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TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Frances Cairncross
Producer: Chris Bowlby
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
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Broadcast Date: 26.12.02
Repeat Date: 29.12.02
Tape Number: TLN251/02VT1052
Duration:
Taking part in order of appearance:
Sherry Turkle
Director of the programme on technology and self,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
David Reynolds
Professor of education, University of Exeter and
member of the board of BECTA
Josh Angrist
Economics professor at MIT
Roger Watson
Publishing consultant
Yasmin Valli
Senior lecturer, Leeds Metropolitan University
Mike Moore
Head of computing at the Community School in
Salford President of the Association of Teachers and
Lecturers
CAIRNCROSS Technology and hype go together
like bread and butter. Do you remember how, only five years ago,
computers seemed the magic answer to all the woes of Britain’s
schools? Keyboards and screens arrived by the crateload and BT,
prodded by the government, connected schools to the worldwide
web. Computers went not just into secondary schools, but into
primary schools too and exactly the same happened across the
Atlantic.
But where is this revolution today?
TURKLE The original vision was that you
would teach children programming, you would teach children
something about the nature of this new medium and in the course of
doing so you would really give them access to powerful ideas that
are intrinsic to computation - a whole new world of thinking, of ability
to process materials, to think about structure - and that didn’t
happen.
CAIRNCROSS Sherry Turkle watched that vision
evolve more closely than most people: she directs the programme
on technology and self at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, or MIT. But even some of yesterday’s cheerleaders are
now a little more hesitant. Take David Reynolds, professor of
education at the University of Exeter and a member of the board of
BECTA, the government’s quango for information and
communications technology.
REYNOLDS I think we have dropped the
material onto schools, we haven’t provided adequate training for
teachers in how to use it, we’ve assumed it’s a good thing that
doesn’t need justification. And like many other innovations, the
danger is that all innovation and change requires a coalition of
people in schools to support them. It requires teachers to be on
board and enthusiastic and the classic innovation failure here is that
we haven’t done enough to get the uptake which would show the
stuff can work to actually get what we need.
CAIRNCROSS So has the use of computers in
schools really been a classic case of innovation failure? Or are we
going to the other extreme and writing it off too quickly? So much
was once expected of computers in schools. They were going to
turn out children who were technologically literate and so prepared
for life at the keyboard. They were simultaneously going to reduce
the number of expensive teachers that were needed and improve
the quality of education. This wild enthusiasm for computers in
schools has some disturbing parallels with previous bouts of techno-
hype as Josh Angrist, an economics professor at MIT, has noticed.
ANGRIST It was certainly the case that
when movies were invented there was a sense that this would be of
enormous educational importance. In fact, Thomas Eddison
himself was a big proponent of the use of movies in schools and he
paid for the production of educational films. Now, we look back at
that with some amusement. Similarly in the 1950s when television
was introduced there was a sense that this would bring
opportunities to people who were relatively isolated, open new
horizons and so on and, again, I think, if we look back on that it’s
hard to say that television has been a positive educational force. A
lot of what goes on today in the guise of computer aided instruction
has popped up both in earlier forms and even in the current form
there was a famous social scientist, B F Skinner, working at Harvard
three decades ago and he was a very big believer in what he called
programmed instruction of various kinds and, again, it didn’t turn out
to be an enormously effective tool. So, there is a sense that we’ve
been down this road before.
CAIRNCROSS But why was the road so
attractive? Was it simply hype that led governments to invest so
much in wiring up schools? Or did computers somehow fill a political
need too?
ANGRIST Computers are very visible so that
if I come to your town and I come from some central government
agency and I’m saying that I’m bringing you computers, I will indeed
be bringing truck loads of computers and I’ll have something to
show you that I’m bringing you and then later on it’ll be there and
you’ll remember me perhaps for that. So, there’s a sort of a visibility
to it that tends to play better in the media.
CAIRNCROSS For Bill Clinton on one side of the
Atlantic, and for New Labour politicians on the other side, this was
irresistible. Computers appeared to offer a technological answer to
all those complicated educational problems that otherwise force
politicians to take unpopular decisions. For Britain, there was an
additional impetus. BECTA’s David Reynolds.
