In her paper, White predicts the current emphasis on information literacy that has cause so much controversy, as the use of the World Wide Web (or just "the Web") at the K-12 level continues to gain popularity. Schwartz's use of science software, though not as sophisticated as Kozma's or Dede's, was designed with the same learner-centered approach in mind. In fact, the whole tenor of this symposium projects an emerging emphasis on "mediacy" as a third competency to be added to the curriculum along with literacy and numeracy.
Though the emphasis on the new technologies has shifted from videodiscs and television to videoconferencing, interactive, collaborative learning environments, and the Web, the philosophical issues surrounding the integration of technology into the school curriculum are as fresh and challenging as they were a decade ago.
Gibbon's approach, like that of Donald Norman, is learner-centered, and emphasizes active exploration and knowledge construction rather than the passivity of lecture attendance and textbook reading. Learner-centered education focuses on a set of realistic, intrinsically motivating problems that students work on in small groups. "Teachers carefully structure the problems so that, in the course of solution, students naturally pass through and acquire all topics of relevance" (Norman, 1996, p. 26). According to Gibbon, students must learn to search out and discover needed information from the multiple sources available in electronic format, and to evaluate it critically, using research techniques previously the domain of graduate students. And, as Sherry and Myers (1997) also point out, collaborative design would be the logical next step in the learning process. To create finished products and projects, Gibbon insists that all students learn to type; this skill is no longer the domain of secretarial students, but a universal "must" in the Information Age.
Changes to the traditional curriculum will be pervasive. In language arts, students must learn to scan textual material visually, paying careful attention to indices and menus. They must also learn how to use a word processor, generate professional-looking documents with a desktop publishing system, and collaboratively produce multimedia-based assignments. In mathematics, problem-solving principles and geometric relations should be emphasized using interactive graphics that present mathematical relations in visually concrete form, since rote calculations can be relegated to computers and pocket calculators. In the science classroom, computers can collect, display, and analyze lab data, simulate large, small, or dangerous natural phenomena, and dynamically model complex systems. In social studies classes, teachers who have used "Oregon Trail" and other computer simulations have found them both engrossing and convincing. Music can be written with electronic synthesizers. Draw and paint software can help artists to create sophisticated images, and image editing software can enhance photographs and scanned images.
Changes in structure and style mainly involve blurring the boundaries between curriculum domains. This has been done at the college level by integrating engineering and computer science, or instructional design and graphic arts. Gibbon suggests a similar change at the transition from the elementary to the secondary school level, replacing traditional subjects with collaborative, topic-driven, multidisciplinary courses taught by experts in their respective fields.
Gibbon's suggested changes are being implemented today in experimental classrooms and in ordinary schools alike. At Southern Illinois's Collaborative Learning Laboratory (Koschmann et al, 1996; Feltovich et al, 1996 ), students use specially designed desks with workstations that can access the electronic resources of the library and the Internet to support problem-based learning in ill-structured, multidisciplinary domains. Rural students participating in Vermont's WEB Project (Billig et al., 1997) compose works of art and music electronically, upload their files to a state-wide Web site, and share them with both local and European artists and composers for further revision and refinement. They then use their newfound skills in their social studies classes to photograph and videotape raw waste as it spews from paper mills into Vermont's rivers, test the waters downstream, and present their findings on The WEB Project's Web site. Thus, they apply their skills and knowledge to problems that transcend the bounds of the ordinary classroom curriculum.
In answer to Gibbon's call for changes in curriculum and instruction, Brandt remarks on the difficulty of the task of finding useful information on the Internet--disorientation, navigation inefficiency, and cognitive overload. Constructivists like Brandt argue that an emphasis on knowledge construction and problem-solving in complex, ill-structured domains applies directly to teaching with the Internet (1997, p. 113). By focusing on concepts and connecting them to the learner's mental models, and by integrating them with experiences that learners use to alter and strengthen their own mental models, a constructivist approach to teaching information retrieval will give users the structure they need to get the most out of the Internet (p. 117).
