What Skills for a Brave New World?

You've heard of the digital natives argument for technology in education, but Rick Hess gives a straight-up debunking to the recent trend of purchasing an iPad for every student.

This was all brought home to me again, just the other week, when I had a chance to spend a couple days visiting acclaimed "technology-infused" high schools. Yet, most of what I saw the technology being used for was either content-lite or amounted to students using Google-cum-Wikipedia as a latter day World Book Encyclopedia. Making powerpoints and video shorts is nice, but it's only us "digital tourists" who think it reflects impressive learning.

This had been my impression of technology use in public schools--students are seemingly addicted to it, yet can only use it in rudimentary ways. For example, they will copy and paste content from the internet into their Word document, and use the thesaurus feature to substitute individual words in the copied text. Voila! No plagiarizing here! (Or so they think.)

Diana Senechal's gem of a comment is a must-read:

In my first year of teaching, students kept asking me, "Why don't we do more projects?" I wasn't sure what they meant by "projects," until they started bringing in their projects for other classes. Typically, these were poster boards with a presentation on a topic. It would include pictures (taken from the Internet), a news article or essay (taken from the Internet), a few headings in fancy fonts and colors, and maybe a bit of writing (also copied from the Internet in many cases).

Teachers were under pressure to assign this sort of thing; it was considered "evidence of technology use in the classroom" and "hands-on learning." Also, it served as good classroom or bulletin board decoration.

For students to learn to use the Internet well, they have to learn to go without it. If they can puzzle their way through a text, taking time to make sense of it and think about it, then they will be in a better position to do the same online. If they need the graphics and quick answers, then something's wrong.

Exactly!

I subscribe to a number of listserves for science teachers, and there is often hand-wringing over the need to teach students how to navigate our New! Digital! world. The truth is, what they really need are the old skills: content knowledge; the ability to paraphrase, summarize, and cite text sources; an understanding of grammar and a solid vocabulary.

Adults over 30 are better able to use the technology available today because we developed those skills, sans fancy gadgets. Today's high school students? I worry about them.