REYNOLDS I think there was the fear that if we
didn’t do it here, other societies that were making noises about
doing it and other societies which were actually doing it - I mean,
the Pacific Rim, the classic example here is Singapore that did
information technology provision in schools extremely quickly - I
think there was the fear that if we didn’t do it our economic
competitiveness would be affected and I think many people looked
at America in the mid to late 1990’s and all the publicity and hype
coming out of America there was about a transformed workforce,
was about efficiency and productivity gains of, maybe, two to three
percent per year. For the economy, through using information
technology, I think there was an economic imperative and I think,
secondly, being honest, it was new, it was exciting, it is exciting - it’s
tremendously exciting to see children put in touch with other
children; it’s tremendously exciting to see children accessing the
world’s great knowledge bases in the Library of Congress in ways
they haven’t been able to before. So it was new, it was shiny, it was
exciting and it was full of promise.
CAIRNCROSS But has that promise been
delivered? Will computers and information technology in schools
eventually become central to the process of learning, and as
important as the book? Or are they likely to prove no more useful
than, say, videos, which give teachers one more way of conveying
material in class? If they are to justify their educational role,
computer-based methods will need to have a demonstrable impact
on children’s learning. Roger Watson, a publishing consultant, has
studied the government’s own figures on the relationship between
school test scores and computer use. How does he see the impact
of computers so far?
WATSON I’m sure that in the long-term they
are going to be a pervasive and extremely important element in
learning. I think there’s a problem in the short term in that we’re still
trying to learn how to use them. We don’t really know what it’s
possible to achieve using computers.
CAIRNCROSS Well, does that mean that the very
large recent investment that the government has made in getting
computers into classrooms was based on an act of faith rather than
on any certainty that it was going to achieve anything?
WATSON Yes, I’m sure it was an act of faith.
Understandably so because you can’t actually demonstrate whether
the system works until you put it in place.
CAIRNCROSS So, having put it in place have
there been any real attempts to try to measure how well it’s
working? Any success in doing that?
WATSON Oh yes. There’s a substantial
ongoing programme to try and measure the results. So far, the
results are not tremendously clear or, at least not tremendously
impressive.
CAIRNCROSS It may be surprising that a very
large sum of public money has been spent on a teaching tool whose
effectiveness has not yet been proved. Spending on computers has
quadrupled in British primary schools and doubled in secondary
schools in the past five years. But as it happens, Professor Angrist
has conducted an experiment with schools in Israel, to compare
classes taught with and without information technology. He had a
rare opportunity to use a control group: he was able to compare
similar groups of children, some with computers and some without.
Usually such comparisons are impossible, because all the children
get classroom computers at the same time. What did he find?
ANGRIST In the subjects where computer
technology had little impact on instructional methods, we found no
change in test scores - so no surprise there. In the subject where
we found the largest impact on instructional methods - that would
be fourth grade math - we actually found a decline in tests scores.
CAIRNCROSS A decline. So children who were
taught with the aid of computers actually did worse in maths than
children who were not?
ANGRIST That’s right. They did a little bit
worse - enough for the difference to be statistically significant and,
certainly, an unexpected and undesirable outcome.
CAIRNCROSS Now of course, it is notoriously
difficult to prove conclusively that any teaching method has a good
or bad impact. And lots of studies of computer-based learning have
reached different conclusions from Professor Angrist’s - although
they have rarely been as painstaking as his, and have sometimes
been financed by computer companies and firms peddling
education software. But his findings certainly put the onus on the
enthusiasts for computers in the classroom to demonstrate that they
do good, not harm to children. Plenty of supporters of computer-
based learning argue that it’s unfair to judge a new technology too
quickly. It needs time to bed down, and time for new teaching
techniques to evolve and disperse. David Reynolds of BECTA, the
government’s IT agency.
REYNOLDS There is evidence that at the level
of the school - at whole school level - there’s evidence from our own
research in BECTA that a high quantity and quality of information
technology usage is present in the schools that are doing better and
we think that one of the reasons why the schools are doing better is
that they’re using the information technology in sensitive and clever
ways. But, the difficulty is, we don’t know the how, we don’t know
exactly what they’re doing to use it. So it’s fairly clear that there is
something to information technology but the difficulty is telling the
profession what that something is, what works, how to use it and
particularly, of course, how to use it in classrooms.
CAIRNCROSS So, we haven’t yet worked out
how computers actually teach and whether a fundamentally
different kind of learning is involved?
