) who cannot take advantage of traditional modes of teaching and learning, or whose learning needs can be better met by technological interventions, new education technologies are appropriate and should be developed and deployed.
But even for these useful purposes it is simply wrongheaded to believe education is going to be delivered more “efficiently” using the new digital technologies. And those who say otherwise probably haven’t actually tried to teach using them.
Here at the University of North Carolina, my teaching loads have remained more or less steady over the years, but as I have made more use of digital technologies, the amount of time I spend on teaching has actually increased.
First, there are the start-up and retooling costs. As computers have “improved,” and software changes to keep up, I have been forced to scavenge, beg, and buy ever more powerful and complex machines to do even basic tasks for teaching. Money goes out, and retooling to manage the latest system and software changes becomes an all-too-frequent undertaking.
Then there are the dependability problems. If you don’t have the very latest souped-up digital speedster, the operating system provided by Mr. Bill’s Monopoly is going to make it very difficult for you to get through the day without a few lock-ups on your machine. (I’ll bet crashes caused by software written for Wonders 95 and 98 have destroyed more labor performed by Americans than a whole season’s worth of natural disasters.)
On a typical day, even if I am lucky enough to keep my “newest” clunker running without crashing, I still have to pray that all of the supporting infrastructure works. Networks have to be running and kept up to date, and printers have to be up to snuff. Then, if I make it that far, I mosey on over to class, where I continue my ritual incantations and sacrifices to the technology deities. Will the classroom interface work? Is the projector still operating? Will the mechanical screen descend from the ceiling, or will I be projecting on the wall again today?
Too often something fails, at which point – having already had a few years of experience as a cyber teacher – I dig out the chalk and notes I stuffed in the briefcase “just in case,” and scratch out the day’s diagram or outline on the chalkboard. In the meantime, I just wasted ten or fifteen minutes of a 50 minute class period. My students have been mightily entertained by my creativity in the art of cursing, but they haven’t learned much about political science.
If all of this makes my teaching more “efficient,” imagine multiplying the time, and the costs, and the problems a hundred-fold. Throw in a few hundred more cyber faculty, and thousands of “wired in” students, on and off campus. The result is likely to be a logistical nightmare as often as it is a model of teaching and learning "efficiency." Even now, before we have fully “ramped up” here in Chapel Hill, the most frequent excuse I get from students for missing or late assignments is “computer problems.” Deaths in the family and sick pets have been preempted by crashed disks and mysterious electronic viruses that eat computer work while leaving the dog and cat healthy.
If you think this is nothing more than the whining of some overpaid professor, think again. Numerous articles by critics of education technology cite similar sorts of complaints from teachers at every level of education. There are too many stories of teachers who spend the day running from computer to computer, recovering files, puzzling through error messages, and dealing with various hardware problems Some just give up and – like me – dig out the chalk and the textbooks. Others keep trying to wrestle with the gear and leave work frustrated.
These are not just minor inconveniences; they are positively disruptive to the teaching and learning environment. When a teacher has to spend time between tending to equipment and tending to the lesson plan, something has to give. It shouldn’t be the teaching, but if you have to use the gear, you have to fix it before you can teach.
In the cloud-cuckoo land of the digital literati, these are mere “technical problems” awaiting solution through further technological development. Of course we’ve all heard that line before, but let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that they are right. That still leaves all the problems that technology improvements might actually exacerbate.
Those of you who use email, or who have experience with digitally based discussion methods, are already aware of what I call (with my apologies to Dr. Skip Knox) Knox’s Principle of Virtual Communication: “Asynchronous discussions are slow.” Put another way, email takes time. One of my colleagues only half-jokingly put the problem this way: “When I get to my office in the morning, I have to decide whether I am going to read my email, or do some real work.”
Unfortunately, electronic communication has the appearance of instantaneous exchange, which means that people use it like they would the telephone or face-to-face conversation. This wouldn't be an issue if you are only communicating with a handful of people, but it can be difficult if you are teaching dozens if not hundreds of students.
A typical day for me involves trudging through dozens of email messages, many of them from the hundreds of students I am teaching or advising at any given moment. You can do the math: If I spend 5 minutes on each message (many of which involve repeating information I already gave out in class, or answering questions that could have been more efficiently addressed in person) I can spend a good part of my work day engaged in very inefficient work.
