Teach Effectively!

Todd Oppenheimer, who wrote The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology, published an op-ed piece in the San Francisco (CA, US) Chronicle recommending that US President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan avoid plans to invest heavily in computer technology for US schools. In “Technology not the panacea for education,” Mr. Oppenheimer argues that promoting technology will not improve US competitiveness.

Rather than promote technology, Mr. Oppenheimer recommends—gasp!—preparing students to read, write, and compute!

First, the wiser captains of industry have never asked schools to emphasize “technology skills.” What they prefer, and are in fact dying for to better compete in a global economy, are graduates with skills in areas that increasingly get neglected: writing and reasoning; reliable work habits; the capacity for concentration and face-to-face communication; a sense of history, cultural anthropology, and – for jobs in the technology sector in particular – higher math and science. “Want to get a job using information technology to solve problems?,” a report from the Information Technology Association of America, once asked. “Know something about the problems that need to be solved.”

I know that some of my colleagues are busy at work on identifying and studying ways to use technology to promote acquisition of basic skills. That’s good. And, from my perspective, probably one of the best tech investments in content area schooling at middle and high schools levels would be projectors; it’s pretty hard to model how to do something or explain concepts and concept relationships using small screens. But, I hope Mr. Oppenheimer’s reservations about pouring more technology into classrooms with focusing it on where it will actually promote outcomes is heeded.

Link to Mr. Oppenheimer’s piece via SFGate. Shades of my recent post on a similar topic, “Beyond access: Improving success.”