...a rich and balanced curriculum that includes a well-developed, sequential program in history, literature, science, mathematics, and the arts. (p. 27).She, like many experienced teachers who are being introduced to the new technologies, seems a bit overawed by its jargon and the powerful forces that it has unleashed in society today, and is quite articulate in presenting the opposing viewpoint:
If the arrival of the electronic classroom is just beyond the horizonÐand history should caution us not to be too sure in our assumptions--the schools will enjoy certain benefits, but must also be aware of implicit dangers. p. 28).Not surprisingly, Ravitch's prediction has been right on the mark. Students in Hudson, Massachusetts will be able to take microbiology from an instructor in Pennsylvania, while some students in Fremont, California, will be studying statistics with a North Carolina teacher. Classes such as these are supported by the first nationwide "Virtual High School" (Viadero, 1997)--a program that uses the Internet to connect students with teachers up to a continent away.
Ravitch admits the success of computerized drill-and-practice and self-paced instruction, of word processing, and of computer-based simulations. She feels the prime areas for new technology are science and mathematics, mainly through the use of visual demonstrations of abstract concepts and the ability of students to solve problems interactively. Music and arts also benefit by videocassettes of performances and CD-ROM images of museum collections. She is not as enthusiastic concerning literature and history, but admits that video libraries of great plays and films are of value, as well as video (and online) encyclopedias of important recent or current events.
On the down side, she feels that there is a danger that reliance on exciting visuals may distort the curriculum by focusing on the entertaining and provocative features of events rather than encouraging thoughtful analysis of their underlying economic or social forces. "The past" may reach back only as far as visual resources permit, thereby limiting the historical periods that could be studied through film or video. Moreover, the greater emphasis and appeal of the new technologies may tend to devalue printed materials, thus creating an elite class of "print literates". Children weaned on Sesame Street may never experience the joy of reading great novels, both classic and contemporary. Good teachers must always draw on a variety of resources, and good students must always be able to read great literature.
In this regard, Ravitch's predictions are less accurate. For the past decade, the Gutenberg Project has been actively creating an online database with the full text of major works of prose and poetry by noted authors, that can be downloaded and printed by anyone with an Internet connection. Members of the Vermont Historical Society and The Center For The Book have been archiving important local historical documents and using them to stimulate civic discourse, not only within the schools, but within the community at large.
Ravitch also notes that the use of technology can exacerbate the present economic differences between school districts. The current proliferation of Technology Challenge Grants and the efforts of the Comprehensive Centers represent significant initiatives to assure equity in technology access for all students, particularly those at risk of educational failure, providing them with opportunities to reach challenging state content and performance standards (U.S. Department of Education, 1997).
Ravitch also worries that with widespread use of computers comes the widespread use of standardized testing, multiple-choice tests, and the like. Student activities can degenerate into "filling in blanks and circling words, activities that prepare them for the next round of test-taking" (p. 33). This has implications for the president's controversial plan for new, voluntary national tests for students. Will the proposed 4th grade reading and 8th grade math tests help improve classroom practices and student learning--the administration's stance--or will they prove useless or have unintended negative consequences, as some experts claim?
Considering her essentialist background, it is not surprising that Ravitch now supports President Clinton's plan for national testing, provided the administration agrees to relax control over the tests. Though she is not altogether satisfied with the tests as they currently stand, and supports neither the Republican nor the Democratic viewpoint on the matter, she is recently quoted as stating, "We're saying fix it. It can be fixed. We think there should be national testing" (Lawton, p. 34).
Ravitch's main concern in her paper can be summed up in the following question: Will technology eliminate routine tasks and free the mind for higher understanding of why we live and what makes our lives worthwhile, or will the glamour and gimmickry of educational technology erode the humanistic side of the curriculum and eventually dehumanize education? And her main contention is that, for all its hype, technology may eventually prove irrelevant in our quest for humanistic education and understanding of the human condition.
