Yikes! According to Paul W. Bennett, a 91原创 education analyst, policy researcher and consultant, there is “a whole generation of kids hooked on cellphones and exhibiting all the signs of a new clinical condition — TikTok Brain.”
Even more troubling is Bennett’s assertion that “reading, in particular, is severely compromised in revved-up multi-task environments. Today’s elementary and secondary school students are essentially immersed in distractions.”
Notwithstanding the conservatively pessimistic flavour of Bennett’s contention, the last time a newly devised technology threatened education as we know it, a 1950 editorial in The Federal Teacher warned us that “[this] will be the ruin of education in our country.”
What was this new technology that was going to result in the Armageddon of public education? It was the ballpoint pen.
I remember that this relatively new handheld piece of technology wasn’t allowed in local schools until around 1958.
Others will recall that what was permitted in those days was the straight pen and nib and the desk inkwell, especially for writing in the classic cursive style.
Looking back, though, the ballpoint-pen police may have had a point, because even now, my own handwriting, which devolved over 65 years of writing with a biro, looks like a cross between Egyptian hieratic hieroglyphs and Arabic script.
Now the desktop keyboard, which began to be available in the early 1980s, has made handwriting all but redundant.
Times have certainly changed when it comes to education technology, but in 1982, as a district administrator who was overseeing an upgrade of our office technology, I acquired an early Apple 1 desktop computer.
The more I played with it, the more I became fascinated — not just with logic games like Oregon Trail and Zork but, as a wannabe writer and teacher of writing, with the possibilities that word processing brought to the process of writing.
I approached our computer sales representative with the idea that we should put a set of desktop computers in a Grade 12 classroom, teach the kids how to use a word-processing program and see what happened.
“I’ll take it to the higher-ups,” he said. He was back a week later to say: “The bosses can see no future for desktop computers in classrooms.”
That was a mere 40 years ago. Since then, technology in the classroom has become widespread. “E-learning” — and the kind of customized learning where it’s possible for students to learn at their own pace in their own way — is becoming a feature of 2023 classrooms all through the grades.
Now it seems likely that the growth of e-learning will not only influence teaching and learning in innovative ways but will have a major impact on traditional school architecture.
Classrooms designed to have students sitting at desks in rows, facing the teacher — “the sage on the stage” — are already becoming a thing of the past.
The 2023 classroom will be designed so each desk has access to a variety of technologies rather than a single interactive display that all the students watch while the teacher instructs. The teacher will move around the room working with individual students rather than lecturing from the front.
With worldwide e-learning projected to be worth $325 billion in 2025, EdTech is set to become the most popular learning system in history.
According to Global Newswire, the EdTech industry will grow to $605.8 billion by 2027, from $254.8 billion in 2021.
While the pandemic caused temporary school closures, it also cleared the path for more students to move their academics online. That translates into greater possibilities for students to experience individual personalized learning, one of the most adopted e-learning trends in 2023.
The word “gamification” has also entered the teaching and learning vernacular. Gamification is the practice of adding game mechanics, which are systems of interactions between the player and the game, into non-game environments.
One influential study by Taylor and Francis, publishers of high-quality peer-reviewed research, reported that 67% of U.S. students prefer gamified courses as more motivating.
Another study, this time by the World Economic Forum, reveals that online gamification can improve outcomes by 45.5% and 60.67% when combined with reading, and that students retain 25% to 60% more material when learning online, compared to retention rates of only 8% to 10% in a classroom.
As education reformer John Dewey put it, “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
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