Never Send a Human to Do a Machine's Job

Correcting the Top 5 EdTech Mistakes

Yong Zhao, Gaoming Zhang, Jing Lei, Wei Qiu

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781452284644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Technology

Do what you do best and let technology do the rest

Technology has transformed lives. Why then, has it not transformed education? What needs to change to ensure integration that empowers students and enhances teacher depth? Learn how to let technology cultivate student autonomy, creativity, and responsibility while focusing on lessons that hone higher-order and critical thinking skills.

• See technology as a complement rather than a replacement
• Embrace its creation potential over consumption
• Encourage personalized learning, autonomy, and creativity over outcomes
• Celebrate digital competence over curriculum improvement
• Focus on tech-pedagogy over product usage

Chapter One The Wrong Relationship Between Technology and Teachers Complementing in an Ecosystem Versus Replacing in a Hierarchy

Will classroom TV replace teachers?

James Montagnes raised this question in his article that appeared in the Eugene Register-Guard on December 16, 1954. The question was very timely since the 1950s was a time of unprecedented development of television. The percentage of American homes that had television sets jumped dramatically from 5% in 1950 to 87% in the end of the 1950s (Sterling & Kittross, 1990). In his article, Montagnes reported a large-scale experiment in Canada in which fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in 200 schools watched TV programs on current events, history, art, science, safety, and literature. An example of a televised lesson was “How Columbus Navigated.” This 20-minute film showed the actual types of instruments Columbus used for his trip and how he demonstrated to the crew that he knew he wasn’t lost. Montagnes’s article concluded with the prediction that “the day will come when video is as commonplace in schools as erasers and blackboards.” At the end of the article, Montagnes asked a perplexing question: “Will TV receivers in classrooms change the role of the teacher and someday largely replace her?”

Since then James Montagnes’s question of about whether teachers will be replaced has been revisited from time to time. Every time when there is a major technology innovation that holds great potential in teaching and learning, this question is raised again. The prevalence of computers in schools brought probably the most heated debate on the topic. In the 1990s President Bill Clinton campaigned for “a bridge to the twenty-first century . . . where computers are as much a part of the classroom as blackboards” (quoted in Oppenheimer, 1997). And two decades later, that became the reality. By 2009, approximately 97% of teachers in the United States had at least one computer in the classroom every day and 54% could bring computers into the classroom (Gray, Thomas, Lewis, & Tice, 2010). Internet access also became widely accessible, available for 93% of computers located in the classroom every day and for 96% of computers that could be brought into the classroom. Also by 2009, the ratio of students to computers in the classroom every day was 5.3 to 1 (Gray et al., 2010). As a result, variations on Montagnes’s question made more headlines: “Quality Debated as Districts Tap Tech Over Teachers” from Education Week (Quillen, 2012), “Can Computers Replace Teachers?” from TIME Ideas (Rotherham, 2012), and “Can Computers Take the Place of teachers?” from CNN Opinion (Mitra, 2010).

Very soon, online education became the next target of the question as it was the fastest-growing segment of education (Allen & Seaman, 2011). According to a recent report on online education in the United States, over 6.1 million students took at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year (Allen & Seaman, 2011). In addition, the 10% growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the average 2% growth in the overall higher education student population. The most recent version of the question is “Can tablets replace teachers?” (“Digital Schools,” 2013).

So here are different generations of James Montagnes’s question, and new versions will likely arise when we experience new technology innovations.

• Will TV replace teachers?
• Will computers replace teachers?
• Will online education replace teachers?
• Will tablets replace teachers?

While these questions focus on a particular technology that became prevalent in classrooms and seemed promising for teaching and learning, the essence of such questions remains the same: What is the relationship between technology (e.g., TV, computers, the Internet, tablets) and teachers? Does (or can) technology fully assume teachers’ responsibilities, as various versions of the question “Will teachers be replaced?” suggest?

An Ecosystem, not a Hierarchy: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Teachers and Technology

A Hierarchy: Displacement Theory and Media Comparison Studies

These questions illustrate well the displacement theory and media comparison studies, both of which view the relationship between media (i.e., all kinds of technology and teachers) as a hierarchy. The hierarchy mindset is committed to finding out which medium is the best.

The primary interests of the displacement theory are “Is B better than A?” and “Can B replace A?” Here B represents a new medium (e.g., radio, television, computers, the Internet) while A is the existing medium. When a new medium is acquired, people who embrace the displacement theory would label the new medium as a threat to the existing medium. They are eager to find out which one is better. Research that is guided by the displacement theory tends to conduct head-to-head comparison between a new type of educational technology and the existing medium, such as between radio and newspaper (Lazarsfeld, 1940; Mendelsohn, 1964), between television and newspapers/magazines/radio (Belson, 1961; E. Rubenstein et al., 1973; Williams, 1986), and recently between computers and the Internet (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2000; Finholt & Sproull, 1990; Kayany & Yelsma, 2000; Kaye & Johnson, 2003).

By the same token, the pressing questions of media comparison studies are “Is B (e.g., a new educational technology) better than teachers?” and “Can B (e.g., a new educational technology) replace teachers?” These two questions serve as the template for different versions of James Montagnes’s question. A large body of research has been conducted in an attempt to answer these two questions (see meta-analyses by Cohen, Ebling, & Kulik, 1981; C. Kulik, Kulik, & Cohen, 1980; J. Kulik, Bangert, & Williams, 1983; J. Kulik, Kulik, & Cohen, 1979). A typical study would compare the achievement of participants who learn from different media. A recent example is a study by the U.S. Department of Education on the effectiveness of reading and mathematics software products (National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, 2007). The study compared student achievement in four groups between the classrooms that used the technology products and traditional classrooms that did not. The four groups were reading in first and fourth grades, mathematics in sixth grade, and high school algebra (National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, 2007).

Both displacement theory and media comparison studies are driven by an assumption that media are a hierarchy and that we have to rank media to find out which is better in instruction. However, consistent and strong evidence has found that there are no learning benefits from just employing a specific medium to deliver instruction, from the radio research in the 1950s (e.g., Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Sheffield, 1949), to the television movement of the 1960s (e.g., Schramm, Lyle, & Parker, 1961), to the computer-assisted instruction studies in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Dixon & Judd, 1977). In his comprehensive review of media comparison studies, Richard E. Clark (1983) concludes, “Five decades of research suggest that there are no learning benefits to be gained from employing different media in instruction, regardless of their obviously attractive features or advertised superiority” (p. 450). Repeated comparison of face-to-face education and Web-based instruction seems to lead to the same conclusion. Recent results from Bernard et al. (2004) and other reviews of the distance education literature (Cavanaugh, 2001; Moore, 1994) indicate no significant differences in effectiveness between distance education and face-to-face education.

An Ecosystem: Dancing With Robots and a Transmedia Learning System

As learning differences cannot be unambiguously attributed to any medium of instruction (e.g., radio, TV, computers), we should be advised against a hierarchy paradigm. Instead, we should understand that an effective learning environment consists of a variety of media, as an ecosystem includes all of the living things (e.g., plants, animals, other organisms). This chapter argues that we need to change our perspectives on learning media. These media are not a hierarchy; they are an ecosystem.¹ In an ecosystem, each organism has its own niche and its own role to play. In the same vein, in an optimal learning environment, each learnin...