The Flickering Mind
"American education faces an unusual moment of crisis. For decades, our schools have been beaten down by a series of curriculum fads, empty crusades for reform, and stingy funding. Now education and political leaders have offered their biggest and most expensive promise ever - the miracle of computers and the Internet - at a cost of approximately $70 billion just during the decade of the 1990s. Computer technology has become so prevalent that it is transforming nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to close the gap between rich and poor, to our hopes for school reform, to our basic methods of developing the human imagination. Technology is also recasting the relationships that schools strike with the business community, changing public beliefs about the demands of tomorrow's working world, and reframing the nation's systems for researching, testing, and evaluating achievement." "All this change has led to a culture of the flickering mind, and a generation teetering between two possible futures. In one, youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of the tools of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow. Alternatively, they can become victims of commercial novelties and narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith in standardized testing." "At this point, America's students can't even make a fair choice. They are an increasingly distracted lot.
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What Hacker News says
- Read Todd Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind" and you'll find this false mantra (new technology alone will magically solve a deeply human problem) being repeated throughout the history of education technology.
- For those who fervently believe that "Video Games Are The Future of Education", I would like to recommend two books: "Geek Heresy" by Kentaro Toyama, and "The Flickering Mind" by Todd Oppenheimer.
The former offers a voice of caution, and is written by the former head of MSR Asia.
The latter is filled with historical examples of "x is the Future of Education" (for x ∈ {"radio", "television", "computers", ...}) each of which has failed to replace human instruction, showing that there's something about human interaction that appears to be crucial for education.
- Regarding Ed Tech, for a merciless look at this recurring insanity, see Todd Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind", and in general, Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy".
- The Flickering Mind is a great book to read on this subject. http://www.amazon.com/Flickering-Mind-Technology-Classroom-L...
Oppenheimer does a great job of citing actual studies. And it turns out despite thousands of different efforts, there's little evidence to say computer technology makes a bit positive impact on education.
This isn't to say it's completely useless or that it doesn't provide overwhelming value in other industries. But I think our problems in education need to be solved in different ways. Key among them is challenging the philosophy of John Dewey.
