Social Dimensions of Technology

Adapted from remarks prepared for a seminar at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, March 2007

Note: this seminar was aimed at educational journalists. It was organized by the School of Journalism and the Algebra Project. I was on a panel of six and our moderator was Danny Glover, who is a big spporter of Bob Moses and the Algebra Project. I was excited that I'd be introduced by Danny Glover. I don't usually get introduced by celebrities. I spoke last and just as Danny was about to introduce me, he got a cell call and had to step out of the room. So someone just as nice but far less distinguished stepped in. Later that night at a NYC restaurant with my wife and kids I made Danny "introduce" me. So now I can rightfully claim I've been introduced by Danny Glover—even if he only introduced me to my wife and daughter and her boyfriend!

I am a publisher of mathematics and science materials for schools and a developer (www.kcptech.com) of educational software.  The materials that I publish share an educational point of view—they support student inquiry, collaborative and interactive pedagogies, conceptual knowledge as a requisite for procedural fluency, independence in analysis and thought, and engagement as the key to student success.  The technology that our company develops—The Geometer’s Sketchpad, Fathom, and TinkerPlots—are among the most widely used and ratified school software tools in the world.  It is from the perspective of my work in software development, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, and my work with educational policymakers and organizations in more than a score of countries, that I share these thoughts,  I am more activist than academic, although I make my contribution to change indirectly by producing materials that enable qualitative change in classrooms.  With respect to technology, I would like to raise a few issues that, in my experience, merit attention in a discussion about the interactions between education, social justice, and the media.  These are three-fourths developed ideas, written to provoke other ideas—perhaps yours, certainly mine.

Social Dimensions of Technology—
Steven Rasmussen, President, Key Curriculum Press and KCP Technologies, Emeryville, California.
Adapted from remarks prepared for a seminar at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, March 2007
srasmussen@keypress.com
I am a publisher (www.keypress.com) of mathematics and science materials for schools and a developer (www.kcptech.com) of educational software.  The materials that I publish share an educational point of view—they support student inquiry, collaborative and interactive pedagogies, conceptual knowledge as a requisite for procedural fluency, independence in analysis and thought, and engagement as the key to student success.  The technology that our company develops—The Geometer’s Sketchpad, Fathom, and TinkerPlots—are among the most widely used and ratified school software tools in the world.  It is from the perspective of my work in software development, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, and my work with educational policymakers and organizations in more than a score of countries, that I share these thoughts,  I am more activist than academic, although I make my contribution to change indirectly by producing materials that enable qualitative change in classrooms.  With respect to technology, I would like to raise a few issues that, in my experience, merit attention in a discussion about the interactions between education, social justice, and the media.  These are three-fourths developed ideas, written to provoke other ideas—perhaps yours, certainly mine.
Issue 1:  What do you mean by “Educational Technology”?

If the term “Educational Technology” ever had meaning, it has certainly lost its meaning as technology becomes pervasive in all aspects of work and study.  Yet in education, the word “technology” still carries caché, as if the fusion of silicon and electricity imparts status and value to educational activity without regard to the actual nature and effects of that activity.  Schools buy technology products and think that they have facilitated learning—even if no learning results.  Even more troubling is that under the “Educational Technology” headline, disparate educational philosophies and agendas are lumped together in ways that obscure important differences in approach and purpose.  In the press, in professional conferences, in schools, technologists are often assumed to be of like mind and common purpose.  Critical differences in the motivations for using technology are ignored or lost.  For instance, there are those who see technology as a means of cost-cutting in education, a way of circumventing the need for teachers, especially in urban schools hard hit by the ravages of under-funding.  There are those, like me, who see technology tools as ways to magnify students’ creative reach, at the same time increasing students’ powers to work independently and necessitating human interaction to make sense of powerful experiences.  We have very little in common, yet we are both portrayed as like-minded in our interest in technology.

An April 5, 2007, Associated Press article displayed online at FoxNews.com illustrated this problem.  The headline reads, “ Study: Computers in Classrooms Don't Make Kids Smarter.”   In the article we learn, “The study found achievement scores were no higher in classrooms using reading and math software products than in classrooms without the new products.”  Further along we find out, “The report detailed the effectiveness of the products as a group and did not review the performance of particular programs.”  So the article, in its oversimplification of educational technology lumps an amalgam of software (the actual report  identifies the software as a group of sixteen products used from first grade to high school algebra and self-selected by teachers who volunteered to participate in the study) and proclaims that computers in general (not the particular software used) “don’t make kids smarter.”  Confusing things further, the report (as does the body of the article) cites effects on achievement test scores (not making kids “smarter”).  Perhaps is the tests that don’t measure what kids have learned.  An equally valid conclusion if one is trying to measure actual learning.

