This article was written in 1996, three years after our school installed an internet connection (a 9600bd SLIP line from the University of New England for those interested in technological history)
It’s interesting because, 10 years later, we are still asking the sorts of questions that were common at that time and earlier, despite the proliferation of technology in schools.
Effective Learning on the Web
Martin Levins
The Armidale School (www.as.edu.au)
email: mlevins@as.edu.au
“All the books on World War 2 in the library are out”
Have you ever heard this? I have. When I went to school as a student, a trip to the library often resulted in this sort of cry. That night, desperate parents would hunt for information so that their sons and daughters could front the teacher the next day with a suitable “project”.
For those who were born later than I, projects were usually mounted on a piece of A3 light card with pictures cut from stray Women’s Weekly “project specials” (The royals got a lot less press then) and illustrated by scrawls of juvenile copperplate using Derwent coloured pencils.
What a change from that to my current classroom. Not a shortage, but an inundation of information, a drowning in data as students search the wealth of information on the internet.
This has brought about several changes in the way that I teach, and (I hope) the way that my students learn
Let’s look at learning first.
Learning
What is it that we want our kids to learn? The futurists keep telling us that we can’t even guess the types of jobs that they will be doing in a few years, so flexibility and adaptability must be reasonably high on the cards.
The volume of data is also increasing exponentially (the web-based data store is increasing at approximately 20% per month) and the equipment that we use to deal with that data doubles its power every year. So we’d also need some ability to cope with this volume, and then use it beneficially to learn.
We’ve all heard these sort of things before but I dont think the enormity and extent of the implications have really sunk in yet.
When I give a research assignment to my students, I do so knowing that they will have access to reams of data, and that their main sticking point will be “How do I choose what data is relevant?” They won’t necessarily articulate it that way of course. They’ll just be flummoxed by a search engine’s response of “300000 documents found matching your query” or frustrated by a search for “how does a telephone work” when advertisements for communications equipment turns up and nothing else, or sidetracked by a serendipitous reference to a sport or TV show.
Of course, some will take the easy road of selecting the first found document and printing it out. (more about this later) Perhaps they will accept the information contained within any web based document as true, simply because it is there.
When they do settle on a data source, what do they do with it?
In the “good old days” we’d copy out swathes of stuff from encyclopaedias, changing the odd word or two here and there.
In one of my classes, a student had split his computer screen into two, with a web browser on the left and a word processor on the right. He was laboriously reading from the left hand side of the screen and then typing verbatim into the right.
When asked why he was not using the computer’s copy and paste facility, he responded “but that would be cheating” (I’ve since had this response from several students)
So what is it that these students understand by learning? Or, perhaps, what do they understand by the task and its purpose in their learning?
A year 8 student, when asked to “do an assignment on a natural disaster” spent hours at a computer collecting data on the Kobe earthquake, then assembling the resultant seismographs, eye witness reports from emails, stills from NHK television and maps sourced from the web and CD-ROM into a coherent view of what that disaster did to the people of Kobe.
A search page displaying the results of a simple search. What processes are involved in finding exactly what you want?
His teacher marked him down because “the computer did most of the work”
Now, I’d argue vehemently that the student learnt more in that excercise about Kobe than any other, because he had to sift, organise, prioritise and present his distillation of the Megabytes of data available.
I would also propose that he learnt that this form of scholarship was not valued and it would have been easier to copy from the encyclopaedia, changing a few words here and there…
What went wrong here?
If you look at the assignment topic, the teacher didn’t really know what he was wanting. The task was too broad and ill-defined. In the past, this form of research may have been acceptable, because the volume of data was limited and the emphasis was on learning facts.
I would suggest that, given the assignment task above, the student could have typed “natural disaster” into a CDROM search page or into a search engine on the internet, retrieved the first suggested document, printed it out and received full marks because she would have done exactly what the teacher had requested.
Why didn’t the teacher ask “Look at a natural disaster from the viewpoint of a child, or an old person?”
Or perhaps: “Look at a natural disaster from the viewpoint of a student. How would he or she have been affected? Would someone in our society have been affected differently?