Similar problems follow with “asynchronous discussion software,” which allows students to have electronic conversations without being at their computers at the same time. As Skip Knox has pointed out, these conversations “take days, at a minimum, to develop,” and they typically run “a week to two weeks.” They are “easily disrupted” by breaks in schedules that prevent people from staying engaged. In other words, what you could do very efficiently in a couple hours in a classroom now takes many, many weeks.
Obviously, such methods are ill-fitted to a traditional academic semester. In addition, as Knox argues, courses taught this way “do not scale well. You can’t teach a hundred students” by these means. Of course where the applications are appropriate, we might want to change the semester schedule and reduce class sizes to accommodate the limitations of the technology, but no one should be fooled into thinking that techno-teaching and learning will be “efficient.”
Finally, there are the effects of technological anarchy with which to deal. For my own research, and for student research, I have found the Internet to be a wonderful source of information. (In fact, most of the research I did for this piece was on the Internet.) In every class I teach, I have assignments using the Internet, and in one class, every assignment is based on Internet materials.
What this means is that my students can get at least some of the instructional materials from the comfort of their own computers. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have easier access. (When was the last time your search engine found what you were really looking for?). It doesn’t mean that they have more information. (Any good library can compete with the Internet for sheer volume of material). And they certainly don’t have better information. (Most of what is on the Internet is just trash.)
Recognizing these limitations, every semester I have to impress upon my students what I have come to call the First Precept of Internet Use, viz: “The Internet is an enormous trash heap that yields useful materials only by perseverance and rigorous refinement techniques.” I also have to announce warnings about “getting 404ed.” (For the Internet ignorant, 404 is the error message that comes up when a web address doesn’t exist). When I put readings on reserve in the library, I don’t have to warn students that the librarians will file them willy-nilly anywhere they please, or that the reserve materials might disappear if the librarian decides to yank them. But I can’t say the same about the Internet material I assign.
As the cyberteaching corollary of Murphy’s Law would predict, the effects of technological anarchy all-too-often crop -up days before an assignment is due. At that point I start getting innundated with emails about “404” messages for websites with the assignment materials. Then begins the scramble to rewrite the assignment and reorganize the syllabus. “Efficiency,” needless to say, is not the word of the day.
This said, don’t misunderstand the nature of my complaint. I like the anarchy of the Internet. I like its messiness and its resistance to control. One of the main reasons I use it for teaching is that I want students to learn to dig around and to develop better garbage detectors. After all, you can learn a lot digging through a trash heap – if you do it carefully and thoughtfully.
But no one should be under the illusion that the Internet is an electronic analog of a library – unless they add the caveat that it is a really badly managed and badly organized library. And, again, certainly no one should be under the illusion that using the Internet is an “efficient” way to teach and learn.
The gist of all this is that adapting our schools to new education technologies may result in increased inefficiency. Such inefficiencies might (again) be justified, as in distance education programs, or in the kind of learning that comes from developing a good garbage detector. But if we are going to go full-bore ramping up our schools, some serious sacrifices may have to be made. We may have to divert huge sums of money to adapt our schools to a pedagogy that is (at best) no more "effective" or “efficient” than existing forms, and in most cases is probably worse. That almost inevitably means taking money from other programs – like art, music, language education, physical education, and health education -- as many schools already have.
It may also mean finding ways to cut labor costs. Maybe cyberschools could make teachers do more work for the same pay, or pay them less, or even get rid of expensive teachers and hire armies of poorly paid "academic support workers" to supervise the use of "educational software" developed by corporate enterprises. Indeed, many schools – and most “for profit” educational institutions – have already begun to do just that.
So why would we adapt our schools to the technology if its effectiveness and efficiency are in doubt? I believe it is because very few people bother asking for the evidence. They prefer to be on the “cutting edge.” Sadly, as is all too often the case, it isn’t the schools, but the market, that defines the cutting edge. But are you still concerned about effectiveness and efficiency? Fagetaboutit. It’s the economy, stupid.
The economy of techno-education
Students don’t learn “better” with computers? No matter. They are still learning how to use computers, and that’s what really counts. Teachers and students are spending more time on activities that use digital technologies, and less on other topics? Not a problem. In the information economy workers and consumers won’t need music, or art, or history, or politics. They just need to know how to handle the latest hardware and software that came on the market last week. Do we have to pay teachers less so we can keep up with the gear? So be it. At least our children are learning what they need to be happy drones.
This is a caricature, of course, but if education technology advocates really cared about the effectiveness and efficiency of our schools as much as they care about keeping up with the latest technology developments, the education technology debate wouldn’t be so lopsided as it is now.
