Learning about the future from the past

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times May 4, 2007

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

A Few Thoughts about Common Sense, Computers and Education by Bill Buxton (1999)

Let me step back and discuss the future in the context of history. My example comes from Volume II, Plate 55, of the Historical Atlas of Canada [1].  What the plate does is document the introduction of the blackboard into schools in Upper Canada in the period between 1856 and 1866.

Now you will be excused if you are now asking yourself, "Why do I care about blackboards in the 1800'sin Canada no less?". Nevertheless, I beg your patience.

The key to the example (regardless of year or country) lies in posing the following question: "What preceded the blackboard?"

With just a little reflection one will come to the obvious answer: "The slate."

But, you might ask, "Is not a slate just a little blackboard? If so, this cannot be very important."

Well, from a technological perspective, the answer is yes, slates are just small blackboards. They are made from the same materials, and in the jargon of today, employ the same "user interface", the same "text editor", "operating system" and even the same "erase" operator.

Consequently, one might quite legitimately ask, "What is the big deal?" After all, "all" that they did was make a bigger slate and put it on the wall.

Well, I would argue that this seemingly "simple" change was a "big deal". In fact, I believe that an argument can be made that the introduction of the blackboard has had more impact on classroom education than any innovation in technology since, including the introduction of cheap paper or the introduction of the internet and personal computers!

That may seem like a bold claim. But for my point to work, you only have to concede that this argument is plausible. It need not be true. The gist of the example is to illustrate that a very significant impact resulted from a change in scale, location and usage, rather than a change in technology per se. The change was social and educational, not technological in the common sense of the term.

Leaping ahead, this example from the mid-1800's sheds some light on the deployment of technology in today's schools as well. What it suggests to me is that perhaps we should be spending as much time looking into the potential of computer-driven electronic whiteboards, at the front of the class, as we are spending in the seemingly ubiquitous quest to put a computer on every student's desk. However, my perception is that his is not even remotely the case, to the misfortune of future students, I fear.

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[Valintino]

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