In this regard, she appears to espouse the same view as Robert Kozma, who, in his ongoing debate with Richard Clark, follows Marshall McLuhan in insisting that the medium is the message (Clark & Salomon, 1985; Kozma, 1991; Clark, 1994; Kozma, 1994). The curriculum must be designed to account for this effect. Much learning will take place outside the normal school environment, at the hands of the computer software industry. Students need to comprehend both the content and the construction of images so they will have some sense of control over the new imagery-based technologies.
Clearly, images are not new. White, however, contends that "electronic imagery is not only a new way of learning, but it may develop into a new way of thinking about our world" (p. 43). For example, scientific images are essential for presenting the huge amounts of data produced by mainframe computers in the fields of astrophysics and weather forecasting. Computerized animation of these visuals can unveil latent patterns and dynamic processes, as Judah Schwartz explains in next paper. As it becomes possible to form images of problems, rather than seeing them spelled out in linear form, we may be able to hold more complex relationships in an image and to see the interactivity of one image with others. (p. 59).
On the cognitive level, print is serially or hierarchically organized--a logical sequential, linear process. In contrast, powerful images viewed on a television set may occur in any order, perhaps even simultaneously--a relational process. It is important to understand the implications of sequence, movement, and color of electronic imagery for the transmission of information and its subsequent processing by the human mind. TV commercials work because we can recall images by using music or words as cues. However, it is not clear whether images invoke other images, or whether images are remembered better and longer than information presented in a static, text-based format.
There are five significant changes in information presented in image form, as compared with print. Images are transitory, have no commonly accepted standards, are limited to short time durations, tend to be fragmented because continuity and editing cost money, and are often used as an entertainment device to gain the student's attention. Information may be distorted to produce an entertaining program, thereby sacrificing accuracy, truth, and objectivity in the presentation process. We may expect complex issues to be presented in short units, leading to superficiality and oversimplification. Human behavior may be modified to copy the activities seen on TV commercials and documentaries. History may degenerate into nostalgia for the past--that is, the recent past since the film industry was born.
The education industry must realize that it cannot compete with entertainment for the students' time and interest. It cannot just add the new technology to the existing curriculum. New learning styles must be at the core of the school's curriculum design. Educators must shift their focus from what technology to buy and where to put it, and think carefully about what and how to teach in the Information Age. As our world view becomes more complex, problems in all knowledge domains become intertwined. Thinking with images may become a critically important tool for parallel, nonlinear information processing in a world where the old, linear solutions are no longer appropriate.
In this regard, White has identified an area of concern that had begun to be studied two years later by the cognitive flexibility theorists, particularly Feltovich, Spiro, and their colleagues. (See Spiro, Feltovich, et al, 1988). In particular, they have found a tendency for individuals to "understand" complex subject matter too narrowly; to try to [narrow their view] inappropriately implies some dominant, central organization; to view things from only one of a large number of legitimate perspectives; to deal with only a small number of dimensions in multidimensional phenomena; and so forth. (Feltovich, Spiro, Coulson, & Feltovich, 1996, p. 28.)
This new learning style, cognitive flexibility, aims to enable an individual to contemplate a given situation form the general world perspective of some other individuals--to develop a group perspective in the student's own mind by the use of nonlinear, hypertext problem spaces. There is, however, an unintended consequence of nonlinear, hypertextual environments--the tendency for students to get "lost in hyperspace" and become disoriented.
White ends by saying that schools must take up the challenge and educate students "not just with technological skills, but with an understanding of how information itself is changing" (p. 60). Students must learn to evaluate the quality of information and analyze imagery. They must be able to discriminate between junk information and quality information, to judge its reliability or bias, to spot distortions and sensationalism, to distinguish facts from persuasion, to know how the technology itself shapes the information it carries, and to understand the economic forces that influence the form and flow of information.
In essence, White foresees problems with and warns us about the impending, imagistic world overloaded with information that Pinar fears--an approach in which the media present information but do not sequence or make sense out of it, the representation of the present in an ahistorical perspective, the fragmentation of pictures, sound, and text, leading to the death of the connecting narrative, and therefore, the inability of students to cognitively map and to make meaning out of the onslaught of disjointed bits and bytes they are exposed to (1995, p. 470). White insists that these problems will have to be addressed in the 21st Century curriculum.
