Chinese fortune cookie:: “Information is not understanding.”
VCSC Mission Statement. “The Vigo County School Corporation will equip students with lifelong learning skills and prepare them to be productive and responsible citizens.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
(I suppose this is the point where I need to say I was a teacher for 38 years, five at the high school level, the remainder in colleges. And that I bought my first computer, a KayPro with a CPM operating system, in 1983 and started searching the World Wide Web using the Mosaic web browser over twenty-five years ago. I also was the first in the History Department at Indiana State University to incorporate online exercises into some of my classes. I’ll say it again, I am a reader not a Luddite.)
I believe that active, deep reading is the foundation of education in all its forms and permutations. This undeniable reality is often given lip service but too little real support. Can we all agree on these points:
--Students should read more books.
--Students should read more books they hold in their hands.
--Students should read more books of demanding fiction and non-fiction.
--Students who read such books acquire the deep reading skills and habits of attention, comprehension, and contemplation.
While we may agree and even applaud the above, we need to recognize that the over-reliance on tech in schools is not wholly compatible with these truisms. I’m certain those in this room are readers as well as heavy users of tech screens. But we should recognize that we are a lucky generation of bilinguals. We grew up acquiring the intricacies and benefits of print on page reading. It was our first language. Screens came later in our lives, and in slowly released and careful doses.
Today this is not the case. Our children and grandchildren are being pushed quickly past this crucial first-language of reading. They are growing up with screens, not books, in their faces. Think about it: There was a time when parents admonished children: “No reading at the table.” Now the concern (when expressed) is: “No phones at the table.”
Studies increasingly indicate (some are cited in the attached bibliography) that reading on screens distracts and detours critical thinking. That screen reading changes the neural circuits in the brain. Screens fill the attention of most young people today. Viewing and thumbing in tweets replaces writing sentences and reading paragraphs. We see some students turned into video game bots.
All of this is harmful, even antithetical to deep reading practices. Therefore, all decisions in regard to more screens, more time on task involving screens, and more expenditures in terms of hardware, training, and servicing of tech screen related products should be made with these concerns in mind.
Again, I am not a Luddite fuming against computers and all technological advances in our society and economy. Computers and related technologies are real and necessary tools for living in the twenty-first century. But as a general category, tech has been grossly oversold as an educational panacea to problems and goals. Expenditures on tech are too often seen as an education necessity of the highest order. It is important that school administrators and school boards not oversell tech to a public that is uninformed in its understanding of the pitfalls and failings of tech in the educational mission.
My concerns about the over-dependence on screen technology in classrooms are pedagogical and philosophical as well. Allow me to dive deeper here.
We can all agree that tech cannot replace, significantly augment, or repair a teacher who is unprepared, uninvolved. But too many harbor the false hope that greater emphasis on tech will solve, or at least paper over, weak teacher’s existing shortcomings. Tech is not teacher-proof, tech is not the answer to weaknesses in teacher preparation or teachers who have personal deficient dedication problems. Only hiring exceptional and motivated teachers can fully address such problems. (And I recognize that this means paying the higher salaries such qualifications warrant. It also means fully supporting new hires through Master Teacher Mentor programs.)
We need teachers with a deep grasp and love of their subject matter, teachers who receive the support of administrators, seasoned teacher-colleagues, and the admiration and respect of the public at large.
There is no algorithm for this. None of it is available in the cloud. And none of this comes through the click of a mouse.
We all remember our “great” and our, let’s be kind here, “not-so-great” teachers. What will students remember of the computer screens they stared into through twelve years of public education? Computers, related devices, and books online are covers and diversions from hard problems not clearly and candidly faced. Before dramatically expanding the tech screen element in our schools, questions implied in the preceding paragraphs must be faced.
And then there is the rush away from public education being a key, perhaps the key, in training and nurturing young people in their roles as citizens. If representative democracy is to survive and flourish, schools must play a basic role in the creation of intelligent, informed and active citizenship. [See again: VCSC Mission Statement. “The Vigo County School Corporation will equip students with lifelong learning skills and prepare them to be productive and responsible citizens.”
Today the role of the schools in the area of citizenship has been avoided, diminished, and even abandoned. The central mission of every school has become the molding of the young into a job seeking, economic widget. Education is far too often narrowed into a kind of bottom line, materialistic, curiosity crushing slogan: education equals lifetime earnings. We once sought to educate the whole woman/man. Now the goal is being narrowed to job preparation–through a college or a vocational path. Tech is too often seen as the key to this over-emphasized, misguided goal.
