Professors at top research universities are highly skeptical of the value of the instructional technologies being injected into their classrooms, which many see as making their job harder and doing little to improve teaching and learning.Some of the professors make a point that I've made for years--that technology is good for administrative tasks but its usefulness in teaching is somewhat more limited.
That's the conclusion of "Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate," published in the January edition of Science, Technology & Human Values. Based on interviews with 42 faculty members at three research-intensive universities, the study was funded under a grant from the National Science Foundation and particularly focuses on professors in the sciences, including chemistry and biology, with anthropology thrown in as a point of comparison.
Consider the opinions of two different chemists. "I went to [a course management software workshop] and came away with the idea that the greatest thing you could do with that is put your syllabus on the Web and that's an awful lot of technology to hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it," said one. "What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any. You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don't think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper," said another.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Technology For Its Own Sake
I'm not the only one who wasn't smitten with Cupid's technology arrow:
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5 comments:
Look up "Slow Tech" on Youtube. I think technology is a good servant, but a bad master. I believe our children have been poorly served by academic elites who pretend technology is the answer for all of education's problems.
And the K-12 schools all over the country are going gang-busters to get this technology into the schools. It's a lot of gee-whiz and "look what we're doing" promotion. It has it's place and a few applications but until we build a better textbook, it's just a publicity sham. (BTW, I'm the tech coordinator for 1000 students.) Quite the conundrum from my perspective.
Administrators and other political types like technology because it is something tangible that they can show taxpayers in return for their rising taxes. That some computers are obsolete within months of attaining them or that the cost of software makes it almost impossible to keep hardware current is ignored. Just as integration was a magic word in earlier generations technology is more of the same. Neither option was able to insure the success of students.
Not just somewhat. I defy anyone to come up with a single use of technology, other than the possible use of exploration with graphing calculators in advanced mathematics, that actually improves education. For the most part, the kids know the technology better than the teachers do. And I would NEVER want to read essays on a computer ... how do you make comments?
Max, I'm going to challenge your comment. I've found that one or two students have more computer knowledge than I do, or perhaps know how to use certain software packages that I don't know, but *in general* they don't know as much as you might think. When my stats students marvel at the existence of Excel, or don't know how to find a file that they've "misplaced" on their flash drives, then they don't know as much about computers as we think they do. Yes, they can use Photoshop or make YouTube videos and can make Facebook sing, but outside of that....
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