..."silver bullets", not well integrated solutions.
Every generation has had what they had hoped would be the
technological silver bullet. When I was in high school, the next big
thing was going to be cable TVs in every classroom. Overhead
projectors was a pretty effective technology from the '50s and '60s.
I hear that the "digital wall" is the big thing now.
But as we know from the corporate world, effective IT is neither
cheap nor easy. It requires extensive investment, user education,
and ongoing support to be effective. Most of the educational
establishment doesn't seem to be capable of it. The highly political
nature of public education drives the educracy towards the Hail Mary
approach of large up-front investment, but poor follow-up. Budget
processes are mostly about procurement and not ongoing support and
growth. Schools aren't used to life-cycles defined in months instead
of years or decades. Complex integration is illusive. That's
probably why TVs with cheap VCRs proved more useful than cable TV
programming in every classroom.
One reason I’m a writer is because I can’t write.
It’s called dysgraphia.
My parents dealt with it by getting me a typewriter.
Flash forward 35 years. My son is dysgraphic. But there are no typewriters.
PCs wiped out the typewriter market but the PCs of the late 1990s were too heavy, expensive, and fragile to take to school. Even in high school my dysgraphic son got dinged by teachers because of his handwriting.
This is just one example of how computing has failed education. The rapid evolution of PCs in the 1980s and 1990s caused investments in “computer-aided education” to be wasted, as this year’s software could not run on last year’s hardware.
The training curve of teachers never caught up to what upper middle-class kids could access at home, and schools fell behind.
If my kids were 10 years younger there would be a solution to their problem. Netbooks first emerged in force last year. They’re fully functioning PCs but they have no moving parts. This means they are rugged by definition. And they’re dirt cheap — even a Windows version can be had for under $300.
This still doesn’t answer for kids whose parents can’t put $300 in their hands. Most of my son’s high school classmates were like that.
One solution tried in my son’s senior year was to get rid of Windows, installing Linux terminals in classrooms linked to a central server.
I was impressed with this solution when I first saw it but my son recently revealed that it didn’t work in practice. A shortage of support funds meant many of the terminals just refused to boot. They weren’t stolen, as older PCs were, because once disconnected they were useless. They became paperweights.
The rapid changes in technology that have marked the last 30 years have not served educators well. Billions were wasted on systems that quickly became obsolete. Not enough was spent on training, and support was also neglected.
The result is that today’s public schools are little-changed from those of 20 or even 30 years ago. Most public school teachers still lecture from blackboards. Most lessons are still found in books. Backpacks have just gotten heavier.
Fortunately smarter solutions may be coming.
Internet-based learning systems require no upgrades at the school level. Any terminal with a broadband connection will do, so long as the system is maintained. This will give teachers the time they need to learn how to adapt what’s available to what their kids are doing, and in time change their teaching methods from “the sage on the stage” to “the guide at the side.”
As to my son? He’s a high school graduate now, starting college classes next semester. And he’ll be bringing my netbook with him. He can take notes with it, output them to a stick memory if they need to be printed there, or he can access tests and lessons from home.
It has taken much longer than I expected but this marriage of PCs and education may finally be about to become a beautiful friendship.
Feel free to add your own computers-in-education horror stories below.