Hopefully, this committee will see clear to allow more expansive concerns to be considered in its analyses of how tech can serve students, teachers and the public. Too often educational institution’s decisions about technology are based on pie in the sky promises of “efficiency,” “cost savings,” and easy nuts and bolts choices about this machine vs. that machine. All this is based on vague notions of a future world that does not exist, that cannot be predicted with any accuracy. Schools diminish their basic mission for fear of being left behind while others pursue the next new thing.
This is not the vision or the stance a true leader such as VCSC should take.
Here are my tech predictions: In the future computers will be a tool, and only a tool. (I know, I know, this is a common refrain today. But it is not emphasized or practiced.) Critical thinking and the comprehension of complex problems-- political, social, economic, vocational-- will require knowledge and understandings not available solely, let alone primarily,. through the use of this tool. The hard won intellectual and emotional capital coming from deep reading, deep thinking, and deep discussion is what students (and all of us) need as we rush toward an uncertain, confusing future.
Schools preparing their students for a place in this world must resist abandoning broad, hard won, educational foundation goals that enlighten and excite. Short term satisfactions of search, copy, paste, plug in, delete are loops, superficialities. Our students should be taught to ask hard, important questions that cannot be easily answered; screen tech too often leads to asking unimportant questions with easily obtained, unimportant and easily forgotten information.
I opened a Chinese fortune cookie recently. It was to the point: “Information is not understanding.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
SOME SOURCES WITH A DIFFERENT, TOO OFTEN NOT CONSIDERED, POINT OF VIEW ON TECH, READING AND EDUCATION
We live in an era of exploding technological innovations. Much of the literature related to this explosion has created an institutional education bandwagon, a don’t get left behind mentality, and a raft of simplistic how to exercises. And far too many of these sources are thinly veiled sales pitches for hardware and software that eventually ends up gathering dust in storerooms.
Explosions do not create an atmosphere for thinking through the strengths and weaknesses of our responses. Here are a few of the sources that clear away the smoke and debris and do just that.
_________________________________________________________________________________
The New York Times
November 7, 2007
On Education
New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
“All the advances schools and colleges have made to supposedly enhance learning — supplying students with laptops, equipping computer labs, creating wireless networks — have instead enabled distraction. Perhaps attendance records should include a new category: present but otherwise engaged.”
___________
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/books/hyperfocus-chris-bailey-attention-distraction.html
Having Trouble Finishing This Headline? Then This Article Is for You.
Sept. 6, 2018
“First, some math. If Chris Bailey’s new book, “Hyperfocus: How to be More Productive in a World of Distraction,” is 215 pages long, and I can read 40 pages per hour, how long should it have taken me to read the book? Answer: A weekend. Reality: three weeks.
“It’s not Mr. Bailey’s fault. He’s written an engaging book about how managing your attention can make you more productive, but every time I tried to sit down and read, I was pulled in a different direction, mostly by way of my phone: Instagram, email, more email, Facebook, WhatsApp; sometimes, I just scrolled from screen to screen aimlessly. . . . “
___________
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html
For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.
By Farhad Manjoo
March 7, 2018
___________
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/books/review/andrea-gabor-after-the-education-wars.html
What Role Do Teachers Play in Education?
A teacher at an elementary school in North Carolina hugs a third grade student.
By Cathy N. Davidson
Aug. 17, 2018
AFTER THE EDUCATION WARS
How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform
By Andrea Gabor
373 pp. The New Press. $27.99.
_____________
_Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain_ by Maryanne Wolf
“But as well as celebrating the transformative act of reading, Wolf admits to being troubled about the future of reading. . . . Reading is not just about absorbing information and finding ready-made answers; it is thought-in-action. There are no pre-packaged answers in life. "We can receive the truth from nobody," said Proust; "we must create it ourselves." But in the "Google universe", with its instant over-abundance of information, how we read is being changed fundamentally. On-screen texts are not read "inferentially, analytically and critically"; they are skimmed and filleted, cherry-picked for half-grasped truths. By doing this we risk losing the "associative dimension" to reading, those precious moments when you venture beyond the words of a text and glimpse new intellectual horizons.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/apr/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview21
_______________
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/well/family/reading-to-your-toddler-print-books-are-better-than-digital-ones.html?action=click&module=Discovery&pgtype=Homepage
Reading to Your Toddler? Print Books Are Better Than Digital Ones
“The tablet itself made it harder for parents and children to engage in the rich back-and-forth turn-taking that was happening in print books,” a researcher said.