In order to understand technology, one has to reach into the minds of those who create it, understand the intent of its champions, and evaluate the social dimensions of its use.  Educational technology use only adds additional issues to the mix of issues surrounding social values in our classrooms, upping the ante in the struggle to achieve equity between the educationally resourced and the educationally neglected in our society.  It is critical to drill down through the surface and understand the educational purposes towards which technology is applied. Educational ideology is as prevalent or more prevalent in technology applications in our schools than in other educational domains—and the effects of technology use are often harder to discern and still harder to challenge when destructive in nature.

Issue 2: Are you programmed or programmer?

Many applications of technology in our educational systems relegate students and teachers to passive and submissive roles, coercing conformity by cleverly enticing children to navigate pre-programmed educational mazes with meaningless incentives and rewards.  Other software programs provide opportunities for students to explore their own ideas, to document evidence of their learning, to share their thinking with peers close at hand and with strangers on the other side of the globe.

The differences you find in software are the result of different assumptions of the software designers—often more related to educational values than software design.  My company takes seriously the idea that its users (children and teachers) are mathematically curious.  From this, a number of things fall out: (a) motivation is presumed to be intrinsic to the user, rather than extrinsic (no quacking ducks); (b) direction (curriculum, pedagogy, etc.) is external to the software; (c) there is no distinction drawn between a producer or a consumer of mathematics, a programmer or the programmed.  The tools are “word processors” for mathematics and data analysis.  They can be used to convey knowledge or create knowledge and anyone can deconstruct the knowledge someone else has constructed with the software and choose to build new knowledge on top of the work of others.  Learners can become “teachers” and teachers can become learners—and any user can move between roles at any time.  The technology is open and “democratic.”

Visit schools and see who gets to interact with which types of technology.  You will find clear differences based on class, ethnicity, and the culturally influenced expectations that adults have for children.  Technology tools can serve as effective enforcers of the barriers between the programmed and the programmer.  Poor kids more often get programmed, conditioned for jobs with little authority or autonomy—affluent kids get to be the programmers, practicing for entry into the world of work opportunity

On the other hand, technology tools, when chosen consciously, can serve to democratize education and create new opportunities for kids.

Issue 3: Does your family own a computer?

As school curriculum—textbooks, research libraries, etc.—move online, new disparities arise and old disparities grow more acute with respect to access to content and instructional resources.  The “digital divide,” already a deep chasm separating one community from another and one family from the next within communities, will take on additional significance.  “Advantage magnifies advantage” is the way some researchers have described the phenomenon.  The evidence is already in front of us (perhaps more clearly to those of us who provide the resources to schools) that schools increasingly rely on parents to provide the technological resources to their children that our schools cannot afford to provide.  As this trend grows, schools are less and less able to guarantee equal access to an education.   State systems will take a long time to develop mechanisms to guarantee equal opportunities to children and families as they grapple with all of the complex interdependent factors—hardware, software, connectivity, bandwidth, support, security—that determine access to technology-based education.  Technology, thought by many to be a potential liberator of education, will for many families become yet another guard at the gate to opportunity.

Issue 4: Are you “research-based”?

The Bush administration has changed the face of education with No Child Left Behind.  Among other requirements, the law requires that curriculum used by schools be “research-based” and proven effective.  Effectiveness is tied to positive gains in scores on multiple-choice, machine-scored, standardized tests.  It’s bad enough that standardized test results are used as the measure of effectiveness, but NCLB represents an assault on education and intellect of another kind: it promotes the erroneous notion that the science actually exists to certify materials as effective.  It does not.  The law invokes pseudo-science in the aid of educational demagoguery, and its application has been used to force regressive pedagogies on schools across the nation.  And in the name of “science,” the experiences of educators have been discounted and the teaching community disenfranchised.

