Time to Move on
By Bob Johnstone
Six years ago, when I began work on my book (Never Mind the Laptops: Kids, Computers, and the Transformation of Learning, iUniverse), it seemed like one-kid, one-computer was well on its way to becoming the dominant model of learning. In my adopted home town of Melbourne, Australia, pretty much all the independent schools had implemented laptop programs. Some of the leading schools in the public system, including the one my kids went to, were following suit. The Victorian government was about to start issuing laptops to all 37,000 public school teachers in the state. Meanwhile, in the US, hundreds of schools around the country were picking up on the pioneering efforts of Australian educators via the Microsoft-sponsored Anytime Anywhere Learning initiative.
Now, with the publication of the book this month [September], I realize that, so far from being almost over, the laptop story has barely even begun.
There are still plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the outcome. The statewide laptop initiative in Maine, now in its second year, seems to be going great guns. And as (former Maine governor) Angus King predicted, if one state was seen to be succeeding with laptops, then other states would surely follow. Michigan looks like being first out of the blocks, with its Freedom to Learn program scheduled to start next January. Now New Hampshire, no doubt feeling pressure from its next-door neighbor, is dipping its toes in the water. It has initiated a pilot program that will place laptops in the hands of seventh and eighth graders at five of the state’s poorest and lowest-performing schools. These initiatives are taking place at a time of record budget deficits. But laptop prices will continue their inexorable drop for the foreseeable future. Cheaper hardware will allow school districts to run programs out of existing recurrent funding, as at Henrico.
At the same time, however, several things trouble me. One is the fixation on the hardware rather than the really important issue which, as we all know, is professional development. It’s all very well to make sure that teachers have laptops. But unless you also bring them up to speed on how to use them in the classroom the investment is wasted, as Victoria has discovered to its cost.That is why I entitled my book Never Mind the Laptops, because it is not the laptops per se, it’s the learning that kids do with them that is important.
It turns out that many of the schools which implemented laptop programs did so for the wrong reasons (eg, image, marketing). At the school my kids went to, they set up a couple of what turned out to be token laptop classes, but made no effort to integrate them. The classes lasted a couple of years, then that was that, back to the chalkface. I was horrified recentlywhen one of my kids told me that he had actually been forbidden to use the Internet for an assignment. The reason given was not just that everybody doesn’t have access (a dubious contention in this day and age) or that information downloaded from the Internet is unreliable (yes, but how are you ever going to learn to discriminate the kosher from the dodgy?), but that it was too "easy" to get. Work is supposed to be hard, right?
Another thing that disturbs me is the public’s lack of awareness about what is really going on (or, more accurately, not going on) in schools. As one publisher asserted in rejecting my proposal, computers are in schools, most teachers are enthusiastic about them, so what’s to write about? Much of the blame for this misperception, it pains me as a journalist to have to say, must be laid at the feet of the media. In particular, whenever some new initiative is announced, the hacks make a beeline for comment to the same tired old voices.
Take, for example, a recent article in the Boston Globe on New Hampshire’s pilot laptop plan.* Having outlined the initiative, the writer then reaches out for a “balancing” quote from Joshua Angrist, a professor of economics at MIT. Angrist leapt to prominence last year as the result of a paper he co-authored and published in Economics Journal. His (negative) findings derive from research done in Israel in the mid 1990s on computer-aided instruction. “The evidence for computer-aided instruction is very weak,” the Globe quotes Angrist as saying. “This just doesn’t seem to be an effective way of teaching.” Well, right. I suppose it is too much to expect a non-specialist journalist to be aware that computer-aided instruction is (at least one hopes it is) a long-since discredited approach to the implementation of technology in the classroom. But if you want informed comment on an educational topic, why would you ask an economist in the first place? (Or for that matter an astronomer?)
It was particularly galling to see the same research quoted - one sensed with approval - in our local broadsheet here in Melbourne, where there are more laptops in schools than anywhere else in the world. (Because most schools that use laptops are independent, the technology is still perceived by our egalitarian media to be the preserve of the elite.) What for Heaven’s sake is the relevance to us of CAI, in Israel, in 1994? If you want to know whether or not laptops work, go out and talk to the teachers who are doing interesting things with them. In particular, go ask the teachers at Methodist Ladies’ College, the first school to mandate the use of laptops, the extraordinary story of which forms the core of my book. MLC has been using laptops in the classroom for almost thirteen years now. The teachers there aren’t stupid, and they’re really critical of anything that looks like a fad. If the laptops didn’t work for the kids, didn’t make a substantive improvement in their learning, then they wouldn’t have lasted, the teachers wouldn’t still be using them.
The aim of my book is to provide some much-needed context for the seemingly endless debate, to raise the bar a bit so we don’t keep having to go back and reinvent the wheel every time someone proposes using computers in the classroom. Laptops are no longer a radical notion (although, if properly done, some of the consequences that flow from using them are), so let’s swallow our pride, look at what other schools have done, learn the lessons, and move on.
Bob Johnstone
* "NH plan targets test scores with laptops in low performing schools", Shari Rudavsky, Boston Globe September 9, 2003
