I recently concluded a major project that looked at the issue of educational technology in a social, technical, curricular, and policy context. While the William and Mary course that inspired this blog was wholly unrelated to the area of k-12 educational technology (which is the primary focus of my recently completed project), I do have some interesting insights to share. These various thoughts will be published over the course of my next several blog posts.
One does not require statistics to see that the information revolution has had a profound impact on the lives of America’s youth. Students (and adults) have logged onto MySpace and Facebook by the tens of millions, Apple’s iPods have become one of the era’s defining cultural icons, and cellular telephones have proliferated. But as change in youth behavior has become a social consequence of the information revolution, many schools have seen technology not as an opportunity to be embraced but rather as a threat to be guarded against.
Cell phones are now in the hands of most Americans; Apple computer had sold 49,818,000 iPods by the end of second quarter 2006. Many of these portable devices are in students’ hands; a recent study showed that users between the ages of 18 and 24 spend 22 hours per month, compared to the national average of 13 hours per month, using their cell phones.
While students spend more and more time using technology, schools spend more and more energy devising ways to keep that same technology out of the classroom. A simple Google News search for the query “school bans cell phones” uncovers a plethora of articles accounting many different school systems’ decisions to restrict student use of the devices. Similar measures, such as the one taken in Anderson County, Tennessee, have restricted use of iPods and “other electronic devices.” Higher education institutions have taken a dramatically different approach, however, as Duke University, for example, in 2005 initiated a program that provided iPods to all incoming students so that they may be used for instructional purposes.
Students’ use of new technology in their daily lives, however, runs much deeper than telephone and iPod gadgetry. Many in America’s 18-25 year-old population keep a profile on the Facebook Internet service. Facebook, like its cousin “MySpace,” is a leader in a new breed of Internet services known as “social networking” or “social computing” defined as “The application of computer technology to facilitate interaction and collaboration.” I decided one morning to monitor the Facebook page for an upcoming campus event at the College of William and Mary. My anecdotal findings were quite phenomenal. The event—a concert and party held by a local band and fraternity to raise money for children in Honduras—began the day with a single host and a handful of guests. Throughout the day as I checked the page several times, I saw that more event hosts were added who, according to the site, did not even all know each other. The guest list, meanwhile, grew at a shocking rate. By the end of the afternoon, a handful of party hosts from different social circles had managed to promote a benefit concert that had 75 confirmed guests, 75 possible guests, 34 guests that would not be able to make it, and 245 students that had yet to RSVP. After corresponding with the event planners through e-mail, I learned that the venue’s occupancy was 150 people, with room outside for about another 150 to listen.
On the surface this may seem unremarkable. I, however, had just seen a single person start planning a benefit concert, seven more strangers decide that they wanted to help, and nearly the entire venue be filled by word-of-mouth communication in a single day. And, even more remarkably, these students had managed to accomplish the task, one that years ago would have taken weeks of planning and countless hours of work, using nothing but the Internet.
Similar stories of social networking technologies working their way into the daily lives of students and institutions can be found elsewhere. In mid-April 2006, Police in Kansas used MySpace to foil a planned school shooting on the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. The plot would have involved five plotters and a lengthy “hit list” of victims, but authorities found guns, knives, and ammunition in the possession of suspects thanks to leads obtained online. Lives of students and teachers were saved thanks to information obtained on a website that did not exist three years ago.
Yet, despite the rapid spread of social networking services in students’ private lives, concerns about privacy, bandwidth consumption, and in-class distractions have led many school districts to ban these popular websites.
Students, for their part, have been adept at developing countermeasures to administrative restrictions. In November 2005, for example, a high school sophomore in Oregon was able to connect to his home computer from a school computer lab, pulling MySpace.com through the Internet via his home Internet connection. The school had responded to the perceived threat of MySpace, but students were able to effectively trick those school filters into allowing unrestricted access to the “off-limits” website.
These examples of student culture (surrounding technology) at odds with schools’ administrative reactions illustrate the conflict between technology and established educational norms. Social organization—the ways that students interact with one another and live much of their lives away from school—has been made much more nimble and mobile thanks to the Internet, but yet many schools have thus far been very hesitant to adopt these technologies in a manner that enhances the educational process. Schools are challenged in one respect by the distracting and revolutionary influences of gadgets and new web services, while they simultaneously work to leverage cutting-edge technologies for legitimate educational purposes. The fundamental challenge is for educators and the courses that they teach to stay relevant. Students are increasingly growing up with ready access to new communications technologies. These resources are an intrinsic and natural part of their life and, as such, resources that students expect to interact with in the classroom. To not integrate technology with instruction, and to cling to old methodologies is to risk making certain academic pursuits less relevant within the broader context of society.
Instead of becoming technology innovators, many schools have become technology resistors, and have passed on a wonderful opportunity to enhance the quality of their instruction.