Here, the student has to make choices, which may be difficult, but he is assisted greatly in that some framework is given upon which to make those choices. (see “The Big Six” website for a guide to research technique)
Why did the teacher not give the assignment this way? Well, let’s look at the teacher.
Teachers
Virtually all Australia's teachers have been schooled, trained and taught within the present model for a considerable period of time. (The average age of teachers in NSW is 42 years, and it is not dropping.) Most have known no other organisational models. Theirs has been a paper-based, teacher-centred learning environment, and they have invariably had no experience in any other industry, particularly the more innovative, leading edge, private enterprises.
The teacher who gave the disaster assignment (or was it the disastrous assignment?) above, fitted this mould. A lot of us do.
We have difficulty with change (someone once remarked that the only people who wanted change were babies) and we learn differently to kids. Seriously.
I have frequently watched students play a MUD — a text based internet game where players assume character roles and act in mythical environments. Commands are given to direct the machine and can be abbreviated.
Occasionally, they may give a set of instructions such as “S,N,E,U,E,E,E,W,D” meaning “Go South, then North, then East, then Up…”. They issue the commands in sequence because the MUD machine may be so popular, or located so far away that it responds slowly.
Could you do that? I can’t. I have difficulty playing a simulation game where disturbingly real graphics display my position in three dimensions, let alone holding a three dimensional map in my head and remembering where I am.
It’s not surprising to see some students playing two or three of these games simultaneously, swapping from one to the other as the lag in response dictates.
Now, I always told my parents that I could study whilst listening to music, but this multiprocessing is amazing to watch. It would be interesting to research the spatial mapping that is happening in these peoples’ brains.
So, I would use this as anecdotal evidence that we do not have the same abilities as those whom we teach.
We are also working from a cognitive framework that is used to assimilating a limited amount of data — we are used to “the textbook” as “the source”. How many of us have been faced with 50 000 documents that may be what we want?
Our educational institutions don’t necessarily help here either, so let’s look at them.
Schools
Some of the organisational and structural issues that arise in schools are rooted in economics, but others are more characteristic of the historic origin of schools.
First, consider:
Most of the aspects of contemporary schooling, we now realise, are derived from concepts which belong with cottage industries (the pre-industrial society) or with an economy heavily dependent on mass production, mass employment and standardisation (the now-obsolescent industrial society). (Beare 1997)
The sort of processes that I have observed when good learning happens involve lots of time — time that is not partitioned into artificial lumps called periods.
It also involves what we call cross curricular learning (although we only call it this because we are stuck with the idea of knowledge being compartmentalised into Balkan-like isolates.) Neither of these things are possible in a secondary school, unless we throw out this egg-crate mentality that currently pervades most of our schooling. (Secondary schools can learn a great deal from those who teach Primary students)
Doesn’t changing the curricular structure represent a radical change? Of course, but consider:
Only about a third of the present Fortune 500 leading companies have survived from the 70’s until today. Those that have survived have undergone ongoing, radical, and mainly discontinuous, change. (Lee 1997)
In any event, the Victorian Board of Studies recently completed a project comparing the curriculum for Year 12 students in 20 subject areas across the Australian States and Territories. Not surprisingly, there was a great deal of overlap. Sort of like life, really.
Second, schools impose an infrastructural model (largely fiscally based) whereby a school system can have the gall to state that “all children in NSW schools can now access the internet”, ignoring the fact that they may have to wait for the other 499 kids to use the single machine in the library before they get their turn.
I can understand the “staged implementation” of technology, but I worry about how it is being sold. It’s a little like have one phone in a town and calling yourself a communications sophisticate. In any event, the economic argument (we can’t afford more technology) is a bit of a furphy. The cost of technology may need to be considered in context of the total budget of the school, and not necessarily as an additional expense. Providing a school of 500 with one machine per 10 students would represent an annual cost of $50 000. This is made up of $30 000 for the equipment and $20 000 for support: less than the cost of one and a bit teachers.
Am I arguing for the replacement of teachers with computers? Of course not. But I am arguing for a rational apportioning of all available resources.
