Archives for posts with tag: technology

The opportunity cost of “easy”

March 4, 10 //
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In his book Mastery, George Leonard talks about the “war on mastery”. This could just as easily be called a “war on hard”. Watch TV for just a couple of minutes and you will be bombarded with ads or talk shows or news stories that show you how do something in just a couple (if that many) steps. You never see something that promises to be hard.

And yet, nearly anything worth doing – that results in growth or learning – is hard. The best you can really hope for from “easy” is to maintain what you’ve already got. At worse, you will lose something.

Does Google – or technology in general – make us stupid? No. But by being “easy”, it removes the need, and possibly the ability, to learn. Which some might say is the same thing.

Tools do not a master – or failure – make

July 26, 09 //
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I’m working on a new post to address the question “Is modern technology ‘dumbing down’ America’s youth?“, as posed in the most recent edition (22 July 09) of the local news weekly - West News Magazine. (The html version of the article isn’t available as of my writing this, but you can read it here.)

This question seems to come around every year about this time as everyone is preparing for the annual back-to-school ritual and teachers, parents, and others lament the sad state of our children at the hands of modern technology. Going all the way back to when I heard this discussion about allowing calculators in math class, I’ve never quite understood how a tool, especially one as broad as “modern technology”, could be given the blame or credit for anything that an individual or group achieves (or fails to achieve).

Along that train of thought, here is a reprint of something I wrote back in August 2006 that looks at another much maligned tool – Microsoft PowerPoint – while I work up a “long answer” to the question.

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Tools do not a master make

No tool of modern technology is as universally used, and almost as universally reviled, in the world of business and government as is Microsoft PowerPoint. Perhaps most famous of the PowerPoint bashers is Edward Tufte, writer of several books and essays on information design. (I was fortunate enough to attend one of his courses in the late ’90s, his poster of Napoleon’s March to Moscow still hangs on the wall in my office.)

Tufte has described his issues with PowerPoint in magazine articles (such as PowerPoint is Evil in Wired magazine), in a self-published essay entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, and in a chapter in his latest book Beautiful Evidence. In the past week or so a few others have also lambasted PowerPoint, including Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge in a couple of posts (Festival of Bureaucratic Hyper-Rationalism and Tufte and PowerPoint) and Scott Adams (via Dilbert).

Don Norman, of the Nielsen Norman Group, has a different take on PowerPoint. In his essay In Defense of PowerPoint, Norman places the blame not on PowerPoint but on those who use it improperly. “Don’t blame the problem on the tool.” Or, put another way – PowerPoint doesn’t bore people, people bore people. Cliff Atkinson is another who believes that PowerPoint can be used effectively. For some great ideas check out the Beyond Bullets blog or Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points.

Of course, this problem is not limited to the world of business. One of the big promises of ever faster and more powerful consumer technology (if we are to believe marketing campaigns) is that everyone will be able to perform like an expert. Take, for example, the following pitch for Apple’s GarageBand software (emphasis is mine):

The new video track in GarageBand makes it easy to add an original music score to your movies. And don’t worry about your musical talent — or lack thereof. Just use GarageBand’s included loops, or try a combination of loops, software instruments, or any previous audio recordings you created.
— Apple – iLife – Garageband

Don’t get me wrong, I love GarageBand (and the whole iLife suite for that matter, I use it almost every day). It is very easy to create a ’song’ using loops, like my First Song. Once I got comfortable with the GarageBand interface, it only took me a couple of hours to browse through the loops, pull some together so it sounded good, and export it to iTunes. The ’song’ is listenable, but doesn’t reflect any real musical skill on my part. I didn’t apply any knowledge of time signatures, keys, tempo, or anything. I just dragged-and-dropped.

I guess my point is don’t get pulled into a false belief that a tool, any tool, can make you an expert at something or give you expert results. Remember, good tools are nice to have, but in the hands of a master even the simplest of tools can create wonders.

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As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, my  “short answer” to the question is an emphatic “No, modern technology is not ‘dumbing down’ America’s youth.” More to come.

20th-century teachers using 19th-century methods to reach 21st-century students

December 2, 08 //
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As someone who loves technology and gadgets, and loves figuring out how to make them useful, I’ve had a long interest in how the technology of the information age could change the way people – especially children – learn.  This interest is compounded by the fact that I have two teenage sons, now in high school.  Born at the dawn of the information age (1991 and 1993), they are right in the middle of it all.  Sadly, though, my personal experience has been one akin to the quote used for the title of this post.

The quote is actually something overheard by Marc Aronson in his School Library Journal article We’ve Got the Technology: But our (sic) today’s schools ready for a radical transformation?, but is reminiscent to me of a main point of Seymour Papert’s 1992 (yep, 1992!!) book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer.  The following is paraphrased from the opening chapter of that book:

Imagine a party of time traveling teachers from an earlier century, eager see how much things have changed in their profession a hundred or more years in the future.  They might be puzzled by a few strange objects.  They might notice that some standard techniques had changed, but they would fully see the point of most of what was being attempted and could quite easily take over the class.

In his article, Aronson gives us a quick dose of reality, reminding us:

The fact that technology makes new kinds of educational opportunities possible doesn’t imply that teachers, administrators, school boards, and college admittance personnel—not to mention students and parents—want, or even need, those new methods.

The process, Aronson says, should be one of evolution, not revolution.

I’ll leave the pronouncements about 21st-century skills and radical reform to education analysts and other columnists. For those of us who write for, teach, or work with young people in schools and libraries, the old and the new are likely to overlap and blend, not suddenly displace each other. Doesn’t that make sense? Doesn’t that sound more realistic than a vision of a completely transformed educational system? It does to me.

As much as I’d like to see an overnight change, I have to agree with Aronson that it is better to grow, over time, the educational system we want instead of trying to simply build it.  The system is much too complex to think we can figure it all out at once.

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