REYNOLDS Many people would say that a
fundamentally different kind of learning is involved and the difficulty
has been that so far we’ve used information technology really as
like a superannuated encyclopaedia. We’ve actually used it to
enable pupils and teachers to access information more widely and
more quickly than used to happen before. But what people have
historically thought was that it’s possible to form new networked
communities of learning that would use information technology, not
just to acquire existing knowledge, as it were, from an
encyclopaedia, but actually to generate new knowledge because
the learners would interact with each other. Now that’s always been
the promise and the potential of information technology but, again,
the difficulty is, if that is a route that we want to go, the difficulty is
ensuring that we have enough about what to do to get those
networked communities up and running and being potent.
VALLI It’s particularly useful for pupils
that have English as an additional language. For them this medium
is a totally non threatening way of learning. They stay longer on the
task. They have the visual benefit of actually seeing the word on
screen. They whole concept of multimedia actually promotes their
understanding of learning a new language.
CAIRNCROSS Yasmin Valli is a senior lecturer at
Leeds Metropolitan University and specialises in teaching teachers
how to use information technology. Her work is a practical example
of just what Professor Reynolds has been discussing: she believes
in the widest possible use of all kinds of information and computer
technology, or ICT in the jargon, including networks based on the
Internet that link schools and children together. She finds that
youngsters learning English as a second language use these
networks with particular enthusiasm.
VALLI I have seen them using it to
exchange cultural ideas, for example, festivals. I mean, more
recently the Festival of Eid for the Muslims - I have seen a school
where the pupils were showing them recipes and making food
through video conferencing. They were linked to a school where,
obviously, there weren’t many pupils from different cultural
backgrounds.
CAIRNCROSS So these were two schools both in
Britain, one with a lot of children from ethnic minorities and one
without?
VALLI Absolutely, yes. And this
exchange was a very rich environment through which pupils were
learning about cultures, traditions and exchanging knowledge
through using the medium of ICT which I think is a very powerful
way of breaking down barriers.
CAIRNCROSS So it may well be that computers
are particularly useful for special groups of students who are badly
served by mainstream education. Miss Valli also finds that
disruptive students, especially boys, often prefer to learn on a
computer rather than in a traditional class. Indeed there is some
evidence that boys rather than girls are much more receptive to the
use of information technology, though that may be changing.
VALLI To begin with, you know, boys
were dominating the scene with ICT. But I think gradually girls kind
of crept up and I believe that now there isn’t that much of a
difference between girls and boys in the terms of motivation and
using ICT.
CAIRNCROSS So it isn’t a way that really
particularly appeals to boys who might otherwise be rather
disengaged from learning?
VALLI Certain boys, maybe, if they are
excluded and feel excluded from learning. I believe that offering
them a new style of learning through ICT is really well worth
exploring because I do know from experience that we have learning
centres in Leeds where a lot of the pupils who visit the centres tend
to be excluded from school and they actually readily visit these
centres and engage in learning and are motivated and can become
quite creative.
CAIRNCROSS From her research in the United
States, however, Sherry Turkle has found a persistent divide
between boys and girls in how they respond to new educational
technology - a gender divide that may continue into adulthood.
TURKLE From the beginning computers
have been built by engineers for engineers and by men for men.
And it came out in the earliest language of computers - the early
IBM system had, you know, do you want to abort, terminate or fail
this process was the standard language that came up on your
screen. It was not woman friendly talk. These days, I think you
have an interesting twist on that whereas young women really as
early as fifth grade, sixth grade see the computer, see the games
on it, see the kind of obsessive interest in finding the rules for, you
know, level 39 of some, you know, shoot ‘em out thing and they
basically drop out. And, in my interviews with girls it’s a little bit
different than it was 20 years ago. I’ve been tracking this over a
long time. It used to be girls were anxious that they maybe couldn’t
do it. Now, girls are more confident. They feel that they can do it
and they just don’t want to. They talk about not wanting to have a
career where you’re stuck in some corral, you know, with a
machine, wanting to do things that involve them more with people.
Girls are voting with their feet to stay out of this.
CAIRNCROSS If girls opt out of computer-based
learning, that raises an awkward question. After all, girls in Britain
increasingly outshine boys in core subjects such as English. So
might more time at the keyboard improve boys’ performance? Or
might it be that girls do well because the use of computers brings
few benefits to most pupils?
The answer might be clearer if it was easier to see exactly what is
the best use of computers in class. Are computers an exciting but
essentially peripheral educational accessory, most useful for special
situations and special groups of learners? Or can they transform
those basic aspects of education, such as numeracy and literacy,
that the government now worries about so much? In theory, they
can be used for creative chitchat with youngsters in other schools –
as Yasmin Valli suggests. But what about teaching the sort of things
that get children through their exams? Mike Moore, head of
computing at the Community School in Salford and the current
president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, has been
using computers to teach for more than 20 years.
