Geek Heresy (20 page)

Taylor had concrete suggestions. A call-and-response clapping protocol to recover student attention. Five-minute timeouts for disruptive students. A meeting with her if that didn’t work.

When I instituted the rules, the students naturally resisted. They tested me, and in quick succession, I had to send several students to the formidable Ms. Taylor. I felt bad about it, but I realized I had to overcome my kneejerk overempathy for the children. Luckily, fifth graders are at an age where even the more disruptive ones still defer to adult authority. I found that anyone sent to Taylor didn’t want to go back. Within a week, students were better behaved, and Taylor stopped casting concerned glances my way. Maintaining an attentive classroom atmosphere was the most difficult part of what I did at TAF, but it was a necessary foundation for learning.

There’s nothing special about the rules I imposed. Experienced teachers have their own versions. What’s notable, however, is that in a class about computers, what was required first was a change in people: good behavior from students and the willingness to discipline on my part. If technology amplifies human forces, then a poor outcome often means that the right human forces aren’t in place. Where people problems exist, even the best technology will flop.

Does Not Compute

This principle applies to education broadly. To wonder what ails American education is to open a Pandora’s box. It could be poverty in early childhood or school districts funded by inadequate property taxes. Maybe it’s poorly designed incentives for teachers or elite flight into the private school system. The truth likely lies in some combination of these factors and more, but the problem is definitely not a lack of computers. Even people who think that more gadgets would help don’t argue that US educational decline was caused by a decline of technology.

In America, much of our collective handwringing about education comes from comparisons with other countries. In the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), American students ranked twenty-seventh in math and seventeenth in reading.
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But while the United States as a whole may be losing its competitive edge, stronger students aren’t sliding. At the annual International Math Olympiads, for example, where countries send their six best precollege mathematicians to solve problems that make SAT questions seem like 1+1, the United States regularly places in the top three.
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But as data from PISA show, high-scoring countries emphasize high-quality education for everyone, not just the elite. America, unfortunately, does poorly here when compared against thirty-three of the world’s wealthiest countries. We have the third-lowest school enrollment rate (only 82 percent) for fifteen-year-olds, and we’re ninth worst in educational disparity – scores vary particularly widely between well-off students and low-income ones.
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We all know that our schools are unequal. Less acknowledged is that this inequality is responsible for our lack of competitiveness internationally.

If educational inequality is the main issue, then no amount of digital technology will turn things around. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan echoed the wishful thinking of many when he said, “Technology can level the playing field instead of tilting it against low-income, minority and rural students – who may not have laptops and iPhones at home.”
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This notion is misleading and misguided. Technology amplifies preexisting differences in wealth and achievement. Children with greater vocabularies get more out of Wikipedia. Students with behavioral challenges are more distracted by video games. Rich parents will pay for tutors so that their children can learn to program the devices that others merely learn to use. Technology at school may level the playing field of access, but a level field does nothing to improve the skill of the players, which is the whole point of education. Technology by itself only increases the gap between the haves and have-nots.
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Educational technology scholar Mark Warschauer confirms that “the introduction of information and communication technologies in . . . schools serves to amplify existing forms of inequality.”
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What the US education system needs above all isn’t more technology, but a deliberate allocation of high-quality adult supervision focused on those who need it most. The specifics are daunting and complex, but this isn’t a problem that technology can fix.
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The Proper Use of Educational Technology

Information technology’s very power means we have to be careful with it. When I observed the other teachers at TAF, I found that while each of them had a unique set of rules, the effect in their classrooms was constructive learning. At first, this puzzled me. When their students opened up their laptops, they got to work; when my students opened up their laptops, they watched YouTube videos.

My problems began before the class started. When students arrived, they would pull out laptops from the cabinet and take them to their desks. For those who were early, I let them do as they wanted. They were there, after all, to become familiar with computers. It seemed sensible to maximize their time with the technology. Don’t people learn best by doing?

But the result was that I would have to spend ten minutes at the start of class calling everyone to order. If I let them have dessert before dinner, they lost their appetite for the main meal.

Most of the other teachers didn’t allow this. In fact, they carefully managed computer time. After consulting with other TAF teachers, I picked some rules that made sense to me:

       
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At certain times, such as when I was doing a demonstration, laptops must be closed.

       
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Laptops cannot be used before class, even if students arrive early.

       
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Laptop time in class must be used for class activities.

       
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Students who break any of the above rules twice in one day must go see Ms. Taylor.

The point was to constrain usage to educational ends. Sure, this was a computer class, but the goal wasn’t to maximize screen time, it was to maximize learning. There are numerous theories about how children learn best, but it’s clear that watching music videos isn’t the best way to develop programming skills.

Veteran teachers will tell you that classroom rules should be introduced at the beginning of the school year in order to establish a productive class culture. I wasn’t a veteran teacher, so I had to claw back privileges the students had gotten used to. It was a struggle. But once the students grew accustomed to my laptop rules, they (mostly) stopped trying to sneak in games and started focusing. I was happy to see that as students were freed from their inner yoke to games, they started asking questions about Scratch. “Can I add sounds to this?” “How do I make the balloon pop?” “What will make this character spin around five times?”

