Improving Education With the Help of Technology, Essay Example

The assigned topic of this argumentative essay is “With the help of technology, students nowadays can learn more information and learn it faster.” As a topic, it would seem to be so obvious as to make an argument against it almost impossible. But I may have succeeded. In this paper, I will argue that the statement is basically a meaningless slogan, empty of real thought.

First, look at it from the point of view of a vocational student studying technology, say computer hardware manufacturing. Here, technology is the subject itself. It is required to enable its own self-study. Students have more information available on that subject thanks to the computers themselves, but the human mind has not adapted in speed along with computer processing power. Students in that subject are not learning more information and learning it faster than they did a generation ago. Instead, they are being more selective. By analogy, instead of drinking water from a fountain, they must get their water from a fire hose going at full blast.

Here is another other extreme: a New York Times story from 2011 tells of a grade-school in the heart of Silicon Valley where some executives and employees of companies such as Ebay, Google, Apple, and Yahoo send their children. Of this school, the article says: “But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home” (Richtell, 2011). Clearly, that school does not believe the technology enables students to learn more information and learn it faster. Instead, they realize that technology enables (or forces) students to absorb more “information,” which is not the same thing as education. If we contrast this with the troubled efforts by the Los Angeles Board of Education to provide iPads for every one of its students, we can see that the matter of computers in the classroom — that is what our topic is really all about — is arguable a socioeconomic issue. Computers supposedly help some of their students compete for college, where, outside of vocational oriented courses, computers are in the classroom because their students bring them in their backpacks, pockets, and purses.

We can get another view of technology and schoolroom education if we consider two other things: 1) technology such as iPads and cellphones are designed to be easy to use. Their digital interfaces are always getting better and better at mimicking analogue real-life movements such as scrolling and page-turning and so need very little formal instruction to master; and 2) they are made to be upgraded — whether through planned obsolescence or inevitable competition — as they get cheaper and more powerful. Seen in this light, programs by schools to purchase iPads and similar devices for their students becomes over time a kind of welfare-program for their district’s most needy students. Those who increasingly are able to afford newer versions due to price competition will have those versions at home. This is likely at least one reason why computers in the classroom are seen by some as “oversold and underused” (Cuban, 2001). By 2001 according to one survey, “60 percent of adults said they had a computer at home. Among children ages 10 to 17 who said they had computers at home, 88 percent told pollsters that they use them to do schoolwork” (Cuban, 2001). Those percentages are now much higher.

What this means is that technology found in the classroom will quickly be old technology. So we might have to rephrase our topic by adding one word: “With the help of new technology, students nowadays can learn more information and learn it faster.” This restatement clears things up. New technology will not necessarily do that. Old(er) technology might be just as good for learning. But is that an argument for buying iPads for all of your students and then not upgrading them regularly? It might be, if the units are used strictly as tools to access real information. After all, students could read about the Civil War from a dog-eared textbook.

There is at least another point to make about technology and classroom learning. Suppose the instructor is unwilling or unable to learn how to incorporate new technology into the classroom? Some instructors will resent the imposition. Others may use technology just to make their own jobs easier. The medium is the message wrote Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. It may be that ultimately the problem underlying this entire issue is the message that new technology, parachuted into what is a really just a normal grade-school or high-school classroom, says about the role of the instructor of that class. In a vocational course, the technology is the class and the instructor’s job. But what about a humanities class?

The subtitle for our assigned reading is “Research on Emerging Technologies and Pedagogies,” which would seem to make clear that new technology will require new methods of teaching, and that those methods will change as technology changes. In that book the authors write  that “Opportunities presented via new educational technologies are inevitably coupled with challenges” (Kwan, Fox, Chan, & Tsang, 2008). That is probably an understatement, but with that statement in mind, let’s rephrase our topic statement one last time: “With the help of technology, teachers nowadays can learn more information and learn it faster.” That is not necessarily true, is it? It might be more true if iPads were given to all a school-districts teachers, not all of its students. We might even judge technology and education not by how it would help students first, but how it would help teachers first. If a tool doesn’t help teachers first, how can it help their students? Looked at this way, we can at last see how meaninglessly conditional our original topic statement really is. It is true under some circumstances, but one cannot really generalize it much, if at all. Teachers and their students have uncountable variables which enhance and restrict learning, not the least of which is is the student-pool demographic.

School districts should consider the words of Marshall McLuhan.

References

Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Kwan, R., Fox, R., Chan, F., & Tsang, P. (2008). Enhancing Learning Through Technology: Research on Emerging Technologies and Pedagogies. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing.

Richtell, M. (2011, October 22). A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute. Retrieved from New York Times: Technology: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&