“When my own children were young, and I had just started to investigate the literature on reading, I was delighted to discover that “sustained silent reading” was an important pedagogical technique in elementary schools. I promptly invented another important technique, which I termed “witnessed sustained silent reading,” which I felt changed my parenting approach from “don’t bother me now, I’m reading,” to something far more laudable.”
______________
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf
Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound
Maryanne Wolf
When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age
“The negative effects of screen reading can appear as early as fourth and fifth grade
Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college, or in wills, contracts and the deliberately confusing public referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth.”
____________
The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
The current system for delivering news online is broken. Readers and journalists will need to work together to find a new one.
[“In 2017, the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach published the book “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.” Their book, which is about the perils of superficial knowledge, offers as good an explanation as any of how our social-media-based news ecosystem is leading to undesirable outcomes in our democracy. People vastly overestimate what they know, and their unjustifiably strong opinions are reinforced by other people who are similarly ill-informed, creating self-reinforcing communities of misinformation:
“When group members don’t know much but share a position, members of the group can reinforce one another’s sense of understanding, leading everyone to feel like their position is justified and their mission is clear, even when there is no real expertise to give it solid support. Everyone sees everyone else as justifying their view so that opinion rests on a mirage.”]
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-urgent-quest-for-slower-better-news
__________
http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16
_The Shallows_ by Nicholas Carr
“This is a book to shake up the world.” —Ann Patchett
“Essential reading about our Internet Age.” —New York Times Book Review
“A book everyone should read.” —American Scientist
“Is Google making us stupid? When Nicholas Carr posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic essay, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the internet’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?
“With The Shallows, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and a New York Times bestseller, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the net’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published.”
Maryanne Wolf, "Reader, Come Home"
C-Span BookTV
Published on Aug 24, 2018
Maryanne Wolf explores how our brains process reading print versus digital mediums in her book "Reader, Come Home".
https://www.c-span.org/video/?449318-2/reader-home
[Warning: This material is available only on a computer screen. See, I told you I’m not a Luddite.]
_____________________________________________________________________________
(I suppose this is the point where I need to say I was a teacher for 38 years, five at the high school level, the remainder in colleges. And that I bought my first computer, a KayPro with a CPM operating system, in 1983 and started searching the World Wide Web using the Mosaic web browser over twenty-five years ago. I also was the first in the History Department at Indiana State University to incorporate online exercises into some of my classes. I’ll say it again, I am a reader not a Luddite.)
I believe that active, deep reading is the foundation of education in all its forms and permutations. This undeniable reality is often given lip service but too little real support. Can we all agree on these points:
--Students should read more books.
--Students should read more books they hold in their hands.
--Students should read more books of demanding fiction and non-fiction.
--Students who read such books acquire the deep reading skills and habits of attention, comprehension, and contemplation.
While we may agree and even applaud the above, we need to recognize that the over-reliance on tech in schools is not wholly compatible with these truisms. I’m certain those in this room are readers as well as heavy users of tech screens. But we should recognize that we are a lucky generation of bilinguals. We grew up acquiring the intricacies and benefits of print on page reading. It was our first language. Screens came later in our lives, and in slowly released and careful doses.
Today this is not the case. Our children and grandchildren are being pushed quickly past this crucial first-language of reading. They are growing up with screens, not books, in their faces. Think about it: There was a time when parents admonished children: “No reading at the table.” Now the concern (when expressed) is: “No phones at the table.”
Studies increasingly indicate (some are cited in the attached bibliography) that reading on screens distracts and detours critical thinking. That screen reading changes the neural circuits in the brain. Screens fill the attention of most young people today. Viewing and thumbing in tweets replaces writing sentences and reading paragraphs. We see some students turned into video game bots.
All of this is harmful, even antithetical to deep reading practices. Therefore, all decisions in regard to more screens, more time on task involving screens, and more expenditures in terms of hardware, training, and servicing of tech screen related products should be made with these concerns in mind.
