Technology and Education
Technology is a massive double-edged sword. It has brought us so many benefits, but also so many problems. This is particularly true in education.
Cellphones have given us some great things: GPS, the ability to call or text and not need to find a pay phone if one has a breakdown, and the advantages of having a computer with one at all times for instance. But they’ve also done a lot of harm. Even the useful things like GPS have led to people no longer knowing how to read a map, a skill which uses one’s brain every time one does it. In education cell phones have been a disaster. Students have less patience. Student literacy has plummeted. Students are less likely to want to learn how to figure out an answer when they have a device handy to answer questions for them. I don’t think that’s entirely due to technology, but I think expecting all content to come in the length of a Tik Tok video hasn’t helped matters. Even search engines have led to students expecting instant answers that they have to do very little research to get. The good news here is that more school systems are becoming aware of this problem and are requiring their students to put the phones away during class time.
With the Canvas outages due to hackers happening at the end of the recent spring semester, Course software has been in the news. There are pros and cons to having centralized course and grade management online. But I’m not going to weigh those, I am going to discuss the use of computer programs in instruction from the learning side of things. About a decade ago I went back to city college and took all the math classes I’d never taken there as well as a physics class. The software side of things had wildly different experiences. Whoever had developed the Cengage Calculus program did a very good job. They clearly wanted people to learn Calculus. One could experiment with different tactics for problem solving. The program would give other examples and other exercises that helped one learn. The Pearson Publishing Physics program on the other hand… whoever designed that wanted to save the professor time grading, and while that might be helpful for the professor, I found it to be counterproductive in learning. Any mistake was instantly graded. There were few examples. And I even found rounding errors where entering the same problem into a calculator would give a different answer than if I did the same problem on the computer’s calculator because the hand calculator started rounding at a smaller number of digits. The point is that course software is not all alike. When one says A someone else might mean B, and administrators are likely to pick the cheapest version that does the least for student learning.
The advent of Large Language Models or “AI” as it’s misidentified, is having a potentially disastrous impact on education and learning. In addition to numerous studies particularly those out of MIT that show that using LLMs is addictive and does cognitive harm to the user, it seems that the sorts of administrators who are more concerned with graduation rates than learning as well as students who only want a degree, see this as the perfect tool for circumventing any sort of learning process. I recently canceled my subscription to Scientific American after they ran a dodgy promotional article about LLMs use which included testimonials that were all for it without one voice of skepticism. The most loathsome of these testimonials came from a primary school English teacher who gushed “the students are no longer late with their homework.” I wanted to shout “because they aren’t doing it, the machine is.” Those students are not learning. They aren’t improving their reading skills. They aren’t learning to write, nor to think critically. The product of an eight grade English assignment isn’t supposed to be the assignment, it’s students who are capable of reading, writing, and analyzing what they’ve read. It may be possible that there is a use for AI in education, but it should not be adopted in education until that use is found. Much like the push to force LLMs on the public at large to feed the greed of tech companies, putting LLMs into the hands of students is an insane notion and will be catastrophic for efforts leading to an educated public. I recommend banning it in schools except in computer science and cognitive study labs where the goal isn’t to use it but to study potential uses and to be fully aware of any harmful impacts.
Bring back books. I like electronic books for some things. A rare and out of print book, or something I’m reading quickly and never revisiting. The trouble is pdfs of textbooks are not as helpful for learning or retaining information. This has been empirically shown to be the case. And yet university bookstores are not ordering books. University libraries have floors and floors with zero print books. I understand some of this is due to demand. But supply and demand works in both directions. If there aren’t print books available for students to buy, even those savvy enough to care about learning are going to have to turn to the pdf. Also stores at public universities should not be run on a model that prioritizes profits above all else. The point is just as in other things, learning should be the priority, not shuffling people through to a degree.
I am not against the use of technology in education. As I said there are benefits to course management software. The Cengage Calculus software I used as a middle-aged returning student seemed quite beneficial to learning. There are also many tools that help with life-long learning outside of the classroom. Podcasts, webinars, language apps, web based learning sites, all are available and can help people go on learning. Great Courses has a library of lectures on a wide array of topics. The important thing is that the technology is a tool that we use to benefit our learning. The moment the algorithms take over and the stock market makes the calls, it quickly becomes the case that the technology uses us to benefit their profits and it prevents us from learning.
Technology in education can be a powerful tool. We need to set aside profits, fads, and the ease of passing the buck and make certain we are utilizing it for learning.
