Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

November 12, 2009

Is technology making the classroom old-school?

There’s a dramatic shift in education happening right under our noses and now’s the time to re-think the American educational system, according to an educational researcher who lectured here last month.

“All around us people are learning with the aid of new technologies: Children are playing complex video games, workers are taking online courses to get an advanced degree, students are taking courses at commercial learning centers to prepare for tests, adults are consulting Wikipedia,” said Allan Collins, emeritus professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University. “We have home schooling, distance education, workplace learning, computer-based learning environments and online technical certification programs.”

LRDC lecture COLLINS

These new technologies are creating learning opportunities that challenge the educational delivery system of traditional schools and colleges, said Collins, drawing on the theories advanced in his book, “Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America,” co-authored by Richard Halverson.

“These new learning niches enable people of all ages to pursue learning on their own terms,” said Collins in an Oct. 22 lecture sponsored by the Learning Policy Center, part of the Learning Research and Development Center. “People around the world are taking their education out of school into homes, libraries, Internet cafes and workplaces, where they can decide what they want to learn, when they want to learn and how they want to learn.”

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to see firsthand what the new democracy was all about, both the good and the bad, Collins said.book collins

“In some sense that’s what Richard Halverson and I were trying to do in the book: Look at this technological revolution and its impact on education and figure out what’s good about it and what’s bad about it,” Collins said. “I come here not as an advocate for technology in education; I come as a sociologist trying to figure out what’s going on.”

He related several anecdotes that illustrate the changing nature of education delivery, including the story of the 3-year-old boy who by watching videos about dinosaurs became an expert on them before he learned to read.

Collins also cited the story of the retired marketing executive who began to follow the stock market online until eventually, through self-teaching, she was able to make money for herself and friends.

He related how a middle school student, whose father needed a web site for his business, built the web site for her father after learning how from a group of digital artists who trained her online.

“The point is that a lot of the most impressive education is happening through technology all over the place, but particularly outside the school,” Collins said. “We argue that there are some really deep incompatibilities between schools and technology. For example, schools are designed for uniform learning — We want everybody to learn the same thing at the same time — whereas technology empowers customization, allows you to pursue the things you’re most interested in and will also give you immediate feedback.”

In addition, the culture of schooling is built on the idea of the teacher as the expert who passes on wisdom, whereas technology affords a lot of diverse sources that a teacher often isn’t aware of. “This also leads kids to question the authority of the teacher who doesn’t have access to all the same resources,” he said.

Furthermore, the goal of traditional schooling is an accumulation of memorized knowledge, “so we don’t let kids have books when they take tests, or calculators often, and certainly not the web,” Collins said. “But technology produces people who are using the web to accomplish their learning goals. It’s a different relationship. In other words, you don’t have to have everything in your head, because you can access it easily through the web or through tutors on the web.”

Traditional schooling is driven by absorption and emphasizes broad coverage of knowledge, Collins maintained. “We want you to learn all the big theories, good ideas, facts, works of art, works of literature, whereas technology takes you much more into a learning-by-doing paradigm, putting you into a simulated environment or having you interact with other people in a web community. In sum, schooling takes you into just-in-case learning; technology, into just-in-time learning.”

As a result of these incompatibilities, Collins argued that schools have become a much less important venue for education. “They’re not going to go away. We will have schools well into the future. But they won’t be so central to everything,” he said.

That shift, Collins said, is akin to the first major shift in American education. “The parallel equation is that the industrial revolution took us from an apprenticeship-based system to a schooling-based system in the 1800s. Now the digital revolution or the knowledge revolution is taking us toward a lifelong learning system,” he said.

“What happened with the introduction of universal schooling was that the state grabbed control and responsibility for learning away from the parents and the master-teachers. Now what we see are individuals taking back responsibility for their learning away from the state, and pursuing the things they care about.”

Collins tracked the changes in the three eras of education: the apprenticeship era, the schooling era and the emerging lifelong learning era.

“Apprenticeship was a pedagogy where there was close interaction between the master and the learner. Often it was just learning to farm or work in the family business. The culture was an adult culture. It was a form of social reproduction,” Collins said.

By contrast, a peer culture arose in the schooling era. “It’s a culture of belonging to a house for learning,” he said.

“As we move into home schooling and distance education and online gaming, the culture changes again. There is much less peer culture. Often individuals are learning alone, or they might be in web groups that attract all ages. It’s a culture based on common interest, not common age.”

