Education 2.0 beta?

Over the holidays, two news items appeared about technology in schools. One item, on BBC’s Look North (think Midlands Today with Geordies) reported on a pilot scheme of introducing Nintendo DS games consoles into primary maths classes, to motivate pupils and improve their concentration. The other, in the Times, saw ex-Ofsted boss Sir Jim Rose announce his plans to replace primary history lessons on the Victorians and World War II with sessions on using Twitter and Wikipedia.

Let’s get one thing straight. I am not going to use these stories as fuel for yet another anti-PC rant (and that’s PC in both senses). Today’s papers are full of stories bemoaning either the decline of ‘British values’ or the hopelessness of modern technology. They’re boring to read, boring to write, and I’m in no mood to waste your time.

Neither is this an opportunity to go all nostalgic, fondly recalling a time before electronic whiteboards and laser pens, and complaining that today’s children will barely be able to speak after leaving school. Such a viewpoint is ludicrous. Saying that all modern technology is bad for schools is to suggest going back to Dickensian times when everyone wrote on individual blackboards with chalk. Or perhaps even further, before that most modern of technologies, the book, had been invented.

There is a real problem with introducing new technology into schools if it is not accompanied by high quality teaching. Anyone can shoot at baddies or send an e-mail, but these don’t necessarily make for a well-rounded, intelligent human being, capable of independent thought and in-depth discussion of the sort that we students take for granted.

If the government and schools introduce computers and consoles as a substitute for good teaching, then it does indeed amount to dumbing-down – or more accurately, an excuse for people not to think. Aldous Huxley once said that “technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards”. Just as his characters in Brave New World are so surrounded by material comforts that they have no desire to learn about what they see, so we risk leaving the next generation high and dry if we simply impose technology willy-nilly.

As sophisticated as technology is, it will never be a complete substitute for people. Teachers are so much more than data processors that read from textbooks, mark essays and shout at us for talking. Most of us have a favourite teacher from high school, and when asked why the answer is generally because they bonded with and encouraged us, rather than just giving us good marks.

The use of technology as a supplement to traditional learning can do no real harm. Just look around you. We can now download lecture podcasts and access thousands of e-books and journal articles at our leisure. But very few people who are serious about passing their degree will claim that they rely solely on these facilities. Even fewer still will admit that they prefer the cold hum of a computer screen to the flowing discussions of a seminar.

There is, however, another aspect to these technology trials: that of discipline. Trials of a similar scheme in Dundee last year showed that children’s performance in maths tests not only increased by ten percent, but the time taken to perform such tests dropped by up to half. Concentration improved, not through punishments meted out by teachers but by the pupils’ self-motivation.

Bringing games consoles into the classroom may help to counter rebellious pupils, at school and at home. If consoles are banned altogether, children will simply go to any lengths to smuggle them in anyway and play them out of sight with the sound off, just as we did with Tamagotchis. If, however, they are tolerated in the classroom as a learning device, then that ‘smuggling incentive’ is gone. Children will accept there is a time and place for technology, just as we should.

Opposing technology for fear of dumbing down is to deny our children the fruits of our innovation. All that it required from the government, the regulators and the schools themselves, is that the new technology serves as a supplement to genuine teaching, not a substitute.