At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey looks at the collapse of newspapers and sees higher education on the same trajectory. I’ll defer to Carey on what the Internet might do to higher ed, but I suspect that as long as there is market value in the credential of a name-brand university degree in addition to the actual product of education, elite colleges needn’t worry about filling their freshmen class. You can only take the newspaper analogy so far: nobody ever got an interview at a job fair merely by being a reader of The New York Times.
It seems to me there is a bigger opportunity, however, to use technology to radically improve K-12 education. While not every child goes to a great school or has a great teacher, it seems reasonable to suggest that it’s easier–and faster–to get every child in front of a great teacher online than to get a great teacher in every classroom.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, has just launched YouTube EDU, a service that puts college lectures online. Great idea. But how about K-12, Google? Why not incentivize teachers to create first-rate videos by splitting advertising revenue from each viewing? This could create a new source of income for low-paid teachers, and a rich trove of material for students. While it obviously wouldn’t be a substitute for good classroom instruction, it could certainly supplement bad classroom instruction. Such a resource would also be a boon for differentiated instruction and enrichment during school, homework help or tutoring after school–and a great resource for homeschoolers or parents whose children are trapped in failing schools.
When you think about the enormous waste of teaching capacity that takes place every day — millions of teachers preparing lessons for audiences of two dozen kids — it seems a shame not to have a mechanism to capture great teaching and distribute it broadly for all students. Tomorrow, thousands of teachers will teach their kids how to add unlike fractions. Undoubtedly there are some real gems among them, some that could produce an “aha” in tens of thousands of kids. In YouTube, the free distribution channel already exists. Why not take full advantage of it?
Are the hours kids and teenagers spend prowling the Web a threat to literacy? Or is it simply a new form of reading and writing? A sprawling New York Times thumbsucker notes that “as teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.”
Clearly when kids go online instead of turning on the TV, they read and write instead of passively consuming video. But critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., tells the Times. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”
“Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” adds Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.
According to the paper, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component to next year’s tests. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. “A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools,” the Times notes.
Nicholas Carr, in the cover story of The Atlantic, worries that the Web has damaged his ability to think:
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Carr’s cover story, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” notes that how we read matters as much as what we read. When you take most of your information from the Web “the ability to to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”
“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles,” writes Carr. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
I need to go back and finish that article now…
Rising fuel prices, and increasing access to broadband Internet hookups in schools is creating a boom in virtual field trips, notes the Christian Science Monitor.
About 100 students who didn’t get into the selective North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics will still be able to take school courses, but from their homes instead of the Durham campus, the Charlotte Observer reports.
Great idea.
Helicopter parent? Why merely hover over your child when technology will let you be a black helicopter parent?
The New York Times looks at computer programs that provide daily, real-time data on kids’ in-school performance, from attendance to test scores. Programs like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool are “changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers,” reports the Times. “Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.”
What did you learn in school today? Forget it. Now you can know before your kid walks in the door.
On school days at 2 p.m., Nicole Dobbins walks into her home office in Alpharetta, Ga., logs on to ParentConnect, and reads updated reports on her three children. Then she rushes up the block to meet the fourth and sixth graders’ buses. But in the thump and tumble of backpacks and the gobbling of snacks, Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test?
“Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: “Tell me about this grade,” she will say. When her ninth grader gets home at 6 p.m., there may well be ParentConnect printouts on his bedroom desk with poor grades highlighted in yellow by his mother. She will expect an explanation. He will be braced for a punishment. “He knows I’m going to look at ParentConnect every day and we will address it,” Mrs. Dobbins said.
At best, the programs can help kids stay on top of things and act as an early warning system for trouble. At worst, it’s another lever for over-anxious parents to pull. “At an age when teenagers increasingly want to manage their own lives, many parents use these programs to tighten the grip,” notes the Times. “College admission is so devastatingly competitive, parents say, they feel compelled to check online grades frequently. Parents hope to transform even modest dips before a child’s record is irrevocably scarred.”
“Half a million American children take classes online,” reports this morning’s New York Times, “with a significant group getting all their schooling from virtual public schools. The rapid growth of these schools has provoked debates in courtrooms and legislatures over money, as the schools compete with local districts for millions in public dollars, and over issues like whether online learning is appropriate for young children.”
This is a big, important story—and trend—that’s only going to get bigger. The Times story looks at Wisconsin, where state lawmakers agreed to allow a dozen online schools to stay open “despite a court ruling against them and the opposition of the teachers union.”
The genie is out of the bottle, and won’t go back in willingly.
Update: “We’ve made great strides in providing education for the world’s children. Much more needs to be done, and technology can provide the tools.” So says Bill Gates in an essay today in Forbes.
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