Eliza Doolittle is talking about love, but the words are equally appropriate for technology in education. For the past 15 years computers and internet connections have dramatically increased in schools, but this doesn’t seem to have improved student outcomes. It is not just the luddites who are questioning the impact of every increasing technology.
Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College said,
A stunning trend is emerging for the first time ever. We test incoming freshmen with a general knowledge instrument, then test them again when they graduate. For the past three years, the majority of our students score higher as freshmen than they do as seniors—on the exact same test. The reality is, many of our students know less when they graduate than when they entered.
Carolyn Wakeman, Professor at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
The most alarming change I have witnessed is in the literacy of our students., Twenty years ago most journalism students were avid readers and testing placed them at a college reading level. We currently have students that read nothing outside of class assignments and a few test as low as third grade reading level.It is difficult to be in the midst of monumental change and understand what is really happening. As a person of a certain age, I straddle both the digital technology age and the world in which reading and listening to an expert were the beginning of knowledge.
Could the change be as dramatic as the shift in consciousness that occurred between the oral and literate world with the introduction of the printing press? Reading had been around for centuries, but until technology made it possible to mass-produce books the culture remained an oral one. It is no accident that the paintings in the Sistene Chapel “tell” the story of the Bible from beginning to end.
Claude Levi-Strauss who studied the differences between oral and literate cultures pointed out that once people could read and write memory dropped dramtically. One of the unitended consequences of the literate revolution was that human memory atrophied.
It is time to look at the unintended consequences of technology. As McCluhen indicated, are we moving back toward a pre-literate consciousness?
So along with our struggle to move technology into the schools we need to talk also about which of these consequences need to be welcomed and which need to be combated.
1 comment:
I would like to clarify the thoughts attributed to me, above. I'm not sure of the original source of these words, or their accuracy, but I do know that it is likely I was speaking specifically about college students' math abilities.
What this study found is that many students often start college with stronger math skills than they appear to have at the time of their college graduation. The likely reason for this disappointing outcome is that college students arrive having taken math all the way through high school. In fact, many have taken college-level calculus courses in high school. However, there is a tendency to avoid math classes in college. And the result -- due to forgetting some of what is learned in college -- is weaker skill at college graduation than on first enrollment. The solution, we believe, is to require courses in quantitative reasoning for everyone as part of college distribution requirements.
Hope this information is helpful.
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