Again, I am not a Luddite fuming against computers and all technological advances in our society and economy. Computers and related technologies are real and necessary tools for living in the twenty-first century. But as a general category, tech has been grossly oversold as an educational panacea to problems and goals. Expenditures on tech are too often seen as an education necessity of the highest order. It is important that school administrators and school boards not oversell tech to a public that is uninformed in its understanding of the pitfalls and failings of tech in the educational mission.
My concerns about the over-dependence on screen technology in classrooms are pedagogical and philosophical as well. Allow me to dive deeper here.
We can all agree that tech cannot replace, significantly augment, or repair a teacher who is unprepared, uninvolved. But too many harbor the false hope that greater emphasis on tech will solve, or at least paper over, weak teacher’s existing shortcomings. Tech is not teacher-proof, tech is not the answer to weaknesses in teacher preparation or teachers who have personal deficient dedication problems. Only hiring exceptional and motivated teachers can fully address such problems. (And I recognize that this means paying the higher salaries such qualifications warrant. It also means fully supporting new hires through Master Teacher Mentor programs.)
We need teachers with a deep grasp and love of their subject matter, teachers who receive the support of administrators, seasoned teacher-colleagues, and the admiration and respect of the public at large.
There is no algorithm for this. None of it is available in the cloud. And none of this comes through the click of a mouse.
We all remember our “great” and our, let’s be kind here, “not-so-great” teachers. What will students remember of the computer screens they stared into through twelve years of public education? Computers, related devices, and books online are covers and diversions from hard problems not clearly and candidly faced. Before dramatically expanding the tech screen element in our schools, questions implied in the preceding paragraphs must be faced.
And then there is the rush away from public education being a key, perhaps the key, in training and nurturing young people in their roles as citizens. If representative democracy is to survive and flourish, schools must play a basic role in the creation of intelligent, informed and active citizenship. [See again: VCSC Mission Statement. “The Vigo County School Corporation will equip students with lifelong learning skills and prepare them to be productive and responsible citizens.”
Today the role of the schools in the area of citizenship has been avoided, diminished, and even abandoned. The central mission of every school has become the molding of the young into a job seeking, economic widget. Education is far too often narrowed into a kind of bottom line, materialistic, curiosity crushing slogan: education equals lifetime earnings. We once sought to educate the whole woman/man. Now the goal is being narrowed to job preparation–through a college or a vocational path. Tech is too often seen as the key to this over-emphasized, misguided goal.
Hopefully, this committee will see clear to allow more expansive concerns to be considered in its analyses of how tech can serve students, teachers and the public. Too often educational institution’s decisions about technology are based on pie in the sky promises of “efficiency,” “cost savings,” and easy nuts and bolts choices about this machine vs. that machine. All this is based on vague notions of a future world that does not exist, that cannot be predicted with any accuracy. Schools diminish their basic mission for fear of being left behind while others pursue the next new thing.
This is not the vision or the stance a true leader such as VCSC should take.
Here are my tech predictions: In the future computers will be a tool, and only a tool. (I know, I know, this is a common refrain today. But it is not emphasized or practiced.) Critical thinking and the comprehension of complex problems-- political, social, economic, vocational-- will require knowledge and understandings not available solely, let alone primarily,. through the use of this tool. The hard won intellectual and emotional capital coming from deep reading, deep thinking, and deep discussion is what students (and all of us) need as we rush toward an uncertain, confusing future.
Schools preparing their students for a place in this world must resist abandoning broad, hard won, educational foundation goals that enlighten and excite. Short term satisfactions of search, copy, paste, plug in, delete are loops, superficialities. Our students should be taught to ask hard, important questions that cannot be easily answered; screen tech too often leads to asking unimportant questions with easily obtained, unimportant and easily forgotten information.
I opened a Chinese fortune cookie recently. It was to the point: “Information is not understanding.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
SOME SOURCES WITH A DIFFERENT, TOO OFTEN NOT CONSIDERED, POINT OF VIEW ON TECH, READING AND EDUCATION
We live in an era of exploding technological innovations. Much of the literature related to this explosion has created an institutional education bandwagon, a don’t get left behind mentality, and a raft of simplistic how to exercises. And far too many of these sources are thinly veiled sales pitches for hardware and software that eventually ends up gathering dust in storerooms.
Explosions do not create an atmosphere for thinking through the strengths and weaknesses of our responses. Here are a few of the sources that clear away the smoke and debris and do just that.
