On Classrooms, with and without Computers

CLIFFORD STOLL

Certainly, college-bound students should know basic computing: enough word-processing skills to write a paper, the ability to use and modify a spreadsheet, and a familiarity with database programs. Remember, though, that plenty of profs still accept handwritten term papers.

Should computer dexterity be taught at the expense of other skills? Hard to say, especially in a time when driver's education is disappearing from many high schools.

Maybe computing should be integrated with other classroom activities? Sounds tempting - combine computing with math, physics, or history. In a sense, we teach students to become information hunter-gatherers. Tell them how to access on-line resources and make sure they're comfortable finding their way around the networks.

This assumes that most everything is available on-line and that networks use simple, standardized tools. It also assumes that primary source material isn't messy and that students will know how to use the data presented to them. I doubt that any of these assumptions are valid.

There's a deeper assumption: that gathering information is important. These teaching projects magnify the computing side, while making the learning experience seem trivial.

In a well-publicized classroom experiment, a group of fifth-graders from Washington State conducted an on-line survey. As a geography project, they asked the price of a twelve-inch pizza. Using the networks, they found highs of twelve dollars in Alaska to a low of four dollars in Ohio.

A most appealing project: These students were learning geography, handling the tools of economic research, and meeting others over the Internet. All this from their on-line classroom.

But hold on. That pizza data could just as readily have been acquired by telephone or letter or fax. There's nothing inherent to the Internet here - it's just the data-transmission vehicle.

More damning: They were learning the wrong-most thing about geography -that data collection is an end in itself. It's usually the easy part of research, and the part requiring the least thought.

Better to hear how the fifth-graders worked with the data further, coming up with hypotheses explaining the trends in pizza prices. Is there more competition in Ohio's pizza market than in Alaska's? Are ingredients cheaper? Are these prices associated with unemployment?

Why not study Spanish, trace the flow of Pacific Rim forest products, or perform a class play? None of these have the same glamour or technological appeal as a class project over the Internet. Yet they're likely to be far more important to the students' future than a survey of pizza prices.

At the 1993 Computer-Using Educators Conference in Santa Clara, California, David Thornburg, director of the Thornburg Center of Professional Development, hooked his computer into the White House section of America Online. From there, he downloaded a dozen press releases, a presidential speech, several proposals to Congress, and hundreds of pages of governmental reports. He turned to the audience and said, "Look at all this research material that these kids now have."

In the back of the room, one teacher quietly remarked, "OK, what's next? I've got one computer and thirty kids. What can they do with this raw data? I'd have to print out a hundred pages, review what's there, then generate a lesson. As it sits, this material is worthless in a real classroom."

What do we mean by computer literacy? Along with buzzwords like information superhighway, interactive multimedia, and paradigm, it's a fuzzy term without fixed meaning. Defining these is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

To one person, computer literacy means that a student can type on a keyboard. Another sees it as the ability to use standard tools to send, copy, or delete files. A third expects students to be able to write a simple program in BASIC. One teacher showed me an exam where a student had to describe the functions of different pieces of hardware.

But what does computer literacy mean to a child who can't read at grade level and can't interpret what she reads? What does it mean to a teenager who can't write grammatically, not to mention analytically?

If a child doesn't have a questioning mind, what good does all this networked technology do?

Have we ever spoken of automobile literacy or microwave-oven literacy? Each of these is important today; yet high schools are shedding their driver's education programs and home economics classes. There's far more need for cooks, drivers, and plumbers than programmers, yet parents and school systems insist on teaching computer skills.

But what are these skills? Over the past decade, we've realized that programming is of little value except to those few who take it up as a career. Word processing is plenty handy, but hardly requires a semester of teaching.

And just because students use computers doesn't mean they're computer-literate. How many couch potatoes know how their televisions work?

Slowly, the term computer-literacy is becoming passe, I'm told. In its place, educators speak of computer-aided education, networking, and technology seeding. If computer vendors seem filled with puffery, you haven't heard these people talk.

In physics, you measure the brightness of light with a photometer and voltages with a voltmeter. Bogosity - the degree to which something is bogus -is measured with a bogometer. When listening to these guys, I watch the needle of my bogometer,.

It's usually administrators and consultants - not teachers that give me the heebie-jeebies. Like when Frank Withrow, director of learning technology at the Council of Chief State School Officers, asserts that the network brings us virtual publishing; moreover, the ability to transmit information instantly has brought us to "a major crest of human development and symbolisms."

Symbolisms? My bogometer reads midscale. Then I read David Thornburg's course materials for the fall 1994 Computer-Using Educators Conference. He says that the information age is over, replaced by some sort of communications age. He wants to reshape education because "students are going to primary source materials to research their term papers without leaving their bedrooms. The days of running through the library stacks pulling reference materials are numbered."

Not much need for books and school libraries? The bogometer needle reaches into the red zone.

Alan November, a consultant for the Glenbrook high schools in Illinois, believes that today's students are in the test-preparation business. In the May/June 1994 issue of Electronic Learning, he says that pupils will soon build information products that can be used by clients around the world. Teachers, in turn, will become brokers "connecting our students to others across the nets who will help them create and add to their knowledge." That one pegged my bogometer.

I'd discount such high-tech mumbo jumbo except that there are so many believers. Parents walk away from schools satisfied if they merely see computers in the classroom. Principals plead for budgets large enough to bring interactive media into their schools. Many teachers are cowed by consultants sporting fancy degrees. School board members apply for grants to bring networks into local districts. Lost in this promotion are students.

Not every kid wants to spend hours at a keyboard. Some bump into the same kind of frustrations that adults feel. Others are just bored by the experience.

"Just because children do something willingly, even eagerly, is not a sufficient reason to believe it engages their minds," writes Dr. Lillian Katz, a specialist in early education and author of Engaging Children's Minds. "Remember that enjoyment, per se, is not an appropriate goal for education."

You know, there are plenty of things that I'd love to do all day long that simply aren't good for me. Offhand, I'd include reading net news and eating Mars bars. Not that those chocolate bars aren't good, mind you.

If schools encourage inquisitiveness, exploration, and a lust for knowledge, kids won't be afraid of learning computers. They won't have a hard time with literature, science, and history, either.

But when schools pressure kids to know computers inside and out, naturally some students will fail. Others will become automatons, memorizing instructions without engaging their minds.

Suppose that I accept that students should spend a lot of time behind computers. What's the limit? If computers, on-line networks, and interactive video are so important to modern classrooms, why not eliminate the classroom entirely? Students of all levels could sit behind their computers at home, and receive quality instruction from the finest teachers. Electronic correspondence courses.

A silly proposal, reminiscent of the matchbook covers that told us to enroll in their home-study course and "get a good education and step up to higher pay." Home-study dropout rates often exceed 60 percent; it's hard to believe that an electronic version would do much better, despite the gimmickry.

The Internet can probably deliver all the information taught in a university, as can a good encyclopedia. So why go to college?

Because isolated facts don't make an education. Meaning doesn't come from data alone. Creative problem solving depends on context, interrelationships, and experience. The surrounding matrix may be more important than the individual lumps of information. And only human beings can teach the connections between things.