The Technology Agnostic or When Stories Aren’t Enough

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. - Eric Hoffer

Whether it is because of a) how God made me, b) how nature engineered me, or c) how Mom potty-trained me, I am more skeptic than believer. This skepticism extends to religion, politics and, especially, to technology use in school. But of course, if you’ve read anything on the Blue Skunk, you’ve guessed this.

Both believer and skeptic are alike in one important way: both think the other is a complete fool. I am always surprised when I post a blog entry or write a column that raises perfectly rational questions about some sacred cow, and then get a slew of emotional responses. (The LWW says I write such things because I like pushing people’s buttons. Maybe.)

Or if you will...

 

Age moves us from left to right on the believer-skepric scale. Yes, even I was once a young, dewy-eyed, newly-hired technology director with mountains to climb, buildings to be networked, a screw driver in hand, and trust in my heart. What happened? What vendor’s broken promise; what project that went over budget; what equipment failure during a critical demonstration; what useless research finding finally broke my sweet, idealistic spirit? Job may well have been able to maintain his faith in Jehovah; I could not maintain my faith in Jobs.

Now I’d never dream of trying to convince a jihadist not to have faith in his virgins, nor separate a political pundit from his bleak cynicism. Such attempts would be fruitless if not immoral. But I will try to persuade as many readers as possible that  as conscientious educators we better serve our students by being skeptics than evangelists.

Yes, share what works. If a technology use engages and motivates students; if it helps make them better communicators or problem-solvers; if it even, heaven forbid, helps them do better on tests, we should document and share these experiences.

“Documentation,” however, needs to be more than a simple story. Stories indeed can be powerful, but stories alone will not persuade us skeptics. And when it comes to things educational, there are more of us born every day – especially among parents and politicians. We need numbers, evidence, bottom-line stuff, and, as my statistician friend likes to remind me, ‘The plural of anecdote is not data.” Sure, tell that cute story about how Janie got all bright-eyed about PowerPoint, but the skeptic will smile and worry about all the other kids in Janie’s class. Cynics know that anomalies make great stories too.  Stories need to be the face of data, the personalization of evidence, the memorable example of a supportable conclusions.

It behooves us all to be technology agnostics, I suppose – neither completely convinced of educational technology’s value nor lack thereof. And in all fairness, we should be library agnostics as well. Although it pains me to say so.

I'm  glad that there are passionate people in education –folks that are excited about not just what they do, but about possibilities as well. People who care enough to have feelings about an issue. Teachers with hope and vision and faith. Believers, if you will. You are, of course, complete fools. But please, stay that way.

Response to the Flat World Library Corporation Letter

Writers write, of course, because they get satisfaction from others reacting to their writing. It is especially gratifying to a writer when a highly-respected colleague takes the time to send a compliment and comment.

My friend John Royce, Library Director for the  Robert College of Istanbul, is such a colleague. He is a leader in the international school community, author and workshop leader, and I had the great good fortune to first meet him in Berlin at an ECIS Conference in 2002. Anyway, he was kind enough to send this (appearing here with his kind permission) after reading my column that had at its heart "A Letter from the Flat World Library Corporation."

 Dear Doug,
Greetings from Istanbul!

Where spring keeps threatening to be almost just around the corner, and  the March issue of Library Media Connection has just hit my desk.

As always, I turned to the back of the mag, headed straight for "Head for the Edge," and...

Many, many congratulations.  The Flat World Lib Corp article is so spot-on, every word counts.  Just love that "We can even help your  teachers design assignments and assessments, making them free to
lecture" - what a lovely throwaway thought.

It's all already here, isn't it?  What with Questia and Virtual Library  and Turnitin and ETS TOEFL assessment and Google Answers and Kasamba and any of the periodicals databases and ...  it's all already here, and it  just needs some clever marketing to bundle it all together into a single package and then some aggressive, misleading advertising (did someone say turnitin?) - and it's down to the retraining center.  Unless we can  convince our cash-strapped superintendents that the answer is NOT more technology, it's more awareness of what technology does not do, more  thought about the purpose of education...  Indispensable Librarian? 