Listening to the politicians, you might come away believing that the information age will be the Promised Land of freedom and prosperity. Certainly the utopian projections of high-tech company advertising would lead you to think that the information economy will bring about universal happiness. So what about these economic promises?
The reality is somewhat less rosy than the ads and futuristic predictions might lead you to believe. Right now, the empowering promise of information economy doesn’t look much different than the “service” and “industrial” economies that preceeded it – and it may be worse. For every “Microsoft millionaire” and other beneficiaries of what Time magazine called “get rich.com” there are tens of thousands of high-tech outcasts. In the first half of 1998, high tech companies laid off more than 142,000 workers. For every “Silicon Valley success,” there are thousands of Silicon Valley workers whose wages are low and whose working conditions are unenviable. For every academic politician and cyberprofessor (like me) at universities like Carolina, there are hundreds of underpaid teachers, and hundreds more who may find themselves joining the ranks of academic migrant workers who will be forced to submit to the unholy alliance of academic and corporate powers, which has only been strengthened by the techno-education movement.
Unfortunately, these are not just industry-specific examples. Over the last two decades -- which just happen to correspond to the emergence of the so-called information economy -- the distribution of wealth in the United States has made the rich richer, and it has left most everyone else no better or even worse-off. Between 1983 and 1989, 62% of the growth of financial wealth in the US went to 1% of the population. By 1995 the wealthiest 1% of Americans owned 40% of the wealth, and the wealthiest 10% of the population owned a staggering 71% of the country’s wealth.
This is the economy that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world while most Americans were working more hours, watching the value of paychecks stagnate or dwindle, juggling day-care or leaving latch-key kids at home in order to manage double-income budgets or trying to make ends meet on a single income, and seeing their health care and retirement benefits savaged by corporate “downsizing” and “restructuring”.
Most of the evidence at hand now -- about growing inequalities of wealth, about stagnating incomes, about longer work weeks, about greater stresses on families _ suggests that the utopia of the information economy is nothing more than the most recent expression of a society increasingly divided between the shrinking number and more powerful haves, and the growing number and increasingly powerless have-nots. Once again, American socio-economic “change” (sic!) goes backwards into the future.
This is the economy for which our schools are preparing students to “compete.” And lest you think that that higher – or high tech – education will get your kids into the elite 10%, bear in mind that the long-term trend in starting salaries for college graduates -- the “mind workers” of the information economy – has been on the decline. Even the upturn of the last two years is a mere blip in this long trend; the benefits of economic growth accruing to the middle class have been relatively stagnant while the wealth of the super-rich has grown by leaps and bounds. The numbers for those less fortunate are nothing less than a national disgrace. Very few outside the charmed circle of the already super-rich and the fast-buck artists of the technology industries are immune to these vicious inequities.
Don’t be fooled by the technology industry’s glitz: in the information economy, profits still take precedence over people, the quick buck still takes precedence over wise long-term investment, and allowing the super rich to engorge themselves on superfluities still takes precedence over the eroding hopes of working Americans.
So much for the brave new world of the digital future. Yet our academic and elected politicians continue to hype education technology and technology education. Why? Isn't it time we really ask why this hype has become so popular, and who is benefiting from it?
Techno-education reconsidered
Look around you and you will see that computers have made a tremendous difference in the quality of many people’s lives. But for all those wonderful advantages, the fact is that computers are simply not everything that advocates of education technology often make them out to be, and forcing them into the schools may not be for the public good.
When the President of the United States makes education technology a centerpiece of his education agenda, he distorts its importance and skews the ways in which scarce resources will be used in American schools. When university administrators make “technology enhancement” a defining part of their institution’s mission, they add to this distortion. And when local school superintendents, principals, and school board members push to spend more money on technology and cut back on music, art, physical education, foreign language, literature, science labs, field trips and other programs, they are merely putting into practice an education agenda that may damage our education system in ways that could take many years to repair.
So why all the hype, and who benefits? The answer, quite simply, is the politicians, who (as always) promise more than they can deliver, and the technology industry, which is more than happy to provide the politicians with the (unfulfillable) promises. On the one side there is the desire to find the quick fix; on the other side is the promise of the fix – at the right price. Throw in the American public’s penchant for the new and flashy over the time-worn and well-tried, and all that is needed for the techno-education revolution is already in place. Beat the faculty into shape, and it may all be over before you know it.