In the current symposium, he answers a set of questions presented to him by the Task Force of the National Governor's Association. The first question deals with the training necessary for educators as we move into the Information Age. Dr. Schwartz is well aware of the general public's lack of numeracy, as well as their obliviousness to other languages and cultures. Changing this situation demands a commitment to excellence. Teachers, particularly at the elementary level, must be educated in the use of technology to teach the traditional subjects of science, mathematics, language, history, and literature, as well as in the use of the technology itself, including programming, the appropriate use of applications software, and computer-based management of education. Teachers at all levels must see education as a lifelong learning process--the current vision of the IASA--rather than as a mastery of specific content areas.
Good software can foster deep insights into ideas and abstract concepts. A good piece of educational software is "one that is about a set of ideas and not about a piece of curricular content at some grade level or part of a scope and sequence" (p. 69). Schwartz's Geometry Supposer and Function Supposer attest to that. Teachers who use such software must forego their roles as intellectual authorities and become facilitators of their students' discovery process. In this regard, he shares Norman's emphasis on student-centered learning and Marcia Linn's emphasis on knowledge integration. Linn notes that many students complain that traditional courses lack relevance.
They say, "I will never use the periodic table" or "Why learn the parts of a frog?" Often courses reinforce these student views. (Linn, 1996, p. 34.)Linn's current activities with her Knowledge Integration Environment have precollege students apply scientific evidence from the Internet to personally relevant problems like keeping a dwelling cool on hot summer days, making lighting cost-effective, or selecting safe clothing for bicycling at night--problems they consider important now and will encounter again in the future. Her software, like Schwartz's a decade before her, is definitely about a set of ideas that can be applied in a plethora of practical problems. This is in keeping with Reid's view that "ways of treating problems should be guided by the nature of the problems themselves" (p. 48).
Specifically, Schwartz espouses teaching Boolean algebra so students may browse databases competently--an argument recently brought up by Elliot Soloway concerning students who have not gained the necessary competence to use sophisticated World Wide Web search engines such as Alta Vista (Soloway & Wallace, 1997). Schwartz also believes that students must be taught the essentials of good writing by teachers who are, themselves, good writers, and not expect electronic text editors to repair their grammar or clarify their thoughts. Technology can never be a substitute for educational expertise.
The second question involves the actions necessary to redress inequities in technology-rich educational settings. The answer is simple:
It is only those teachers who are confident and competent (with the products of new technologies) that can look to each and every child and expect excellence. (p. 71).Such a teacher must view him/herself as a continuing learner--again, the overarching aim of the IASA.
The third question deals with the kinds of changes schools must undergo to use technology to be more productive. Schwartz recognizes that much learning takes place outside the schools, and predicts that it will continue to do so because of the low cost of distributing educational material to the home. Children will learn most of the skills presently taught by the schools in the isolation of their own homes. This is an argument posed by Chris Dede at this year's annual meeting of the AERA (Jacobson, Kozma, Dede, & Kaput, J.,1997), in which he demonstrated three interactive physics simulations that run on the Nintendo platform--the same platform that is very popular with children who play video games at home.
If the function of the schools is not to degenerate to a purely custodial role, Schwartz argues, "they must become centers for the learning and teaching of that which cannot be learned and taught in isolation" (p. 73). This means redefining productivity in a humanistic, rather than a businesslike sense--the same sense in which Deming defines a system of schools: "a system in which these groups [pupils, teachers, school boards, boards of regents, and parents] work together to achieve the aims that the community has for the school--growth and development of children, and preparation for them to contribute to the prosperity of society (Deming, 1996, p. 62).
In closing, Schwartz argues that we should de-emphasize short-term productivity (acquiring skills to gain employment) and emphasize long-term productivity, which he defines as
the ability of every person to realize some substantial fraction of the promise and potential that he or she has to lead an interesting life and to contribute to the happiness and well-being of others. (p. 72).