_________________________________________________________________________________
The New York Times
November 7, 2007
On Education
New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
“All the advances schools and colleges have made to supposedly enhance learning — supplying students with laptops, equipping computer labs, creating wireless networks — have instead enabled distraction. Perhaps attendance records should include a new category: present but otherwise engaged.”
___________
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/books/hyperfocus-chris-bailey-attention-distraction.html
Having Trouble Finishing This Headline? Then This Article Is for You.
Sept. 6, 2018
“First, some math. If Chris Bailey’s new book, “Hyperfocus: How to be More Productive in a World of Distraction,” is 215 pages long, and I can read 40 pages per hour, how long should it have taken me to read the book? Answer: A weekend. Reality: three weeks.
“It’s not Mr. Bailey’s fault. He’s written an engaging book about how managing your attention can make you more productive, but every time I tried to sit down and read, I was pulled in a different direction, mostly by way of my phone: Instagram, email, more email, Facebook, WhatsApp; sometimes, I just scrolled from screen to screen aimlessly. . . . “
___________
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html
For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.
By Farhad Manjoo
March 7, 2018
___________
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/books/review/andrea-gabor-after-the-education-wars.html
What Role Do Teachers Play in Education?
A teacher at an elementary school in North Carolina hugs a third grade student.
By Cathy N. Davidson
Aug. 17, 2018
AFTER THE EDUCATION WARS
How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform
By Andrea Gabor
373 pp. The New Press. $27.99.
_____________
_Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain_ by Maryanne Wolf
“But as well as celebrating the transformative act of reading, Wolf admits to being troubled about the future of reading. . . . Reading is not just about absorbing information and finding ready-made answers; it is thought-in-action. There are no pre-packaged answers in life. "We can receive the truth from nobody," said Proust; "we must create it ourselves." But in the "Google universe", with its instant over-abundance of information, how we read is being changed fundamentally. On-screen texts are not read "inferentially, analytically and critically"; they are skimmed and filleted, cherry-picked for half-grasped truths. By doing this we risk losing the "associative dimension" to reading, those precious moments when you venture beyond the words of a text and glimpse new intellectual horizons.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/apr/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview21
_______________
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/well/family/reading-to-your-toddler-print-books-are-better-than-digital-ones.html?action=click&module=Discovery&pgtype=Homepage
Reading to Your Toddler? Print Books Are Better Than Digital Ones
“The tablet itself made it harder for parents and children to engage in the rich back-and-forth turn-taking that was happening in print books,” a researcher said.
“When my own children were young, and I had just started to investigate the literature on reading, I was delighted to discover that “sustained silent reading” was an important pedagogical technique in elementary schools. I promptly invented another important technique, which I termed “witnessed sustained silent reading,” which I felt changed my parenting approach from “don’t bother me now, I’m reading,” to something far more laudable.”
______________
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf
Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound
Maryanne Wolf
When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age
“The negative effects of screen reading can appear as early as fourth and fifth grade
Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college, or in wills, contracts and the deliberately confusing public referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth.”
____________
The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
The current system for delivering news online is broken. Readers and journalists will need to work together to find a new one.
[“In 2017, the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach published the book “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.” Their book, which is about the perils of superficial knowledge, offers as good an explanation as any of how our social-media-based news ecosystem is leading to undesirable outcomes in our democracy. People vastly overestimate what they know, and their unjustifiably strong opinions are reinforced by other people who are similarly ill-informed, creating self-reinforcing communities of misinformation:
“When group members don’t know much but share a position, members of the group can reinforce one another’s sense of understanding, leading everyone to feel like their position is justified and their mission is clear, even when there is no real expertise to give it solid support. Everyone sees everyone else as justifying their view so that opinion rests on a mirage.”]
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-urgent-quest-for-slower-better-news
__________
http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16
_The Shallows_ by Nicholas Carr
“This is a book to shake up the world.” —Ann Patchett
“Essential reading about our Internet Age.” —New York Times Book Review
“A book everyone should read.” —American Scientist
“Is Google making us stupid? When Nicholas Carr posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic essay, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the internet’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?
“With The Shallows, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and a New York Times bestseller, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the net’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published.”
Maryanne Wolf, "Reader, Come Home"
C-Span BookTV
Published on Aug 24, 2018
Maryanne Wolf explores how our brains process reading print versus digital mediums in her book "Reader, Come Home".
https://www.c-span.org/video/?449318-2/reader-home
[Warning: This material is available only on a computer screen. See, I told you I’m not a Luddite.]
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