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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, September 6, 2010 |
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| Browsing K-12 Education Section | 8 Items Found | ||
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The Digital Realm: Pedagogy By Other Means
Lift from her [the teacher's] shoulders as much as possible of this burden and make her free for those inspirational and thought-stimulating activities which are, presumably, the real function of the teacher.
Sidney L. Pressey
Instructional Design Pioneer, 1926
Ohio State University
Technology As Teaching Aid
Technology is at best a neutral force in education today — not because of its limits or abilities but rather due to its widespread misuse, misdirection and ubiquitous nature.
It has been nearly 20 years since computers first appeared in American classrooms. Their arrival has changed more than today’s classroom teaching setting, for technology has become ubiquitous throughout society. Today’s student, and teachers are tech-savvy and largely connected to one another and the world beyond by a wide array of digital appliances, apparatus and tools. Most students carry portable computing devices, as do teachers and parents. Laptops abound among the technically sophisticated, notebooks, netbooks and cell phones are nearly universal.
Today’s computing equipment is ten generations beyond the clumsy gear that set-off the computer revolution in education just twenty years ago. It is more powerful, it is more engaging, and it is more easily used — even by some first graders. Whether computers advance pedagogy, or simply entertain students who have become addicted to being connected 24 hours a day, is no longer an issue — for technology and education are wed. For most teachers, working with computers and using Internet resources is old hat. For today’s students, the computer age has relieved some, perhaps most of the drudgery of school work common to earlier generations ( when books and libraries were the principal, sometimes the only source materials ).
The Hurrier We Go, The Behinder We Get
Most of today’s public schools are awash in technology. Information is easier to find and the tools of learning are far more engaging, but the outcomes for students remains little changed from 20 years ago. The problems, we have learned are not in our technology but in our schools. The reasons are due to our attitudes toward education — how we underfund it, mismanage it, politicize it and disempower it in our culture.
The concept of interactivity as a methodology for learning are not new. What is new is the flexibility and speed of the computer as a teaching machine.
When one exasperated teacher exclaimed to me, “It seems the hurrier we go, the behinder we get,” I understood her to be saying that compared to failed parental involvement, cultural focus on what’s fun, not what matters, and apathetic attitudes towards learning and intellectual achievement, technology is largely an irrelevancy. Not every teacher feels this way, for there are many others who assure me, “I couldn’t be as productive in terms of student achievement were it not for having computers and interconnection for lesson planning, homework assignment — and assessment tools.”
Those tools, the ones that work everyday to assist both teacher and student are rooted in two very different fields of study and two eras of intellectual engagement. For the history of technology in education began nearly 100 years ago when Sidney L. Pressey conceptualized a theoretical model for machine assisted learning. It was crude, and not at all well received by educators, but it provided a conceptual foundation for what exists today, and what is yet to come.
Origins Of Teaching Machines
Today's Teaching Machines Are Nowhere Near The Equal Of A Good Teacher
Among the digital devices available today, the computer is unique. Computers are intrinsically interactive, that is to say they are uniquely capable of responding to the user’s actions. This is because computers operate according to prescribed rules of logic contained in their programs.
Unlike computing hardware which is intrinsically stupid, computer programs are written by people and so reflect the knowledge and intentions of their authors. The concept of interactivity as a methodology for learning are not new. What is new is the flexibility and speed of the computer as a teaching machine.
Sidney L. Pressey’s pioneering work at Ohio State in the 1920′s, which examined the feasibility of machine based teaching, was far ahead of its time. Pressey, a professor of educational psychology, formulated the notion that certain aspects of learning were amenable to machine based teaching. Machines, Pressey noted, did not tire of repetitive tasks and so were especially well suited to the learn by drill methods favored in the early years of the twentieth century.
Few, if any, of Pressey’s colleagues might have grasped the immense potential of his ideas due to the limitations of 1920′s technology. Pressey wrote, “… the procedure in mastery of drill and informational material were in many instances simple and definite enough to permit handling of much routine teaching by mechanical means.” Pressey further argued that the teacher is “burdened by such routine of drill and information-fixing.” In his day, Pressey was regarded as a strange little man who saw the world in ways they could not, but his vision was flawless.
Philosophical Foundations
At the center of Pressey’s thinking was finding a way to Lift from her [the teacher's] shoulders as much as possible of this burden and make her free for those inspirational and thought-stimulating activities which are, presumably, the real function of the teacher.”
Pressey came upon his ideas by way of the work of Edward Thorndike, also an educational psychologist at Colombia University Teachers College. Thorndike understood the importance of structure in learning, wherein students must first master some materials before moving on to that which is dependent on foundation. What propelled Pressey into ordered, or structured learning machines had been Throndike’s assertion that
“If, by a miracle of mechanical ingenuity, a book could be so arranged that only to him who had done what was directed on page one would page two become visible, and so on, much that now requires personal instruction could be managed by print.”
Perhaps that made sense when it was first conceived nearly a hundred years ago, but today we know far more about pedagogical means and how curriculum fits into 21st century education. Technology is at best a neutral force in education today — not because of its limits or abilities but rather due to its widespread misuse, misdirection and ubiquitous nature.
Today, the mechanical underpinnings of Sidney Pressey’s teaching machine are anachronistic at best, for education is about learning to think, working with others to achieve things we cannot accomplish alone, and to master the skills required to promulgate our culture and protect our freedoms. Everything else is important, but optional, for absent the fundamentals our society is dissolving beneath us.
The core aims of education, thinking, analyzing and working with others are not extensible or attainable through technology — for they require parental engagement, human intuition, educational insight and pedagogical skill.
Fortunately these skills have always been part of our educational system.
We call them teachers.