Yesterday, I had a student drop by office hours to get some help on his midterm study guide. “I looked the terms you gave us up on the internet,” he explained, “but I was confused on a couple.”
“You looked them up on the internet?” I asked incredulously. “Why didn’t you use your textbook? All the terms on the study guide come directly from your textbook.”
“Textbook?” My student stared, perplexed. “I just always use the internet to look things up.”
This student is not alone. I am constantly grading papers where students will define terms, even very technical terms particular to a field of study like moral theology, using dictionary.com or some other online dictionary, rather than their textbook, or any book for that matter. Works cited pages disproportionately reference websites over books. And students today are woefully unfamiliar with the inner-workings of their friendly school or public library.
So after a solid week of such experiences, I was completely disheartened to read in the local newspaper that a kind-hearted local philanthropist just donated 30 new netbooks to one of our town’s middle schools, an act of charity that is becoming increasingly more common (I read last month about a school in Texas which was the happy beneficiary of iPod Touches for all of its elementary students). The donor said that “the classroom laptops help students learn in a way they’re familiar with, and they focus more than when they’re working from books.” One 12-year-old beneficiary said she liked the computer much more than traditional books: “They’re easier to use and more convenient.”
This is undoubtedly true, but the overuse of technology in the classroom is actually doing a great disservice to students at the college level. Sure they focus better when they are using a computer, but in college, they have to focus when they read books, and read those books carefully. Students are entering college without the basic reading and comprehension skills they need to succeed. But more than that, they are entering college without any interests in books or texts which they view as “old-fashioned” and “boring” and “not nearly as useful as the internet.”
We know that we form our character through how we act consistently over time. If students are consistently directed to computers and to the internet as the sources of true learning, they will never develop the habits of critical reading, or of patience as they plod through a text, or of imagination. I have no doubt that our local philanthropist’s heart is in the right place, but I wonder if we are doing the greatest service to our students by gifting them with more and more technology. Sure students find it easier and more stimulating to use a computer, but isn’t the goal of education to challenge students, to teach them skills they can’t learn on their owns, and to open new horizons and areas of interest for them that they might not be exposed to otherwise?
Hi Beth,
Interesting post! I don’t share your concern to the same degree, though. I think we have an obligation to help students to think critically about all texts, including texts found on the web. Sure, wikipedia and dictionary.com are overused by first year college students. But the web has a lot of great material too. And we can teach skills of careful reading using e-books as well as hard copy books. If our expectations for research are clearly laid out in the assignments we give students, and if we actually teach them how to analyze and critically evaluate the material on the web, isn’t that much better than telling them to ignore the first “go-to” source that they will inevitably use anyway? Isn’t this a new component of research literacy that we should add to our syllabus, instead of complaining about it? Students from families without computers at home are often at a disadvantage in middle school and high school, so I applaud the philanthropists who have donated computers to schools. That doesn’t take away the need to teach research literacy, but the web is a tool that can be used well or used poorly– don’t you think?
Beth – I think you’re on to something. And even more: I think we have relied on technology as a savior of sorts to fix ailing schools, health care issues and so on, and this is an example of it. But I think that these things have by and large not panned out on a number of levels. Mark Bauerlein’s book The Dumbest Generation and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains are both well-researched books by people who use the internet themselves, but who find some serious issues with internet usage.
I wonder – really – how much we need to have access to technology in school. Aren’t many of these things we can learn on the job, just as many of us have done and continue to do out of necessity? After all, I don’t know how to use an IPad yet but it’s not like I need to go back to 8th grade and get my free IPad to learn how to use one.
I agree with Emily that more needs to be done about teaching people to use the internet skillfully – but I’m just not sure that’s a skill best learned in primary or secondary school.
I wanted to address Emily’s point about disadvantaged students further: if Bauerlein and Carr are right, then all kids are being disadvantaged by internet use – but most especially those who are disadvantaged to begin with.
I recognize that there’s a technological class gap and I agree that there’s something to being disadvantaged when it comes to technology – but I think there must be a better way to deal with that than encouraging technology use at school.
Thanks for your thoughts Emily and Jana. I want to first agree with Emily that the internet can be a very valuable source of information, and part of the job of teachers (including the ones teaching students to use these new netbooks in their middle school) is to teach students how to “sift” and separate good sources from bad. In my papers, especially for moral theology where the students are writing on contemporary issues, I encourage using the internet as a source and I try to teach these skills. The problem is that students are not learning also how to “sift” through books as well, separating the wheat from the chaff. Part of the reason is that they don’t have the attention span to read through an article or a book carefully to find the information they are looking for. While I have not read Shallows (only the NPR review) I am finding his basic argument to be true among college students who have been raised with a heavy emphasis on technology in the classrooms.
As for poor and disadvantaged students, I really have to agree that we are doing a service to them by gifting whole bunch of technology, especially when poor and disadvantaged students also lack so many other things (including books and teachers who will help them appreciate those books). I’m on a science fiction kick these days and I recently started re-reading Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World. In the second chapter, a group of delta babies are conditioned for their class as adults, so that they will like the things their class is supposed to like and hate the things their class is supposed to hate. The director exposes the babies to books, and when the babies respond with enthusiasm, picking the books up and gurgling with delight, he sends an electric shock through them, teaching the babies on a visceral level to hate books. On some sense, aren’t we doing this in the classroom when we say implicitly (or explicitly as our local philanthropist did) that books are not as interesting nor as useful as computers? Aren’t we conditioning kids to disregard books when a local philanthropist gets front-page coverage for donating computers to a classroom, but the NEA (who recently donated thousands of copies of Fahrenheit 451 to our local schools as part of this year’s Big Read program) gets shoved to the Entertainment section?
Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, there you get a book with a great warning about relying too heavily on technology as a savior from boredom and disadvantage. But that is a subject for another blog post.
Thanks for this post, Beth! I think one of the difficulties is that these debates over technology get stuck because they don’t make an important distinction between the web as a SUBSTITUTE versus the web as a SUPPLEMENT. I think Carr convincingly demonstrates that, while the web is not a demonic force (!!), it essentially trains/”wires” the brain for a different set of skills than does the use of books (just like writing blog posts involves a different set of skills than journal articles). The web allows for quick juxtaposition, connection among different materials – in short, a kind of discovery process that can at times be exhilerating. I know that during the economic crisis, I was enormously educated by reading economic blogs, in ways that don’t seem replicable in any other medium. On the other hand, now that I’m trying to write seriously about certain economic issues, I spend hours in the library pouring over books.
The problem, it seems to me, is that the skill of quick discovery is ultimately subordinate to the more basic and more important skill of reading, reflection, and mastery – and that, at a student level, the more basic skill is being seriously eroded. A recent US time survey indicated that the average 15-19 year old spent 10 minutes a day reading ANY printed materials – as opposed to several hours consuming online content. This is a problem, and it certainly indicates that schools shouldn’t prioritize something that many students are already spending most of their time doing. The analogy with television is obvious here. TV documentaries or movies can be a nice supplementary teaching tool, but surely we don’t want to throw out reading literature or in-depth non-fiction sources.
Emily rightly highlights class differences here. I don’t know of any actual research on this, but my intuition suggests that the problem is actually exacerbated by class. Privileged students by and large already grow up in a household environment where, all things considered, parents read, education is emphasized, etc. That is, they may also get and use the latest technology, but they are also reading, and can hope to have the best of both worlds. On the other hand, I fear that less privileged households do not emphasize culturally reading and education, and so the onus ends up being on the schools to pay MORE attention to language and reflection mastery. Again, I’d be happy to contradicted by data on this, but I tend to think you end up in a lose-lose situation: you try to bridge the “digital divide,” but leave behind the real divide, which is found in reading, literacy, and reflection.
I’m an academic librarian (and fan of the site), and the issue of “information literacy” is something that my profession has been wrestling with for a long time now. But it’s a lot more complicated than the “paper vs. digital” duality that it usually gets reduced to; it has far more to do with the source of the information than the format. Many teachers simply tell their students “no online sources allowed”, but the truth is an ebook is no more or less reliable than a paper copy of the same, and a database of peer-reviewed articles might be more trustworthy than a lot of printed books. Both formats have their advantages and their problems.
That said, I certainly do agree with Beth’s post that new technology is rarely the best use of philanthropists’ money, and even when the goal is worthwhile it’s almost never done right. Just last week, I visited the library of a small community college in rural Missouri. A wealthy alumnus wants to make a large donation to the library, but he wants it to (a) be “high-tech” and (b) primarily benefit the business students. There are a lot of things that library desperately needs, but what they’ll probably get is a small room with a monitor that scrolls stock market information all day.
ps – The “digital divide” is also a hot topic in my world, and one that I think ties in pretty closely to Catholic social justice issues. Many government agencies are already going “paperless”, meaning the forms they use have to be downloaded and/or submitted from a website. This can be a real problem for those who either can’t afford a computer or don’t know how to use one (i.e the poor and the elderly). It’s especially a problem in rural areas, where broadband Internet connections are harder to come by.
Sure, iPads are more of a hindrance than a help. And the sad fact is that the school cannot refuse such an expensive gift without creating a stir. Nor can they politely ask for the cash equivalent in lieu of the iPads without getting into a debate about the role of technology in schools — an emotion-laden debate they will not win, even if they don’t “lose” on the merits.
As I reflect on the situation, I wonder how often we (you, me, people in general), on a personal level, make judgments about what someone else “needs.” And on a professional level, how often we make judgments beyond our area of competence. Perhaps this iPad donor is a millionaire who happens to be a pedagogical expert. More likely, he or she is simply a do-gooder with pure motives. But next time I try to “help,” I think I’ll pause and consider how my contribution, whatever it may be, allows the “experts” to make the decisions that they are more qualified to make than I.
PS: I read this blog regularly, but do not contribute replies often.
Curt, I think you are spot on with the general problem of philanthropy. I remember hearing a story of Andrew Carnegie who said he wouldn’t give money to the poor but he would build libraries that the poor could use. Now, I’m not going to argue that libraries aren’t a good thing, but they might not always be what the poor really need to flourish. In this sense, I would distinguish between philanthropy (which is more paternalistic) and charity. Charity starts with the real needs of the other and responds to those needs in love and sacrifice. Jim Keenan uses the phrase “descending into the chaos of another” which typifies charity in my mind. The difference between philanthropy and charity typifies the difference between what we might call an “obligation morality” which sees morality primarily about obligation and duty, and a “virtue morality” which sees morality primarily about virtue and human flourishing.
Thanks for reading, Curt. We at the blog are grateful for all our loyal readers even if they never get a chance to comment.