Devices at schools
An article in the Bilingual Times section of the Taipei Times (“Electronic devices in the classroom can lead to failing grades,” Aug. 9, page 15) summarizes research about the “insidious effect” of allowing the use of smartphones, tablets and laptops in classes.
Lead researcher Arnold Glass from Rutgers University warned his colleagues and students that devices are “impairing [students’] exam performances and final grades.”
Using negative terms like “insidious” and “impairing” reveals that Dr Glass’ interpretation of the results of his experiment is biased against such devices.
In fact, his research does not show that the use of devices in class is a problem. Rather, it showed that traditional, stultifying classroom lectures and exams are no longer effective learning environments or methods.
The presence of devices is not going away; they are increasing, especially in Taiwan.
Students do not have to do better on final exams, because they have the exam information readily available on their devices. Taking an exam is one of the few places a student cannot use a device, which renders the exam moot.
Also, students can listen to books and lectures on devices while hiking, drinking coffee or doing other activities in an environment more to their liking.
Education no longer needs to confine students to big cells called classrooms with gangs of other noisy, distracting students, most of whom are not even their friends.
More importantly, the time students spend rushing to and from classes and sleeping through them does not balance against the benefits of allowing them to learn online in environments of their own choosing.
Glass’ research exposes the reality that devices are rapidly becoming the delivery tool for a virtual educational environment, in which all academic exchanges will soon take place.
Teachers, institutions and ministries stuck in the quicksand of nostalgia for 20th-century education and who do not like the look of the future will always be inclined to characterize it as “insidious,” much the way in which dictators describe democracy as insidious, because the power of learning falls into the hands of the students and not their teachers and the autocratic institutions that enslave them both in their antiquated edifices and curricular bureaucracies.
Researchers and teachers who concur with Glass’ interpretation of his data would do better to reconsider the thoughts of democratic pragmatist John Dewey, who a century ago wrote about the importance of balancing the social environment with the educational environment.
When “schools depart from the educational conditions effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit,” Dewey wrote.
In the 21st century, the out-of-school environment is the virtual environment of social media — really, social replacement media — and not society, per se.
It is therefore imperative for educators and institutions to adapt to and cooperate with the rise of social media, even if it means completely redesigning our decayed, overcrowded, underfunded and ineffective educational practices and institutions.
Xue Meng-ren
Taichung
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