MOORE For most of my career I’ve used
text books and would tell the children to turn to a certain page or a
certain chapter within the text book and do an exercise. We’re only
doing the same but using computers which obviously are much
faster, more modern, more interactive. The beauty, the greatest
benefit of using computers is the fact that the pupil is working on a
one to one basis and can get an instant response from a computer.
When they’re in the classroom they’re using a text book, they’re
writing their answers in an exercise book, that book will then have to
be taken away to be assessed by the teacher and it may be as
much as a week later before the pupil finds out whether they’ve got
a good answer that they’ve written down, whereas with a computer
they can quite often get an instant response.
TURKLE If you’re doing math tutoring, you
can get the machine to give you the questions at exactly your level,
know exactly you’re level, drill you at exactly your level, gradually
introduce new material to bring you to another level - that’s a great
thing. But it’s not such a great thing if you don’t feel that there’s
also a person who’s on your side and who’s mentoring you and who
cares about you.
CAIRNCROSS MIT’s Sherry Turkle.
TURKLE This technology is the best when
you use it in conjunction with a person who really cares about a
student. That’s why fantasies about computers as cost cutting
mechanisms, I think were always misguided and set people up with
all kinds of expectations that aren’t true. Because if you use the
computers instead of the people you will lower quality - there’s just
no question about it. You’ll lower the quality of the overall
educational experience. That doesn’t mean that having the
computer there to tutor you in fractions at exactly your level patiently
over and over and over is a bad thing - it just means that it can’t be
the only thing.
CAIRNCROSS That’s an important point:
classroom computers will never be substitutes for good teachers.
They have a different function. And they won’t even be useful to
teachers if schools have no idea how to make the most of them.
Plenty are baffled by the best way to use these complicated and
expensive machines. BECTA has tried hard to promote the use of
information technology in schools. But, as David Reynolds points
out, simply connecting every school to exciting-sounding networks
does not prevent huge variations in how - and how much - the
equipment is used.
REYNOLDS There’s virtual universal
connectivity, don’t get me wrong, but school to school ratios of
computers to child or children to computers vary. Even within
schools there’s huge variation in use, for example, by different
teachers in primary schools, even bigger variation in use by different
departments in secondary schools. And what we have at the
moment is we have wonderful leading edge practice in most schools
- they might be called techies by their colleagues - we have
teachers who’ve really picked this up and run with it but what
they’ve done is they’ve kind of self invented the methods and the
difficulty there is getting those methods which unusual individuals
have self invented to a teaching profession that clearly hasn’t
invented them and which hasn’t been told about them.
CAIRNCROSS For the moment, teaching with
information technology clearly remains the speciality of a few
eccentrics. It is unlikely to be successful if teachers don’t
understand what they can do with it. The profession as a whole
seems largely sceptical. Indeed, some may be defensive: after all,
every parent knows that the average ten-year-old understands far
more about using a computer than does a nuclear physicist, let
alone a middle-aged school teacher. So the deployment of
computers in classrooms sometimes carries a subtle threat to a
teacher’s authority, as Mike Moore knows to his cost.
MOORE It creates tensions for the
teachers who have computing expertise because they realise what
the children can get up to. The teachers who do not have the
computers expertise do not understand that the children can either
delve into the innards of the network system or they can go surfing
the web and finding material that a teacher would not actually want
to see on their screen. So that there are those sort of tensions and
I’ve had many, many experiences where I’ve had material appear
on my screen and on my hard disks on the network that I would not
want there - pictures of Kylie Minogue partially dressed and music
downloaded which fills up a lot of the computer. And the teachers
who are not computer literate to that extent will not realise what the
pupils are doing.
CAIRNCROSS That may not be quite the kind of
creativity that computer enthusiasts hope for. Lots of things are
possible on computers, but downloading Kylie isn’t the best use of
the short school day. In the classroom, children should surely
concentrate on learning things that they are unlikely to pick up at
home. Sherry Turkle.
TURKLE For me, the problem is that when
you talk about computers in education now it’s very unclear what
you’re talking about. If computers in education is knowing how to
surf the web, use the web intelligently as a research tool - well that’s
not computers in education - the web is a technology that, you
know, it’s the way we get information now in many ways. Kids
should learn that the same way they learn to use the telephone. It’s
not particularly something that you devote a laboratory to twice a
week at school. If computers in education is using educational
software, well you’re just using the computer as a delivery device to
give traditional content.