Assessment in the apprenticeship era was done by observation of the master; in the schooling era, assessment is done through standardized testing.

“I think we’re moving more toward a pedagogy of interaction, whether it’s through simulations or with people in a common group. Assessment is becoming more embedded. In other words, typically you’re getting immediate feedback as you interact,” Collins said.

So what’s lost and what’s gained? he asked.

“The losses are big. Equity is really being hurt as the middle and upper classes are buying up all these videos and computers and handheld devices for their kids and they have all sorts of interactive educational content,” Collins said. “Poor minorities can’t afford to spend a lot of money on technology. The middle and upper class segments are buying educational advantages. So this technological revolution is really making equity much worse.”

The arguments behind the establishment of traditional schooling include Thomas Jefferson’s notion that universal schooling was necessary for good citizenship, because the king of England no longer was making all the policy decisions. That fell to the people. So the people had to be educated to make wise policy decisions, Collins explained.

“But when people are taking up home schooling or distance education, they are pursuing their own interests or career goals. They’re not learning about political policy issues,” he said.

“Horace Mann argued that we needed universal schooling because we had all these immigrants coming in. We needed to Americanize them, teach them the language and values of the American culture.”

But with home schooling networks, for example, the cultural values are localized, such as the religious right teaching one set of values and the environmentalists teaching another set of values, Collins said.

“So social cohesion tends to go down the drain. The book argues that we as a society are settling into our own little cultural niches. In fact, the technology revolution is helping that along,” he said.

Also, diversity is becoming diluted in the lifelong learning era. “One of the things schooling does is bring people together from diverse backgrounds. With home schooling or distance education or even participating in web communities, you’re not learning so much from people of different backgrounds,” Collins said.

On the other end of the spectrum, the gains of technological advances include promoting more engagement whether in a simulation environment, gaming environment or interactive web environment.

“The people playing these multi-player games are learning all sorts of entrepreneurial skills like how to form coalitions, how to negotiate with partners or enemies, how to recover from a business failure,” Collins maintained.

Interactive web communities, of which Wikipedia is a common example, are growing exponentially, he noted. “I think this will be a big way that education takes place in the future, where people are participating in communities organized around their shared passions and getting feedback, trying out their ideas and producing things. And they get critiqued in that world,” Collins said.

“With home schooling you get less competition than in the classrooms, which are very competitive environments. You get customization, you get support for people to pursue their interests and more immediate feedback and help. So if you fail at something, you know why you failed. The technologic environment puts far more of the responsibility on the learner,” but also provides many more options for learning, Collins said.

So where do we go from here?

“This is a time of flux so it is a time when visionaries can have an impact. To succeed, they need to understand the imperatives of technology. We summarize those as customization, interaction and learning control,” Collins said.

“We need to re-think high school. High schools are in trouble. Most kids feel like they’re in prison and they don’t want to be there,” he said.

Instead, Collins advocates giving 9th-grade students a choice whether to remain in school or begin specializing in an area leading to a career. This would require much more training for vocational counselors, he noted.

“If we’re trying to improve education, instead of always asking: How do we improve the schools? we should ask a whole new set of questions, such as: How can we make learning technology resources available to everybody? What kinds of tools can support people to learn on their own?” Collins said.

“We also need to re-think motivation, because the current system does not foster intrinsic motivation. We need more self-directed learning. We need more handheld devices for every kid that teaches them reading and arithmetic,” he said. More free online tutoring programs are needed, he said, as are more technical certification programs.

“I would also like to see specialized certification in more than just technical areas. You could even have them in reading at the 6th-grade level, reading at the 9th-grade level, and so on,” Collins said.

Educators need to re-evaluate what’s important to learn. “Technology is changing what we need to know. The web is a great substitute-memory device. What people need to do is be able to find information, so learning to negotiate the web is becoming more and more important,” he said.

In the lifelong learning era, careers will change more rapidly. “People are going to go back and forth between learning and work all their lives. We don’t think that way now and we’ve got to start thinking that way, because making career transitions is very difficult. How can we support that better?” Collins said.

“We need to re-think educational leadership. This is the time for a new system, and leaders need to integrate all the disparate elements,” he said.

“Finally, we need to start re-thinking systemically how to pull this all together. We need to address equity issues where parts of the population are getting all sorts of educational advantages and we need to understand the importance of all this new technology and where it should fit in our educational system.”

—Peter Hart

Filed under: Feature,Volume 42 Issue 6

Leave a Reply