Nobody's indispensable, not even Google (which today happily allows indispensible and no hint that it might be a misspelling).

(You know, there are some people who believe that the purpose of education is NOT just to ensure that the masses receive enough knowledge almost to survive in today's world, but never enough to question the system or the powers that be) (and if they do, it's a certain lack of Patriot Act-ism and therefore criminal) (but sometimes it seems that it is only some people, and not the "right" people, who believe it should be more...)

More power to you, Doug,

John adds in a follow-up e-mail:

I came across i-cue <http://www.i-cue.co.uk/> a few weeks back, an online bookshop which will download complete books to your mobile phone.  The examples cited included "Gulliver's travels", "The complete works of Shakespeare" and "Peter Pan" (along with a handful of in-print in-copyright texts).   On your phone!  Get a life, please. 

The Times Educational Supplement article (March 10, 2006 if you want to chase it up) goes on to cite a survey which suggests "that girls' and boys' reading improves when they use handheld devices to read e-books".  (Mmmm, as if a book was not a handheld device, as if books - and reading - don't contribute to reading improvement...)

It's a nice thought, have the library so welcoming and so evidently useful that the students - and their teachers - will keep coming in.  I'm glad I used the word "evidently" there - because Ross Todd kicked
in, and his ideas of finding and using evidence of the usefulness of the library.  And even more, of the librarian.  It's not enough to bring in the punters, you've got to have their voice saying how much they need you and the library.  There's the answer - an answer, anyway - to the penciled question at the foot of the letter, "Why should I not buy this product?" 

 First, John, thanks for the observations and insights. But thanks as well for the compliment. Even writers who have developed very thick skins enjoy one now and again.

I hope spring makes it to the Bosphorous soon. 

Mischief and Mayhem revisited

"We don't let people drive until they're 16. They can't vote until they're 18, and they can't drink until they're 21. Yet kids in the third grade are on the Internet." Dan Janke, teacher.

I've been writing about the ethical use of the Internet for the better part of 10 years. I just checked. Why?

This morning's Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper included the story Internet Give Power to Vengeful Students which was a recap of incidents occurring in a local town and summary a variety of similar cases across the country. A teacher, Dan Janke,  was suspected of sending sexually explicit e-mails to 6th grade girls. It was quickly discovered that his email address had been "spoofed" by a couple of 7th grade boys, but not until after he had been suspended.

As similar incident happened in our district about 10 years ago (yes, Mankto IS  always on technology's cutting edge), and I wrote a column about it: Mischief and Mayhem . On re-reading my thoughts at the time, I didn't take the topic seriously enough. What I at the time called "mischief," may indeed be causing more harm than I had then ever imagined.

Mr.Janke's quote which opens this blog entry caught my attention, asking me to consider again, "What is the right age for students to be given Internet access? be given e-mail accounts? be allowed unsupervised access to IM, MySpace, chatrooms, etc.? In our righteous efforts to help of students become "technologically literate." are we, teacher and parents both, pushing them into cyberspace without sufficient guidance?

One thing that has always bothered me is that our district's Internet Acceptable Use Policy is written at probably at least an eighth grade reading level. Yet our district, like most, routinely has even primary school children using Internet resources - presumably following guidelines they cannot yet read. Where are the studies that look at student's online activities and ask at what stage of moral development do students need to be operating in order to be both safe and ethical?

A number of years ago, I did a program evaluation for a suburban Milwaukee school district. At the time, the board had banned computers from all classrooms below fourth grade. I was appalled. Today, I am thinking the district was wise.  The Alliance for Childhood has long advocated delaying using technology with kids, giving children a chance to play, to interact with real objects in physical environment, and read and be read to from real books.

What would be really be lost by removing all K-3 student computers in our schools?  Eliminating all elementary student computers? Besides sales to computer and software companies, of course?

And be careful my constructivist friends - kids were engaged in such learning long before computers.