Kay Cunningham's List: Technology

• Proponents argue that students can overcome educational hurdles with low-cost digital devices, but rigorous research fails to show much educational impact of technology in and of itself, even when offered free.
• So, if my tech-immersed undergraduates could intuit the limits of educational technology, why do educators, policy makers, and entrepreneurs keep falling for its false promise?
• We confuse business success with social value, though the two often differ. Just for example, how is it that during the last four decades we have seen an explosion of incredible technologies, but America’s poverty rate hasn’t decreased and inequality has skyrocketed? Any idea that more technology in and of itself cures social ills is obviously flawed.
• if free content were all that was needed for an education, everyone with broadband connectivity would be an Ivy League Ph.D
• Especially in an age of informational abundance, getting access to knowledge isn’t the bottleneck, mustering the will to master it is.
• Students with poor high-school preparation will always find it hard to learn things their prep-school peers can ace. Low-income families will struggle to pay registration fees that wealthy households barely notice. Blue-collar workers doing hard manual labor may not have the energy to take evening courses that white-collar professionals think of as a hobby. And these things are even more true online than offline.
• The primary effect of free online courses is to further educate an already well-educated group who will pull away from less-educated others.
• More technology only magnifies socioeconomic disparities, and the only way to avoid that is nontechnological: Either resolve the underlying inequities first, or create policies that favor the less advantaged.

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• the Internet itself has a bias in favor of free expression. More, its technologies amplify free speech, widely distributing ideas and attitudes that would otherwise go unheard and cloaking speakers in pseudonymity or anonymity. In order to seem harmless, American Internet companies will fiddle with the sunny compromise, but it is an unsatisfactory hack. The Internet’s amplification of free speech will be resented by those who don’t like free speech, or whose motto is “Free speech for me but not for thee.” It will all be very messy, and sometimes violent. All over the world people hate free speech, because it is a counterintuitive good.
• Who hates free speech? The powerful and the powerless: ruling parties and established religions, those who would suppress what is said in order to retain power, and those who would change what is said in order to alter the relations of power. Who else? Those who do not wish to be disturbed also hate free speech. Why, they might say, should I care about free speech? I have nothing to say; and insofar as things should be said at all, I only want to hear the things that people like me say. Why should I have to hear things that are offensive, immoral, or even mildly irritating?
• Because free speech is so important, and because the Internet will continue to amplify its expressions, U.S. Internet companies should apply a consistent standard everywhere in deciding what they will censor upon request.

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• es, the commercial interests of technology companies and the policy interests of government agencies have converged: both are interested in the collection and rapid analysis of user data. Google and Facebook are compelled to collect ever more data to boost the effectiveness of the ads they sell. Government agencies need the same data—they can collect it either on their own or in coöperation with technology companies—to pursue their own programs.
• This logic of preëmption is not different from that of the NSA in its fight against terror: let’s prevent problems rather than deal with their consequences. Even if we tie the hands of the NSA—by some combination of better oversight, stricter rules on data access, or stronger and friendlier encryption technologies—the data hunger of other state institutions would remain. They will justify it. On issues like obesity or climate change—where the policy makers are quick to add that we are facing a ticking-bomb scenario—they will say a little deficit of democracy can go a long way.
• Second, we must learn how to sabotage the system—perhaps by refusing to self-track at all. If refusing to record our calorie intake or our whereabouts is the only way to get policy makers to address the structural causes of problems like obesity or climate change—and not just tinker with their symptoms through nudging—information boycotts might be justifiable. Refusing to make money off your own data might be as political an act as refusing to drive a car or eat meat. Privacy can then reëmerge as a political instrument for keeping the spirit of democracy alive: we want private spaces because we still believe in our ability to reflect on what ails the world and find a way to fix it, and we’d rather not surrender this capacity to algorithms and feedback loops.

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• While WiFi and devices may exist in a school district, distribution can be lumpy, creating hurdles to smooth implementation.
• paper as a cheap, convenient delivery mechanism
• As to students bringing their own devices? It’s a misconception that BYOD is a common policy, said Peter DeWitt,
• Issues include teacher control, teaching kids to use their devices on school properly, infrastructure and number of tech support staff.

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• This means  students—and educators—need to understand that doing research is more than just sorting through what pops up via online search engines.
• With increased access to many different types of tools for learning and socializing and ever-increasing multitasking, it has become even more important to teach students how to focus their attention.

• Let me begin by getting one thing straight: When it comes to weaning professors  off of traditional computers, the iPad fails. It is simply not a good device for  people who do serious productive work, whether that be reading, writing, or  working with multimedia.
• Where the iPad does shine is as a paper replacement. The iPad is the long, long  awaited portable PDF reader that we have hoped for. Finally, we have a device  that preserves formatting and displays images, charts, and diagrams.
• The more open and reusable academic content is, the more reasons people will  have to buy it.

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• The findings come from Project RED (Revolutionizing Education), a national  initiative that aims to prove that when properly implemented, investing in  technology can boost student achievement and will result in monetary savings for  schools and local governments.

• Results indicate that schools properly implementing 1-to-1 programs achieve  more educational success than schools with higher student-to-computer  ratios.

   

  “In our practice, we see how personalization and individualization of  instruction work best when students have 100-percent access to a computing  device,” said Leslie Wilson, president of the One-to-One Institute, a nonprofit  organization focused on professional development for technology integration and  a co-author of the study.
• Daily technology use in core subject-area classes, frequent technology use in  intervention courses, and a low student-to-computer ratio were found to play a  critical role in reducing dropout rates, the study reveals. Principal leadership  and training also were important factors.

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