CAIRNCROSS So children - many of whom, after
all, have computers and Internet connections at home - may do
their homework on a keyboard and send it into school by email. But
so what? Using a computer this way is a practical skill that most
people acquire anyway. It has no more to do with education than
learning to type or to drive a car – and indeed, children who don’t
have computers at home may feel excluded. Besides, using the
Internet as an educational tool may have real drawbacks. Michael
Moore.
MOORE The trouble is if you send the
children off to surf the web, they could come back with so many
different responses that the teacher probably wouldn’t know what
material they’re getting. And I’m really concerned as a real
educationist that children will just cut and paste from a web page,
put it into a document and say, ‘here Sir, I’ve done it’, and in point of
fact they’ve not even read the material.
CAIRNCROSS The Internet is a source of
information - and a wonderfully eclectic one at that. But it doesn’t
tell you much about whether the information is reliable or important.
Fact and fiction are thrown randomly together. Clearly, the young
need to understand how to sort through this jumble. And Sherry
Turkle says that some surprisingly old skills are as important as
ever.
TURKLE We know what our literacy skills
are for reading and writing and we know what journalists need to
know - who, what, when, where, why, how - for all of the materials
that we see in printed form. And we haven’t yet developed the who,
what, when, where, why, how critical skills for what we see on the
internet. Who wrote this web page? Why did they write it? Who
paid for it? When did they write it, you know and what were the
circumstances of their writing it? We don’t approach the web that
way and that’s why I’m so insistent on this notion of readership
skills because I want people to analogise what they do with
computers to what they do with reading and what we demand of
things that we read. The old skills weren’t just skills, the old skills
were really moral, political and intellectual virtues. Being able to
ask: What am I reading? Who wants me to read it? Who paid for
it? Am I being sold something or am I learning something? How
can I check the reference? Those are not just skills, they are virtues
for a society that values critical thinking. We’re not teaching that
sufficiently as we move into this new media and it’s of great
concern.
CAIRNCROSS Critical thinking is, of course,
essential not only for sorting through what the Internet offers. It can
help you to be an effective citizen in many ways. And it just may be
a skill that is easier to acquire from the computer’s six-hundred-
year-old rival, the printed book, than to learn online. However,
books are now rivals not only for children’s time and attention, but
for schools’ cash too. Having sold both books and software to
schools in his time, which would Roger Watson, the educational
publisher, put his money on?
WATSON It’s almost certainly true that if
you’ve got 200 million pounds additional to spend, then spending it
on books would probably give you a better return in the short run.
CAIRNCROSS So it would make more sense, at
least in the short run and it’s the short run in which most children
are at school, to spend the money on books and not spend it on
computers?
WATSON I think so.
CAIRNCROSS Simply teaching children to read
those books is a huge challenge for many schools. The much
touted literacy hour has not achieved what was hoped of it. And
neither, to be brutal, have computers. Plenty of energetic teachers
find uses for them in schools. But many others don’t, and teach no
worse as a result. So what should we do with them? BECTA’s David
Reynolds sounds hesitant but resigned.
REYNOLDS In a rational world, maybe we’d
pause but I think that the international economic pressures and the
worry about competitiveness means frankly there won’t be a pause.
The economy will continue to be more advanced in its use of
technology and the schools will have to respond. So, accepting
there won’t be a pause, what we need to do is very, very quickly -
and I think we can do it frankly in two to three years - is very, very
quickly research what is going on in the area of information
technology. We need to know for each subject, for each topic within
each subject, for each set of skills: I mean, number one, do we use
information technology? Because we don’t have to use it
everywhere in every subject every topic. So, the issues are, do we
use it? How do we use it? What particular combination of
hardware and software and teacher skills produce the optimum
outcome?
CAIRNCROSS That will take time, and the results
may ultimately disappoint those early visionaries. Nobody doubts
that computers are world-changing devices, or that the Internet is a
revolutionary technology. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the
age of the book is over, or that electronics will transform education,
any more than did the coming of radio or television. The business of
teaching and learning often involves human interaction of a
profound kind. For some tasks, a computer may be useful, and the
research tool of the Internet is sometimes as helpful as a good
library. But they will be useful only in the hands of teachers who
apply them confidently and imaginatively. Where teachers don’t see
good ways to use a computer in class, they’re better to leave the
thing switched off.