Annie-Murphy Paul wrote a very interesting but alarming piece on educational technology and the achievement gap. It is not a story of wat she calls the familiar “digital divide”—a lack of access to technology for poor and minority children. It’s rather about how affluent kids and poor kids use tech differently when granted access to technology.
Her conclusion is sobering but clear, but do read the whole article:
Slogans like “one laptop per child” and “one-to-one computing” evoke an appealingly egalitarian vision: If every child has a computer, every child is starting off on equal footing. But though the sameness of the hardware may feel satisfyingly fair, it is superficial. A computer in the hands of a disadvantaged child is in an important sense not the same thing as a computer in the hands of a child of privilege.
The focus of educators, politicians, and philanthropists on differences in access to technology has obscured another problem: what some call “the second digital divide,” or differences in the use of technology. Access to adequate equipment and reliable high-speed connections remains a concern, of course. But improving the way that technology is employed in learning is an even bigger and more important issue. Addressing it would require a focus on people: training teachers, librarians, parents and children themselves to use computers effectively. It would require a focus on practices: what one researcher has called the dynamic “social envelope” that surrounds the hunks of plastic and silicon on our desks. And it would require a focus on knowledge: background knowledge that is both broad and deep. (The Common Core standards, with their focus on building broad background knowledge, may be education’s most significant contribution to true computer literacy.)
It would take all this to begin to “level the playing field” for America’s students—far more than a bank of computers in a library, or even one laptop per child.
What most people are missing in this technology (cf “hardware”) versus use dichotomy is the middle piece: software. This is the form of technology that encapsulates and directs use. The problem for ed-tech is that, unlike almost every other form of technology-enhanced practice (business, military, entertainment, sport, etc) we have not developed our own, requirement-specific technology, but think we can do it just by giving everyone tablets.
If a supermarket buys a new logistics system, it does not, once it has made the purchase, think to itself “I wonder how we will use this new kit?”. The technology itself dictates how it will be used.
[…] Annie-Murphy Paul wrote a very interesting but alarming piece on educational technology and the achievement gap. It is not a story of wat she calls the familiar “digital divide”—a lack of access to technology for poor and minority children. […]