Technology in Education

So what is the role of technology in education?

We talked tonight about a quote from Seymour Papert, from 1984: "There won’t be schools in the future…
I think that the computer will blow up the school. . ."

I don't think technology is changing the basic structure of our schools -- most of the time, anyway. Certainly there are some exceptions -- some people take things too far, by way of whatever "technology" is currently the rage. (Grading writing assignments using computers comes to mind. . .) But by and large, I think technology is useful in education as a tool that can facilitate learning.

There are just things you can do with technology that you can't do without it -- not without a whole lot of work and time, anyway! It is using modern technology that I quickly pulled up tonight's lecture notes and grabbed the previous quote. My son's English teacher used the convenience of email tonight to give me a heads-up about the assignment that is due Thursday. I personally welcome the addition of smart boards in his new classroom that is currently under construction (Hillside -- they are a bit behind schedule now because of the fires a few weeks ago). As a math tutor, I know how helpful it is to be able to see the teacher's notes from the day (in their complete form).

Has modern technology changed education? Sure! But since when was "education" a static thing? In my own discipline (math), think of the technology that has been made available over the years. In terms of calculators alone, consider the changes. When my grandparents were young, they used slide rules. My grandpa was a mathematician like me -- he taught math, starting in a small school house in Idaho, and then eventually became the Superintendent of Granite School District. He was no intellectual lightweight. But "advanced mathematics" to him was algebra, and maybe some trig. I think he probably did some calculus at the university. My parents used the newest and the best: calculators!! They had some disadvantages, though, even compared to our cheapest and smallest calculators today. For example, students of that generation learned a concept called "logarithms" by looking up values in a table in the back of their book. Since the tables could never contain all of the possible values a person might need, the students learned to be adept in "interpolating" -- that is, finding a more precise result by narrowing down neighboring results. This all took considerable time, though, and energy. By the time I was in school, we just pushed a button on our calculator to find a logarithm or a trig function. I thought I was pretty advanced as I painstakingly found roots of complex, higher-order polynomials that my grandpa probably didn't even comprehend! But now, my math students find approximations of these roots at the push of a button, shortening their work time dramatically! In the end, our math students today are using technology that I only even saw as a senior at the U. I wrote C+ and Fortran programs to find the best fit line to a group of data. Now in high school, they push a button and find immediately the equation and then use it to predict future behavior in a system! It's crazy!!

I know, I'm rambling. Blogging is fun for me because I have a captive audience to listen to my rants. Bottom line: yes, education changes with every new technology. Yes, some people take it too far, but that rarely lasts the test of time. Eventually, though, we refine our education process as we use the tools that are available to us to teach what the students need to know -- better, faster, and easier. And it's really cool!