Laurie Niestrath's List: 21st Century Learning

• but find little evidence that making technology more available leads to higher student achievement in core subjects.
• The link between test-score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested.”
• The problem with framing the issue merely as a question of whether technology boosts test scores is that it fails to address the interaction between technology and the values learned in school. In short, we need to ask what kind of learning tends to take place with the computer and what kind gets left out.

  • So the reason that we purchace technology and seek to incorporate it is to boost test scores? Hum...are teachers machines?
• abstract symbols, decontextualized and cast on a two-dimensional screen.

  • Asking children who are concrete, sequential thinkers to think abstractly with two-dimensional object before they are ready is wrong.
• There is a huge qualitative difference between learning about something, which requires only information, and learning from something, which requires that the learner enter into a rich and complex relationship with the subject at hand.

  • Exactly-the idea of learning an algorithm and learning what it means to multiply something.
• the information gushing through our electronic networks is abstract; that is, it is all representations, one or more symbolic steps removed from any concrete object or personal experience. Abstract information must somehow connect to a child’s concrete experiences if it is to be meaningful.

  • Ah, yes...the need for schema!
• he ideas that grow out of them–requires quiet contemplation.
• Theodore Roszak states in The Cult of Information, “An excess of information may actually crowd out ideas, leaving the mind (young minds especially) distracted by sterile, disconnected facts, lost among the shapeless heaps of data.”
• to make meaning out of experience.
• computer cannot traffic in these deeply human qualities, the resilient souls of the pioneers are absent from the simulation.
• What I was not able to provide were the rich and varied firsthand experiences students needed in order to connect the abstract symbols they had to manipulate on the screen to the world around them. Students with scant computer experience but rich ideas and life experiences were, by the end of the year, generating sophisticated relational databases, designing marketable websites, and creating music videos.
• to initiate them into a culture–in this case, the culture of high technology. The purpose is to infuse them with a set of values that supports the high-tech culture that has spread so rapidly across our society. And this, as we shall see, is perhaps the most disturbing trend of all.
• Every tool demands that we somehow change our environment or values in order to accommodate its use.
• Clinging to the belief that computers have no effect on us allows us to turn a blind eye to the sacrifices that schools have made to accommodate them.
• “To an educator with a computer, everything looks like information.” And the more prominent we make computers in schools (and in our own lives), the more we see the rapid accumulation, manipulation, and sharing of information as central to the learning process–edging out the contemplation and expression of ideas and the gradual development of meaningful connections to the world.
• Its growing dominance is witnessed in the language that abounds in education: talk of empowerment, student control of learning, standards, assessment tools, and productivity. Almost gone from the conversation are those inner concerns–wisdom, truth, character, imagination, creativity, and meaning–that once formed the core values of education. Outcomes have replaced insights as the yardstick of learning, while standardized tests are replacing human judgment as the means of assessment. No tool supports this technological shift more than computers.
• Whereas the intellectual focus of schools in the rural society of the 19th century compensated for a childhood steeped in nature and concrete activity, balance today requires a reversal of roles, with schools compensating for the overly abstract, symbolic, and artificial environment that children experience outside of school.

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