Technology and Education: Digital Pandemic?
I have a growing concern about the notion that computers and electronic games can substitute for teachers and educational best practices. I hope RSA fellows move cautiously and with much deliberation before endorsing the wholesale use of technology in our schools. Electronic games are designed for entertainment; not education. Research shows that basic games (i.e. single-shooter games and games where one fit polygons into spaces), do not stimulate important areas of the brain. (Use it or lose it!). When one looks at students’ cumulative exposure to technology at home and school, it is quite worrisome.
Some of our fellows seem to confuse schools with school buildings and have a hankering for computers as the silver bullet in school reform. Information technology gives us wondrous benefits, but at what price? Research reveals pervasive and hidden dangers inherent in the digital lifestyle. We need to control the use of machines or they will control us.
Mack R. Hicks, Ph.D. FRSA
St. Petersburg, Florida, US
www.digitalpandemic.info
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January 19th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
I agree wholeheartedly with your concerns.
In the latter half of the 20th century we developed a huge array of electronic technologies that have far outstripped the ability of our species’ and its various cultures to adapt. At the same time, we saw runaway suburban sprawl, particularly in the US, where the design and construction of the very habitats that provide shelter and sustenance to our species was turned over lock stock and barrel to commercial developers and builders who had one thing and only one thing in mind – to make short term profits as large as can be from the houses and offices they built. Virtually no attention was paid to the planning and the design of spaces and places that we as human beings relate to or want to be part of – as throughout history has been the case until recent decades following WWII. Compounding the problem was the drive toward larger and larger homes (easier to build than smaller ones, by the way, thus more profits per square foot for builders and developers) beguiling buyers that they had achieved some kind of economic nirvana by having more space than they knew what to do with. Parents had their quarters and kids – far removed by several tens of feet away – had theirs. Result, more than 40% of children who come from homes equipped with self-contained suites for kids no longer know how to play or how to interact with other children. The electronic technologies amply provided for in those remote “cybercaves” of the bloated McMansions, guarantee that we will have a generation of people who are severely disabled as far as human interaction goes.
Its a massive problem and we ought to be very careful indeed about what we endorse as far as electronic media in schools as the means for obtaining an education.
Our streets are now devoid of children playing. Our neighborhood shopping areas are now vast acreages of blacktop parking lots surrounding buildings that look more like fancy prison block houses than local stores that relate to people as people. Heck – we even blythley refer to ourselves as “consumers” rather than people!! Something’s very wrong here.
We have a huge amount of work to do to reverse the excesses of the past 50 years and I think RSA Fellows ought to take a stand against the wholesale commoditization of life, education and childhood and the places that we’d love to call home – if only they were.
I could go on……
Phil Allsopp, D.Arch., RIBA, FRSA
Scottsdale, Arizona
January 20th, 2010 at 3:01 am
This sinister substitution of ‘technology’ for ‘knowledge’ has to be stopped somehow. It arises from the impact of psychobabblers, posing as educationalists, who have sold to politicians the idea that education must be made “relevant” to a child’s life and circumstances.
Instead of stretching the pupil’s mind by presentation of new facts, new ideas and new explanations, against a background of age-old human learning and experience. all we are getting now is new toys and educational dumb-down. Under these conditions, the infant mind remains infantile while weak teachers run the risk of mental regression to pre-puberty.
Even the RSA has been guilty in its ‘Charter’ of dignifying teaching methods at the expense of curriculum content. What matters is that the curriculum should be subject-based on hard fact. Substitution of classes on ‘happiness’ and ‘empathy’ for key information and argument is a sure route to disablement of our kids for a generation.
January 20th, 2010 at 8:41 am
Derek’s comments about dumbing down the educational experience are extremely pertinent. I have to say that to get into far too many universities these days in the United States all you need, it seems, is a checkbook and a pulse.
Why is it that our college freshmen rarely have “graduated” from high school with anything but the most rudimentary knowledge of mathematics, the sciences, the arts and history? My sense is that the “no child left behind” ethic has consigned many of our brightest students to a life of utter boredom in the average high school classroom as teachers teach to tests to protect their own career interests rather than the educational needs of the children in their care.
I fear that more and more school children are becoming adept operatives for Internet search engines rather than discerning researchers. The ability to think and differentiate between what is good or bad, right or wrong, too much or too little is not, I think, well served by rewarding children for using computing technology, search engines and educational “games”. When do the children have to converse with each other and discuss best courses of action, collaborate on hard problems and work out differences? Schools should not be eliminating time for encouraging these vital aspects of becoming an adult in favor of having children stare at computer screens for hours on end.