Many responsible teachers do not see technology as a priority, except for the use of word processors for English composition. As teachers continue to lock into "tight boxes labeled history, math, science, English, and so on" (p. 79), administrators continue to resist or be disinterested in classroom technology. They do not know "how to evaluate the teacher in the role of the collaborator in the learning process instead of the dispenser of knowledge" (p. 79), nor do they make it easy for teachers to check out the equipment and software they need from their centralized locations or to have ready access to computer labs when necessary. Part of this is due to the trend of recent years when schools hastened to buy computers without knowing how to use them productively, resulting in disillusionment with technology and a lot of unused, outdated equipment. Unfortunately, this trend is as prevalent in 1997 with the Technology Challenge Grants as it was a decade ago.
Federal, state, and local budget cuts continue to dry up sources of revenue for education, while the relatively low salaries of teachers tend not to attract talented undergraduates to the profession. At the same time, technological and societal changes are occurring at such a fast pace that people must seek new training repeatedly just to remain effective in their work.
The problem is not the technology itself. Technology is, in fact, advancing faster than our ability to cope with it. The problem is that we must assess and respond to technology's impact on our lives. And the answer requires a definition of skills, abilities, and attitudes that we want students to acquire. (p. 82).The skills that she proposes transcend mediacy--they are the ability to evaluate information, the ability to set priorities, and the ability to make decisions--meta-skills that transfer to the world outside the classroom.
Addressing specific questions such as abortion, the legalization of marijuana, or capital punishment leads to cross-disciplinary work in teaching and the use of large databases by students to research pertinent information. With many sources of knowledge, students must be able to differentiate objective sources from biased ones, primary sources from secondary ones, and evaluate the information they access. Skills such as these are now beginning to be integrated into state frameworks such as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) and the Vermont Framework. In fact, George Cassutto, an innovative Social Studies teacher in Hagerstown, New Jersey, has his students do their research online to develop both the "pro" and the "con" arguments concerning controversial subjects, evaluate the information they find, write and revise position papers, and post them on the World Wide Web. In this way they are responsible not only to their teacher and their classmates, but to the entire global community as well.
McGee also notes that an educated person must learn to deal with both short-term and long-term priorities. Schools are in a position to help students understand priorities and their meaning: life priorities that give structure and meaning to their lives, though they may need to be adjusted many times in the course of their careers. This is an integral part of lifelong learning. Analyzing priorities, making business decisions, or making life decisions are problem-solving skills that many young people lack, but which she believes can be taught, using either hierarchical (stepwise) or relational (global) methods. This is process-oriented, not result-oriented, and therefore represents a shift in perspective. Having evaluated the pertinent information effectively and set clear priorities, she feels that a student is then in a position to make sensible decisions. McGee ends by identifying the major issue in school reform today:
We must fundamentally rethink how we educate our children, what our priorities are, and how we think and make decisions...by and large, we are still teaching what we have always taught, the way it has usually been taught. Not many schools or teachers have the time, interest, or energy to radically change the way schools work. (p. 88.)
Pressure is being brought upon teachers from two opposite directions: the use of technology to support an existential, student-centered approach vs. the use of technology to support the acquisition of basic skills so that students can meet state and national standards--a systemic reform approach. Diane Ravitch's misgivings about the current focus on entertaining and provocative features of current events rather than reflection on their underlying historical, economic, or social forces, are not unlike the misgivings of some teachers today who do not feel that providing teachers and students with the most up-to-date technology, information, and teaching materials, addresses the true needs of students.
Ravitch's presentation is a nice contrast to the opening paper by Gibbon, placing educational technology in a less favorable light than Gibbon does. In the final paper, we see that McGee's viewpoint is much like Gibbon's--a marketplace approach to learning that takes advantage of the latest, popular materials, and that emphasizes their positive aspects and downplays their unintended consequences.