When we look at paying for Internet access, the argument is similar to the cost of computers. The recurrent cost of internet access is approximately $6 000 per annum (cheaper in some areas). This would provide ISDN access to a provider, and networked access to each machine. Rather than present this as a cost to the school of $6 000, look at it as a cost of $12 per student — less than half the cost of an average textbook.
Third, schools have had a “Computing Studies” curriculum for some time (although there is evidence that we are moving beyond this)
The net effect of this arrangement is that information skills are taught episodically and out of context. Those of us who regularly use computing equipment or other technologies will recognise that it is regular use of that technology that makes us confident and competent users.
We also recognise that technology is very empowering. It enables me to achieve things that I could not achieve normally; particularly in the creative domain. This empowerment only happens when the user has confidence in his or her ability to feel “in control” of the technology that they are using..
Fourth, the flow of information into a school has always had a gatekeeper. Teachers, or teacher librarians, essentially graded information as suitable or not, based on content, readability and relevance. The advent of a free for all information store without such controls makes the need for high levels of critical literacy and information skills.
In a workshop that I led a few years back, a history teacher derided the internet as an information resource because “the information on the net could be wrong or written by someone who had no credibility. It would be hard to tell if it was right or not.”
“But isn’t this what History is?” was my reply. (I remember the textbook that I had in school. It had Oxford University Press or something similarly impressive on the spine, but its views on Australian “discovery” and its role in several wars would not necessarily pass muster as truth today.)
So where to from here?
Having made a lot of noise about what I think needs changing when internet technologies are used in education, let me draw on some others’ observations.
“Reaching the stage where one can confidently use the Internet… is a bit like getting a driver's licence: uncomfortable to traumatic for a comparatively short time, then forgotten or at most dimly remembered. Similarly, initial experiences with the Internet can disappoint teachers and students at all levels (and even convince some to avoid further encounters) for a number of reasons.
(Linning 1997)
This could equally well refer to the use of any technology. It’s not like learning to ride a bike, because a particular technology’s method of operation and even its purpose may change from year to year.
Lots of promises are made about what happens when learning and the internet are mixed, but you don’t often hear about the failures, or how to cope when the technology breaks (the server is down, Telstra is working on the cables)
Whilst these are solvable: the server will come back up, the telephone cables will be fixed; our production line approach to learning makes it difficult in that, even if all is working well, students may face dead ends in searching, frustration in not knowing the software or other, similar “failures”.
As Linning further states in the same article, we lack “the metacognitive knowledge which would encourage (the students) to see their frustrations and ‘failures’ as aspects of stages through which they will pass on the road to some degree of mastery.”
It takes some faith in the progression of learning to allow your students to fail and get frustrated. It takes a lot of coaxing to get them to continue. But when they finally succeed, it is worth it. The results, I believe, are much better than getting 85% in a “recall of facts” exam.
The form of learning that I am describing is different because the focus is more on learning how to learn rather than just one low order product of assimilating content. In this form, the teacher’s role slowly shifts from leader to facilitator as the student becomes more autonomous.
A side advantage of this form is that it encourages a “Just in Time” model of learning specific skills. Here, techniques are learnt when they are needed, rather than the “Just in Case” model where students (and teachers) will do a three week course in word processing, then go back to their normal work practices and forget the skills they have learnt.
The really sad thing about all of the above is that it is not new:
The main obstacle is our present educational philosophy of non-involvement, non-relevance, and limited emphasis on thinking. Education must move toward the opposite philosophy of involvement, relevance and thinking, or we will not solve the overwhelming problems of children who fail in school
(Glasser 1969)
References
Beare, H. (1997) Designing a Break-the-Mould School for the Future Australian Council of Educational Administration, Virtual Conference, (in press)
Glasser, W. (1969) Schools without Failure NewYork: Harper & Rowe
Lee, M. (1997) What Shape Future Schooling? Revolution, or Stagnation and Implosion? Australian Council of Educational Administration, Virtual Conference, (in press)
Linning, L. (1997) Schooling and the Networked World ITEC Teacher Librarian Virtual Conference (in press)
The Big Six Web site <http://ericir.syr.edu/big6/> demonstrates six steps that can help students and teachers to identify ways of going about research