Virtually Useless

Are computers in the classroom doing our children a disservice?

In 1985, Steve Jobs and the ingenious folks at Apple Computer started a $25 million US educational experiment called Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow. The project began with a handful of schools; a decade later, 13 schools from across the United States had been picked and wired up, with the goal being to teach core subjects on the computer. More than 20 different universities and research institutions took part, all hoping for a front row seat to the next educational revolution.

In 1995, Apple published its assessment of the computer as a learning tool in Education and Technology, a 316-page book that to this day makes sobering reading. Why? Because it repeatedly documents a truth educators still have difficulty digesting: “the uneven progress of digital technologies.”

Research after research paper — all written by paid Apple consultants — concluded that “faster computers and larger hard drives don’t mean more learning or better thinking,” and that “technology alone cannot improve teaching and learning.”
The Apple wired classrooms impressed visitors but they certainly didn’t overwhelm them. Follow-up studies found the students involved did no better or worse than their peers on achievement tests. More importantly, students who returned to traditional classrooms now appeared to be “educationally at risk.”

The computer, in short, did not revolutionize education, and Apple was the first to admit it. Jobs later confessed to Wired magazine that his evangelical computer zeal was mistaken.

“Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology,” he observed. “Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.”

But Apple wasn’t the first to point out the computer fraud in education. Richard Clark, a researcher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, concluded the same thing more than two decades ago. He noticed a persistent theme in the research on television, media, overheads, radio — they simply made no difference to learning or motivation.
After reviewing all the metastudies on computer-assisted instruction, he discovered that wherever technology seemingly made a difference over live teaching, the machines did so using proven instructional methods. In other words, tried-and-true teaching methods combined with intellectual content mattered more than the machine. Computers, Clark concluded, are “mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition.”

Thomas Russell at North Carolina State University reached a similar conclusion after reviewing 355 research studies from 1928 to 1998. These papers compared traditional teacher-student instruction with machine instruction. All recorded no significant difference. A 1962 study on closed-circuit TV, for example, found “no significant differences between groups taught conventionally and by television.” A 1996 study on computers used for university teaching found — surprise — no significant difference.

Such studies have been ignored by administrators and high-tech promoters. But Russell believes they raise an interesting question: “Why spend more for high-tech instruction if there is a significantly cheaper way to achieve the same result?”
As a writer by trade, I thought the research on computers and writing might be revealing. It was. The promise, as usual, was hyperbolic: that the computer would become “the most powerful workspace for writing since the advent of written expression.”

But no research substantiates this hubris. A few studies show computers can motivate students and increase word productivity, but none has concluded that a computer can make them better writers.

A 1994 study looked at compositions of eight- and nine-year-olds over three years; one group did the difficult teacher-student thing, with pencil and paper, and the other practised high-tech magic. The results illuminated the power of hands-on instruction: the length and quality of the handwritten essays were superior to the computer-generated ones. A later study simply observed that the quality of writing produced in high-tech classrooms was both scarce and unsettling: “perhaps the critical key to understanding quality today is the teacher.”

But what about distance learning? It’s the latest chapter in the computer craze and some provinces, such as Alberta, hope to teach second languages and physical education with this e-learning wonder.

In the United States, schools and universities have poured money into the venture but found little success. As one professor noted, “the chief problem with distance education is the distance.”

Most students identify distance learning for what it generally is: a third-rate education. Few people want to be taught by machines and even fewer can succeed doing so. Not surprisingly, the dropout rate for distance learning is much higher than for the teacher-in-your-face model.

Research shows that only a small minority of highly self-directed students will succeed at e-learning. A 1998?2000 Canadian study found that students for whom e-learning was a first choice did well, but students who picked e-learning as a last resort did not.

“The same factors that weighed against them in the conventional school system remain with them in virtual schools,” noted the Vancouver-based education futurist Kathryn Barker. In other words, the most at-risk students were left in front of a screen, wondering where the teacher was.

But what about computers and human development? Incredibly, few people have considered the impact of personal computers on children’s health. Issues such as carpal tunnel syndrome, impaired vision, posture problems or even radiation emissions have been overlooked. The truth is, we don’t know much about the potential long-term health implications of children working with computers throughout 13 or more years of school before they even get a job.

Neurologists agree that flickering screens can affect attention, motivation and metacognition. U.S. educator Jane M. Healy spent three years researching computers, and asks a good question: “Who knows how much of the escalating degree of social and personal malaise present in today’s young people is a function of too much electronic stimulation replacing physical activity and interpersonal experience?”

Nobody seems to have a good answer to that, but research on adults provides some disturbing clues. American psychologists Robert Kraut and Vicki Lundmark recently found that Internet use among adults had a profound effect on their social lives: the more people used the Internet, the more depressed and lonely they became. The psychologists hypothesized that Internet use is “building shallow relationships, leading to an overall decline in feeling of connection to other people.” Will too much Internet use also retard the social development of our children?

Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has made some interesting and frightening observations about how computers change children. Experiences with computers tend to help students learn more about computer realities, she notes. Computers, in other words, condition students to accept more computers in their lives.

So where does all this research leave educators? For starters, it strongly suggests that the computer is nothing more than an expensive delivery tool with limited applications. It also comes with all kinds of side-effects. Computers can do a great job with vocabulary exercises, foreign language drills, graphing software and are handy data managers for teachers. But let’s not expect revolutions from them or even much problem-solving.

Many agree, albeit reluctantly, that the educational potential of computers has been grossly oversold. In the The Flickering Mind, a detailed and critical exposÄ of the computer fraud in education, Todd Oppenheimer calculates that the United States alone has spent $70 billion US in the 1990s wiring up schools. In Canada, estimates run to $5 billion and growing. And what problems have we solved with these vast expenditures? Last time I checked, according to the Fraser Institute, too many aboriginal students couldn’t read (in British Columbia more than 40 per cent failed the province’s reading tests); and according to Jim Cummins at the Ontario Institute of Education Studies, 70 per cent of English as a Second Language students still were dropping out of high school.

Some high-tech hucksters and snake-oil salesmen still argue that we just haven’t integrated enough technology into our classrooms. Don’t believe them. The evidence is in, and it’s damaging, though largely unread. But it all points to some old truths: a good teacher matters more than a flickering screen, and music, the arts, history and literature still build better minds than do video games.

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