“The myth of the digital native harms students and teachers alike"

“Which technology is good for education depends on how education really looks,” declared Jeremy Roschelle at a session entitled “The world beyond the screen – The Educational perspective,” during CET and MindCET’s Shaping the Future conference. This was a critical point in the discussion that took place there, on the nature of education once technology has removed from it elements that were so strongly associated with it, such as the image of a single teacher providing a one-way lecture to a class, kids desperately trying to memorize content, and tests.

Renee Hobbs, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Rhode Island, along with her colleague Julie Coiro, has developed a course in digital literacy for teachers from elementary school through college level, librarians and media specialists. She warned of simply throwing technological aids into the classroom, accompanied by a belief that the students already know how to use them: “The myth of the digital native harms students and teachers alike. Students come to the classroom with a sense of superiority, and teachers come to the classroom thinking that they don’t need to do a thing. It removes the responsibility from educators. There are teachers who have a smart board in their classrooms, and they have never turned it on.”

Renee Hobbs

Make and shape, don’t produce.

Roschelle, co-director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, in whose laboratories over 150 cyberlearning projects are operating, also warned against blind reliance on technology: “I am afraid that teachers will turn computer lessons into typing sessions, or making lessons into product production lessons.” “We have to reimagine education,” he said, and proposed that use be made of the technological capability to provide multiple representations of the material under study. He demonstrated this through the study of mathematical equations – An equation may be described narratively, algebraically, graphically or in tabular form. Use of all four descriptions helps students understand the equation better.

“Teachers and students can be the ones to shape the world, rather than accepting the world as it is shaped for them,” said Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs, which develops educational software used by more than three million children in more than forty countries, co-founder of the One Laptop per Child project, and formerly director of the MIT Media Laboratory. Bender sides with the use of block-based programming languages, because “they have a ‘low floor.’ That’s part of their attractiveness to beginning programmers, but they also have a low ceiling, and so we need to allow children to complete their block learning, and to move on. The motivation for learning programming: autonomy, the opportunity to develop expertise in something, and the sense of having a goal together create a strong motive to be involved in constructing knowledge.”

Walter Bender

What is the role of the teacher, when he is no longer the all-knowing, sole educational authority? “Access to digital media from anywhere makes the model of standing up and teaching outdated. There is an art to creating a digital literacy learning environment,” said Hobbs; however, she admits, “What is digital literacy? We don’t even have agreement over how to define it.” She called for an “expansion of the concept of literacy,” so as to include multitasking (being able to carry out multiple tasks concurrently), transmediation (translating work between different media), representation, curation, and more. In her view, the functions of the new teacher are “to shape the learning environments, identify the needs of the students, support the students’ growth in unexpected ways, and assessing the quality of the learning experience. “One of the tragedies in the American education system is that we have dispensed with responsibility in favor of external, commercial, knowledge-testing systems. I like it when my students exceed my expectations”, she says.

The 5-day gourd discussion

“Technology opens the eyes of teachers, and they can truly teach. Giving a speech is not the same as teaching,” says Roschelle. “In the past, the teacher would come into the classroom and ask: ‘Did you have problems with yesterday’s homework?’ Today he can say, ‘I see that everyone had different answers in Question 4, let’s see what happened there,’ because he can see, in real time, what the students are answering. It is to move from what you once thought was learning, to really learning.”

Jeremy Roschelle

Bender recounts: “I have a friend who is a good teacher and instructor. A student came into the class with a gourd, and asked ‘What’s this?’ She threw out her lesson plan, and the students learned what ‘this’ was. The next day they learned how to grow it themselves, and the day after that, whether it would be worth growing. On the fourth day, they prepared presentations explaining whether it was worth growing it, and on the fifth day, they prepared a plan for growing gourds in their own communities.”