Henry Pollack, a former head of Bell Laboratories with a connection here at Columbia through Teachers College, once pointed out to me that education research is a relatively new field, not much older than 50 years.  He pointed out, by contrast, that agricultural research has a 3000-year history.  After 3000 years, he explained, we can drive agriculture with research.  It may take as long to understand learning well enough to drive education by research.  But science doesn’t seem to get in the way of political agendas, neither in education nor in other emergent fields like climate study.  So, under the pressures of NCLB, numerous studies emerge that make grandiose claims about the effectiveness (or not) of technology, curriculum, and educational pedagogy—and the press often reports these as if they were definitive.
A few years ago, a headline in the Bay Area proclaimed that researchers had found that minority students gained little from the use of technology.  Undoubtedly, such press accounts reinforce beliefs that funds to provide technology to schools with high populations of students of color is a poor investment.  But a finding of the actual study reported that use of simulation and geometry construction software (the software pioneered by my company) produced the opposite results.  That note did not make it into the abridged press reports.  And even in the actual study, it wasn’t clear whether the researchers understood enough about the underlying characteristics of the particular technology applications used by the kids to decipher whether the results were due to the use of technology in general or to the use of specific types of technologies.

Compounding the confusion about what science can tell us about education, Bush’s Education Department demands that effectiveness studies rely on randomized sampling—ED’s “gold-standard” of research methodology.  Although most educational researchers see the near impossibility of approaching questions of educational efficacy in the same way drug companies test drugs in double-blind studies, the competition for scarce research dollars induces educators to compromise principles and try to satisfy government agencies.  Suddenly we have an under-developed, under-financed field using inappropriate methodologies producing limited results that are used for political purposes by politicians, who don’t understand either science or education, to inappropriately justify their policies—reported on in simplistic terms by the press to the public.  It’s no wonder that the marketing materials of every purveyor of school curriculum and services now tout the research basis of their programs.  And its no wonder that the press has not challenged the fallacious claim that sound educational research is driving current policies in education.

What can educational research really prove about the effectiveness of technology? Definitively, very little.  The current state of the field allows researchers to test hypotheses in relatively simple domains, to look for relationships between several variables.  Cognitive research at present does not permit sweeping claims of educational effectiveness across broad populations in the complex world od schooling in the United States.  It can, however, point technology developers and their educator users in useful directions, but only combined with the professional judgments of an enfranchised community of practitioners.

Issue 5: Do you want a machine making all the critical decisions that determine your child’s future?

We are facing a day, thanks to the stampede to move all school assessment online, when virtually all critical evaluations of student learning will be made by computer algorithms, not teachers.  Kids will write passionate essays on their SAT examinations that will be spell-checked and grammar-policed only by a machine.  No human will listen to a child reading out loud—instead students will read into a microphone in a sound-proof cubicle.  In a child’s mind, math proficiency will be synonymous with the correct choice of a, b, c, or d on a computer screen.  A simulated bunny will hop up and down to indicate its pre-programmed delight in the child's correct answer.

Parents across the country already choose neighborhoods to raise their children in based on the results of computerized, standardized tests, but all other critical decisions about a child’s development may soon be the result of similarly cold calculations.  What will be the effects on children of this dehumanization of education?  How will this process compound with the existing alienation felt by children of color already abused by systemic neglect in our urban schools?  With real teachers a dwindling resource in our schools, who will feel the impact of this “mechanical” revolution in education?  I think we can predict.

And what are the impacts on teachers of the deployment of assessment systems that bypass their professional insights and judgments in favor of high volume, low cost, compute-scored, multiple-choice tests.  I’ve occasionally asked business colleagues whether they would buy into employee evaluation and merit reward systems that ignored the professional judgments of their managers and the actual work product of their employees in favor of a cheap, computerized, multiple-choice assessment system.  They look at me like I’m nuts, until I point out that the schools they rely on to determine the fate of their own children use exactly such systems.

Issue 6: How far do you want your child to go?

There is a common belief that use of calculating technologies (graphing calculators, especially) will create (or already has) a generation of kids who can’t do simple calculation without relying on such a device.  It is important that kids be able to do simple calculations without aids (even without paper and pencil), but that’s not the real issue.  The question is not what kids can do without technological aids, it is what kids can do with technology.  Many complex problems in mathematics, including most problems in data analysis and statistics, many aspects of mathematical modeling, and problems uniquely solved by mathematical visualization, if children don’t have access to computers and calculators, they are limited to a far narrower domain of mathematics and problem solving in their studies, and that domain is less characteristic of the actual world of mathematical endeavor in academics and the world of work.  An important function of mathematics education is to help students understand when and how to use computational aids.

