Group items tagged

All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we're really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery. Whereas after a hard day's toil, instead of relaxing with a book they'll be much more likely to sit down in front of an undemanding soap opera because this is obviously teaching them nothing, so it is not learning, so it is not work, it is not drudgery, so it must be pleasure. And I think that that is the kind of circuitry that we tend to have imprinted on us because of the education process. Bingo. Such a tidy summary of the Business Roundtable vision of education as preparing workers for the workforce.

More pointedly still: Creating an opposition between "critical thinking" and "reading and discussing," on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.

Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did. "Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said. Restrain me, quick, before I break something. Because there’s a missing element in this bit of sloppy science that makes me want to throw my beloved laptop through the window. It’s this: the freaking teacher. So let me correct this: “CLUELESSLY wiring classrooms for internet access does not enhance learning.”

It’s totally schooly, and divorced from the authentic uses we put this stuff to in that non-school place called the real world.