TAF taught me to be conscious and purposeful about laptop use. It was important to use technology strategically and to leave it out when it wasn’t contributing to learning. Even Steve Jobs once admitted, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
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Teachers, who must handle twenty, thirty, or forty children at a time, need to do the same. The advice is even applicable for older students. University professors, including me, increasingly prohibit device use in the classroom. “I’m a pretty unlikely candidate for internet censor,” wrote Clay Shirky. “But I have just asked the students in my fall seminar to refrain from using laptops, tablets, and phones in class.”
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Common Sense in Schools

In 2013, a friend asked me to help the board of the Northwest School, a private school in Seattle, think through their technology strategy. The school was known for its emphasis on the arts, its international student
body, and its dedication to community service, but the board chair told me that they had been conservative about digital equipment. At one of their board meetings, I presented some of what I’ve covered in this book and then moved on to their specific questions.

The discussion was open, lively, and intelligent. Some of the board members were excited about computing and feared their children would be left behind. Others were anxious about potential distractions and liked the school’s humanities bent. These are exactly the feelings that underlie so much of the debate about technology in our society. And they’re valid. Emotions, though, are too blunt an instrument for carving strategy. They inevitably pose the question in terms of more or less, yes or no: Should every classroom have a smart board or not? Should we have WiFi or not? Should students all have laptops or not?

The real questions, though, require more precision, and the best way to think of them is to ask, What positive forces should be amplified? (And what negative ones, not?) I nudged the discussion toward specific educational goals and how technology might help achieve them. The school had a vibrant theater program, for example, which would benefit from good video production tools. It also came out that the school encouraged unique teaching styles, and that some teachers had wanted smart boards. The consensus was to install them when requested, but to recognize that not every classroom needed them. Some faculty liked to film their lectures and make them publicly available. That shouldn’t be discouraged, everyone agreed, but the school’s focus would remain on the students under its roof. A major effort to put lessons online seemed unwarranted. And then there was the inevitable question of campus-wide wireless access. As we discussed the educational goals it might serve, the need seemed to vanish. Most students carried smartphones and had PCs at home. The library had several rows of terminals with Internet access. None of the students were complaining that they couldn’t do research online.

The biggest concern was whether to offer a computer programming class, which the school had never done. One father argued passionately that every profession increasingly benefited not only from the use of
computers but also knowledge of how to program them. Some agreed. Another person hinted that the school’s mission was broad and explicitly avoided vocational training. Others agreed. The debate went back and forth. Programming could be offered as an elective, but because faculty, student, and classroom schedules were jam-packed, something would have to be cut, and there was no agreement on what that would be.

At the end of the meeting, that question remained unresolved. I knew, though, that whatever decision they made, it would be right for them. It’s the schools that work hard to maintain a strong learning culture, whose faculty and parents make important decisions together, and that put their educational goals first in making technology decisions – exactly the schools with strong heart, mind, and will – that technology’s power optimally amplifies.

CHAPTER 7

A Different Kind of Upgrade

Human Development Before Technology Development

T
hink back to the Hole-in-the-Wall project. Children in poor neighborhoods were given free access to computers, and they figured out how to use them without any adult help. But they tended to do little other than play video games.

Those were kids, though. Maybe adults would be different. Such was the hope of my colleagues Sean Blagsvedt, Udai Pawar, and Aishwarya Ratan who ran a project, inspired by the Hole-in-the-Wall, which they called Kelsa+. (“Kelsa” is the Kannada word for “work.”) They wanted to see what adults who normally didn’t work with computers would do if one was made available to them at no cost.

The team installed a PC in the basement of our office in Bangalore and connected it to the Internet. Then they held a meeting with our housekeeping staff, security guards, and technicians. The forty or so staff members were told that the PC was theirs to use as they wished as long as they abided by all laws and office policies. They were also told that the software would log any activity.

The PC got a lot of use, and after a few months the hard drive was stuffed with data. The researchers analyzed it, and what they saw
combined the lessons of both Hole-in-the-Wall and telecenters. As with Hole-in-the-Wall, most of the staff – the men in particular – quickly picked up the basics of computer use. They learned from the technicians and security guards among them who had some familiarity with computers already. They browsed online, they sent each other brief emails, and they watched YouTube videos. One favorite activity was to replace the desktop’s background image with portraits they took of themselves with the webcam. In surveys, the staff raved about the project. One of them said, “I felt so happy that day when we had the [meeting]. For the first time I touched a computer and did so many things without a mistake.” His colleague mentioned, “Since the computer is here, we get awareness! Also because we can see the computer daily, my desire to learn and use it has increased very much.” Another said, “In all my service, this is one of the best workplaces I have seen.”
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