Of course, it is easy to construct a school mathematics curriculum that does not pose appropriate technology-enabled challenges for kids, and most “traditional” curricula in schools today do not require calculation devices, at least for the vast problems.  Such curricula often let students use technology as an option.  This approach feeds the concern that technology may get in the way of other necessary skills students should develop because of the very assumption that the technology is optional.  If it is optional, by definition, problems are not of the type that require technology, so must they be limited in their scope, marginalizing the technology use.  This in turns feeds the perception of teachers, parents and students that the technology can get in the way of other skills students should develop.

Here’s a simple way to think about the issue.  Suppose a child needs to go to three destinations: the corner store, to her aunt’s house in a city at the other end of her state, a city in a country, and to her grandparent’s house in Bangkok.  She has three choices of transportation (technology): foot, car, plane.  Just as it would be ridiculous to use a plane or a car to go to the corner store, it would be equally silly to attempt to cross her state by foot.  And if couldn’t fly in a plane, she would never be able to visit her grandparents.  Similarly, we want to avoid silly choices of tool use by students in school, but we want to give them destinations of thought only approachable with technology tools.

Issue 7: Don’t you want our country to be competitive in the world economy?

Until recently, I bought into the thinking that the current rhetoric about keeping our country competitive in the world economy might lead to a much needed increased in the trickle of funds for education, especially for education in the STEM disciplines.  This, I hoped, would be good for developers like myself of cutting-edge technology tools for math and science.

In March 2007 I returned home from a working trip to India, one of about a score that I have made to Asia in as many years, and I found a series of ads run by ExxonMobil in the San Francisco Chronicle.  “Mission: math and science,” ran the headline. “In the global competition to educate students in math and science, Americans are losing ground,” proclaimed the oil company.  ExxonMobil’s “National Math and Science Initiative will expand proven education program to strengthen U.S. competitiveness.”
I had gone to Asia to learn and share expertise on technology issues with mathematics educators working on common problems.  I resented ExxonMobil’s ads, and their implication that it was I that needed to join their mission to enhance their competitive advantage in the world.  Suddenly, my own counter-ad flashed across a billboard in my brain.  “Beware of those that preach education for the sake of competitive advantage.  Education is all about motivation, empathy and love, not competition.  It makes no difference whether we help a child in Chicago or a child in Mumbai, India.  Our children will thrive only if all children are educated and are committed to working across borders for their common benefit.”
Why is it now that ExxonMobil runs ads proclaiming our patriotic duty to teach math and science?  Why are powerful politicians, from the President on down, suddenly worried about achievement in STEM disciplines?  Politicians and large corporations have ignored education for years, and have rarely demonstrated any commitment to the “mission” of harnessing the squandered resource of untapped intellect in our nations urban and rural communities for the benefit of our nation.  I can’t help but believe that the threat to class and national privilege posed by developing nations, many of which invest substantially more resources (relative to GDP) in education than does the U.S., terrifies those who are accustomed to dominating the world’s economy.  How can we tolerate the prospect of a well-healed kid from Evanston, Illinois, reporting to a boss at a Thai company based in Bangkok?

This “competition” rhetoric in 2007 reminds me of similar rhetoric during the cold war when we were urged to study math and science so we could develop better weapons with which to obliterate the Russians.  I remember listening to the CEO of Control Data Corporation shock educators with just such an exhortation.  Such twisted values didn’t appeal to educators then, nor will the rhetoric of “Educate for American Competitiveness!” motivate those who care for education now.  If anything, it will drive thinking and compassionate people from an already endangered field.  People resist cynical manipulation.

When I visit Asia, I don’t hear educators identify international economic competition as the driving force to justify commitment to education.  In Asia resources are committed to education because of the widespread belief that it is the key to national development.  Several years ago I asked Malaysian education colleagues to tell me what had happened to education funding during the years in the 1990s when Malaysia was hit hard by the “Asian flu,” the economic downturn that spread across the region for almost a decade.  My friends told me that the Malaysian government cut spending in virtually every budget area—except education.  Funding for education was increased because of the widespread belief that reduced education spending would compound the short-term economic problem and lead to long-term decline in living standards.  I couldn’t help contrasting this approach to the experience of our own country during economic tough times.

Development need not assume competition.  The attractor for most of us to education is the challenge and fun of stimulating the development of young people’s minds—sparking intellectual flames in kids.  We have far more to gain by working cooperatively with our Asian friends on common issues, taking special advantage on our common interests in developing technologies to enhance learning, than we have to gain by competing.

Who is spinning education as international  “competition” and why?

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