A present-day advocate of Gibbons' approach is Jack Christie, the chairman of the Texas state school board. Christie is convinced that replacing traditional textbooks with laptop computers will boost student achievement and will give every child in his district equal access to information. His viewpoint is supported by a 1996 study by the Center for Applied Special Technology in Peabody, Massachusetts, which showed that elementary and middle school students with access to online resources produced better projects on the civil rights movement than those who used only books, computer databases, and CD-ROM encyclopedias (Jacobson, 1997). But in the words of Neil Postman, is this the end of education?
Ravitch also brings up the point about norm-referenced testing, which, today, is gaining popularity with the current proposals for statewide and nationwide testing. Since assessment and standards go hand in hand, many states are implementing content standards such as the TEKS in Texas and the Vermont Framework. This presents a real problem for teachers who wish to use Gibbon's constructivist approach and yet are expected to teach to a scope-and-sequence curriculum that is aligned with content standards.
As mentioned above, these teachers have their feet in two boats. On the one hand, teachers who buy into the popularization of the media and the Internet, as espoused by Gibbon and McGee, find that technology motivates students, and that students who use the Web as an integral part of their total learning environment will work harder and produce more creative products and performances. On the other hand, these teachers realize that computer alternatives to traditional teaching materials and strategies may de-emphasize basic skills--the very skills that tend to be tested on statewide assessments. "Children are not learning to read. Until that happens, I don't want to talk about anything else" says Donna Ballard, a school board member from east Texas (Jacobson, 1997). It is a real dilemma for a classroom teacher in the late 1990s to try to balance what Reid would consider the systematic approach (content and performance standards compiled by experts) as in the state frameworks, Goals 2000, and IASA, and the existential approach (student-centered learning) favored by Elliot Soloway, Marcia Linn, and Donald Norman.
In the third paper, White places her emphasis on one of the postmodern aspects of technology--the effects of disjointed imagery upon the learner's cognitive structures. Herein, she predicts Pinar's concerns about an imagistic world overloaded with information, in which not only history but the very representation of the present can degenerate into meaninglessness. Lowell Monke, a computer technology teacher from Iowa, takes a more deliberative approach to this problem: technology encourages an appreciation for efficiency, measurability, objectivity, rationality, progress, and the accumulation and manipulation of data, but it devalues other types of learning such as the pursuit of truth, the comprehension of great ideas, the generation of one's own ideas, the discovery of meaning, the use of good judgment, the exercise of emotional maturity, and the development of wisdom (1997, p. 33).
Ten years ago, however, these learned authorities could not have foreseen the major changes in technology that are taking place today, and the effects that they are currently having on the schools. Children who have been brought up with media and computers consider it easier to create a multimedia project than to write a term paper (Billig et al, 1997). In Texas, Jack Christie has stopped purchasing textbooks for his schools in favor of computers, since information on the Web is more timely than that found in textbooks. High school students are taking classes in their virtual classroom from professors half a continent away. However, with all these changes to the means of education, will the ends change? In the words of Postman and Deming, will it really result in a better life?
It appears that, with the advent of the information superhighway, students are better equipped to study the culture of their own country, as well as those of others. However, the current emphasis of the IASA on flexible workers and lifelong learners is very different from Barber's notion of the educated person as a participant in civic discourse, "in the sovereignty of reason, in the universality of citizenship, and in the capacity of women and men to transform themselves through community life" (Barber, 1992, p. 76). Who can predict whether or not this will change?
Surprisingly, the lone presenter who emphasizes the humanistic approach that Barber espouses and that Monke so much admires, is Judah Schwartz--a former professor from MIT, now at Harvard--an active member of the Cambridge cultural scene. Here is a man who is truly excited and energized by the teaching and learning of science, but who sees science and technology as just one part of a more comprehensive world view. Like Monke, Schwartz realizes that the computer is one of the most powerful world view influencers in that it expands one aspect of our cognitive processesÑlogic. On the other hand, he is not willing to sacrifice the other aspects of learningÑintuition and the entire gamut of emotional and spiritual experiences, in favor of a technocentric curriculum. That is the real end of education.
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