Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Go up to any adult with a good life, no matter what his or her station, and ask if a teacher made a difference, and you’ll always see a face light up. The human element, a magical connection, is at the heart of successful education, and you can’t bottle it.
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My father would have been spat out by today’s test-driven educational regime.
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Probe one of those illuminated faces further, and you can also usually elicit memories of a particularly bad teacher.
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Mrs. Souza, fifth grade, but we still did some awesome projects around Haley's Comet. She was just mean.
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Trusting teachers too much also has its perils. For every good teacher who is too creative to survive in the era of “no child left behind,” there’s probably another tenacious, horrid teacher who might be dethroned only because of unquestionably bad outcomes on objective tests.
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Just as there are people bad in their profession in any field- private sector, government, education. Remember Windows ME and Vista, Microsoft Boy?
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How do we use the technologies of computation, statistics and networking to shed light — without killing the magic?
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Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point.
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I wonder if this guy has a TiVo or an Amazon account, or has ever taken a suggestion from a friend of a band to listen to or see?
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nventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it?
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And part of the exploration is suggestions. Some people live in cultural enclaves that don't have readily available "culture."
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Education — in the broadest sense — does what genes can’t do. It forever filters and bequeaths memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans compute and transfer nongenetic information between generations, creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is education.
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The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd.
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The crucial choice of which intergenerational information is to be treated as computational grist is usually not made by educators or curriculum developers but by young engineers.
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Some of the top digital designs of the moment, both in school and in the rest of life, embed the underlying message that we understand the brain and its workings. That is false. We don’t know how information is represented in the brain. We don’t know how reason is accomplished by neurons. There are some vaguely cool ideas floating around, and we might know a lot more about these things any moment now, but at this moment, we don’t.
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So as an educator I should not use my professional judgements on what technologies I should try to use to help my students understand the intergenerational material that is so important?
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We are tempted by the demons of commercial and professional ambition to pretend we know more than we do.
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We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen.
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Is this REALLY any different, at a rudementary level then what happened in the past. It is just easier to copy and paste. The stupid prompts teachers use should garner the need for thought. It is just that teachers continue to use the same dumb prompts in a world where Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha can provide the easy answer.
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What is wrong with this is not that students are any lazier now or learning less.
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What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good.
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I don't see this as a technology issue, at all. This is a teacher issue. This is an educational issue. This is a systemic problem that if we took all high tech tools out of the schools this would STILL be a problem.
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I am a technologist, and so my first impulse might be to try to fix this problem with better technology.
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People applying technologies can solve a problem though. The ultimate example is the Printing Press and what that did to promote education around the world.
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it might now lull us into hypnotic complacency.
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You only have to read 1984 to understand that statement. That one I do agree with.
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Learning at its truest is a leap into the unknown.
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So Learning is a leap into the unknown, but we cannot use technology, which produces unknowns, to leap into the unknown of Learning? Am I missing the point?
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Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please.
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I honestly was not agreeing with Lanier, by and large, until this last statement. He really is a Papert-kinda-guy just by that last statement alone. Computers should transform pedagogy and the curriculum. Computers do not have to serve our 20th century curriculums and make people believe that if a computer is involved that this is 21st century learning.
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a partner architect at Microsoft Research and the innovator in residence at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California
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