All of this makes it perfectly clear that the moguls of the information economy have made techno-education a critical part of corporate strategy. They know a cash cow when they see one -- and American education is a very large cash cow. Americans spend enormous sums of money on education. Nearly 7% of our annual Gross Domestic Product is spent on education. That is more than 425 billion dollars annually. Only Canada spends a higher percentage of GDP on education -- and they are having a techno-education debate of their own.
It should therefore come as no surprise that high tech companies and entrepreneurs are putting so much energy into defining the terms of the education debate. Industry giants and upstart wannabes have been falling over each other to buy their way into the markets that our politicians – who are falling all over each other to get the gear – have opened up for exploitation.
In any case, the technology vendors are in a good position to drain the education cow dry. The strategy they often follow shares more than a few similarities with the pattern pushers follow when trying to create a captive market for dope. First come the feel-good promises. Then the free or cheap “trial” hits. Once the addiction is secured, “investments” from the addict starts flowing fast and heavy.
This is a brilliant strategy, and it is becoming something of a model for education technology vendors. In one (in)famous example, one of the Baby Bells in the Northeast pumped a cool $8 million into an innovative public school, but when the gear aged out, corporate benevolence suddenly became business as usual. Across the country, schools are dumping huge sums of money into infrastructure to support the freebies, only to find that in a couple years all of the equipment is out of date, impossible to upgrade, and quickly becoming a pile of plastic and metal junk, useful only for doorstops. (Here at Carolina, in anticipation of these difficulties, some students have already started referring to the computers they haven’t even yet received as “$2000 paperweights”). In the meantime, having been hooked by their infrastructure investments, schools dump even more money into the cycle of buying and junking, buying and junking. There will be more than a few investors who will join “Get rich.com” by selling our schools educational toys that our children just don’t need.
It isn’t likely to end soon, either. For at least a couple more decades, high tech companies can expect to enjoy the economic benefits of the cycle of obsolescence made possible by Moore’s Law. Coined by G. E. Moore, Intel’s chairman emeritus, Moore’s Law predicts that the computing power of a microprocessor chip will double every 12-18 months. At that rate of change -- as most computer owners have already found out much to their chagrin, and as concerned teachers and parents will soon find to their horror – hardware and software has a pretty short half-life. If blackboards, furniture, and heating and cooling units needed updating every couple years, and manufacturers refused to provide support for aging equipment, there would be hell-to-pay. Yet many administrators have no difficulty dedicating large parts of tight budgets for digital equipment that won’t even last through most students’ college careers.
The short of this is that high-tech corporations are simply engaged in profit making “philanthropy,” and many academic and elected politicians will continue to jump at the give-away bait. After all, "technology enhancement" seems to offer a quick fix for – if not a useful diversion from -- the real problems of American education. Moreover, many Americans will support techno-education initiatives, no matter how outrageous they may be. After all, most of the things that can really improve the schools – like smaller class sizes and better working conditions for teachers -- are not hardware and software. Buying students and teachers more time together, or paying teachers so that they will be enthusiastic about their work, just isn't very flashy. A pair of freshly produced off-white plastic boxes sitting on a desk with a complex graphic displayed on the monitor screen is flashy. No matter how vapid, or empty, or useless the graphic may be, it looks expensive and modern. Americans love gear, and the newer and more technologically complex the gear, the better. Ask your kids. Hell, check out your own consumer habits.
Between the American fetish for anything new and technologically sophisticated, the American politician's fetish for the quick fix or diversion, and the digital technology industry's greed and short cycle of obsolescence, we have nothing less than a recipe for educational disaster. As you bear witness to the exaggerations, distortions, and self-promotions of today’s technohypesters, you might want to keep constantly in mind the sad truth of "Gallois's Revelation":
If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled, and no one dares to criticize it.
The simple fact is that most of what is claimed for and done with computers in education is little more than tomfoolery. Pierre Gallois was an advocate for computers a long time before it was fashionable, but he also recognized their limits. Like Gallois, you can appreciate the ways in which digital technologies can and have improved our lives. Like many of us who have actually used them, you can also support the adoption of education technologies for appropriate purposes -- even when they may be less effective and less efficient than traditional forms of pedagogy.
But if the hypesters start suggesting that you are a “Luddite" because you oppose dropping huge sums of money into “ramping up” your local school, ask them for the evidence to support the investments. That isn’t the request of someone who fears technology, it is just common sense – something that has been altogether lacking in the headlong, bumbling rush into the techno-education future.
