The Rush To Embrace Technology
From an interesting review by Dexter Palmer of a new book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, by Diana Senechal:
“The sections of the book on education are by far the strongest. Through a series of incisive analyses of pedagogical practices, Senechal portrays an absurd, technology-addled educational environment in which teaching has become disconnected from learning, and methods alone are thought to be sufficient to educate, irrespective of whether those methods are invested with any meaning. She questions the often commercial-driven adoption of technology in the classroom when it comes without any real consideration of whether that technology is in fact a benefit to students, or perhaps even a liability.
“For example, she considers ‘clickers’—hand-held electronic devices distributed to students that allow the teacher to poll the class by posing a multiple-choice question and instantly aggregating the responses. Such devices might assist learning for some students in some instances, but technology has a pernicious habit of convincing people that it is always useful in all instances. The result in the case of ‘clickers’ is that lectures often become workshops, and complex ideas that are best relayed through continuous, uninterrupted speech are broken down into fragments that are needlessly difficult to synthesize—the better to allow students to use their clickers”: bit.ly/LFV9cD.
Very interesting—I realize that until now I had indeed uncritically accepted the idea that clickers were a great addition to the classroom. And maybe they are—but I appreciate Senechal’s effort to get us to slow down and examine critically the use of technology in education, instead of rushing to embrace whatever is new and shiny.
Dear Annie Murphy Paul,
Thank you for taking interest in this part of the review and this aspect of my book. You understood my point that we should reserve room to question our use of technology.
Clickers can provide an interesting snapshot of what students do or don’t understand at a given moment. The danger lies in exalting this instantaneous result. It is important for students to encounter things that they don’t immediately understand. (They should come to understand most of them them eventually, of course.)
If the clicker result is mixed, this may mean that students need to go home and think about the problem some more. It does not necessarily mean tha the instructor should backtrack, go into a laborious explanation, or have students “turn and talk” about the problem. On the other hand, it is possible to keep this in mind when using the clicker. The clicker itself need not drag down instruction.
One of the dangers of newer technologies is that their champions do not present them modestly. They are supposed to transform, revolutionize, overturn the traditional classroom. Why the grandiosity? Why the revolution? The very best we can do in the classroom is use our knowledge, insight, and judgment.
In any case, thank you for your comment.
Best wishes,
Diana Senechal
P.S. I am eager to read your book on personality testing.
This is a recurring topic for me in an any edtech discussion (as an entrepreneur in enterprise education), and one that deserves a lot of attention in a space where hundreds of companies are trying to innovate & automate curriculum/lesson planning in place of good old fashion teaching. The fact is that learning has always been ubiquitous, collaborative, emergent, and personal until technology got in the way. What stands out for me is that we need balance in our approach to technology integration in the classroom and company.
[...] captures and analyzes student discussion, producing graphs of students’ speaking patterns, or clickers with which students may answer multiple-choice questions. The use of such devices will count as [...]