Thanks to Stephen Downes’ OLDaily today for pointing me towards this very interesting article in the Washington Post. In an article titled A School That’s Too High on Gizmos, English teacher Patrick Welsh writes provocatively about what he calls technolust - “the insatiable need to acquire the latest, fastest, most exotic computer gadgets”. The high school that he works in has acquired the nickname “Gizmo High”.
Welsh says that teacher morale is the lowest and cynicism the highest that he’s seen in years despite a huge $98 million expenditure on providing the school with the latest. The problem is not only that of moving teachers from older to new technologies - e.g. from a traditional overhead projector where they feel comfortable, to laptop, LCD screen, and “school pad” - but also those of students who use the available technologies to do anything but work, laptops that fail to connect with wireless servers, and the fact that the school system is constant playing technology catch-up.
Welsh also claims that technology overkill is turning off talented young teachers. He thinks that computer communication is replacing human interaction, administrators interacting with teachers, teachers interacting with students. Building relationships in traditional ways is being forced to take a back seat.
One teacher claims that the school is becoming like a “correspondence school where all communication is faceless”.
For Patrick Welsh and his fellow this is obviously a depressing situation: seemingly a situation where the tail is wagging the dog.
But my guess that in all schools here in Australia there could be a little of that too. It is part of the tension between good pedagogy and the technology to support it. How far should the technology be of the sort that most teachers feel comfortable with? How do you get to the stage where as technology advances, teachers keep up? How do schools decide what to spend their technology dollars on?
There are some very thought provoking ideas in this article. Well worth reading.
2 Comments
First, we must define technology. Welsh fails to understand that he has used technology - a great deal of technology - every day in his teaching. He has used books and paper. Pens and pencils. Desks and lighting. Chalkboards and the schoolroom itself. Does he imagine these things to be “natural” elements of the earth?
And he fails to also understand that every technology enables and disables, works in some ways and for some students but not in every situation for everyone. Still, teachers like Welsh do not blame “the technology of the book” when a student struggles to read, or the “technology of the room” when students struggle to sit still.
My suggestion - made in full at
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2008/02/too-much-technology.html
is that Mr. Welsh and his fellow teachers realize that the world’s ICT has changed, and that it is well past time to learn to teach to the future.
Thanks for your comments Ira.
My reading between the lines is that Patrick Welsh and his colleagues have rarely been consulted when a new technology is bought and made available. That always makes it an uphill battle in the adoption process. I did have to have a little giggle though over the image of the science teachers clinging to the overhead transparency projector in the face of datashows etc.
It reminded of a cruise I took about 4 years back where, on days when you were at sea, you could attend lectures given by a Harvard history professor on Asian history. The lectures were given in a state of the art theatre with computer controlled lighting, screens etc. His “aids” were overhead transparencies created from some badly typed notes. The notes had spelling errors which he had whited out and written over, on the transparency, in blue ink! I remember thinking at the time that here was a professor at one of the top institutions in the world, who was actually very close to a Luddite.
There was a debate in 2006 that you might remember over Harvard lecturers who wanted to ban laptops in their lectures on the grounds that they distracted students.
http://url.edna.edu.au/9MCT
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