A Tablet PC appears to provide a student with another tool to increase learning rates, self-reliance, social independence, and personal benefits through individualized initiative and effort. Record levels of resources exist for schools and educators. Conventional wisdom, traditional expectations, and technical measures exist to monitor the development of individualized results from using advanced technologies in schools.
Given this base, educators building a case statement for using Tablet PCs in schools must address this question: Why, then, do U.S. (or a local education agency) educators not immediately deploy a Tablet PC for each student?
One answer is that this is a political question, not a question about pedagogy, money, teacher training, or other reasons often cited. These political decision are made above a teacher’s pay-grade. It’s a political decision to the extent that educators do not support the traditional schooling outcomes of increased learning rates, self-reliance, etc.
Each grant proposal writer addresses the political question at least implicitly by stating how much increase will occur in measured learning rates, etc.
I’ve monitored over the past six months probably several hundred blogs by educators. A few routinely describe ways for teachers to acquire and use advanced technologies to increase learning rates directly and promptly. Kudos to these educators. They’ve figured out how to address basic political obstacles to advanced technologies deployment.
Dr. Bernard Farber, a noted sociologist then at Arizona State University, and a doctoral student explored the political question through a fantasy situation in the middle 1970s at a professional conference and in a peer reviewed professional journal. They used a fantasy to illustrate political obstacles to the general distribution of new technologies within social institutions, and by inference, within schools.
They updated an ancient Greek story of Agamemnon by applying classic data from scholarly fields, such as Malinowski’s 1922 description of the use of dynamite by elites of the Trobriand Islands after WWII. Farber changed the silver bullet metaphor (for example, professionals used to refer to penicillin as a medical silver bullet) for solving problems to an electronic device.
In short, Farber created an imaginary intelligence chip to implant in the brain of people with the least measured intelligence. This chip made the person a genius. Procedures existed to mass produce the chip and implant it into the brains of all people considered less intelligent. But, objections arose, because use of this chip would disturb the status quo. Opponents prevailed, and then figured out how to use this chip first for their own political and economic advantage.
It doesn’t seem too far a stretch of the imagination to substitute a Tablet PC for Farber’s intelligence chip. Both tools provide a user with greater ability to find and use more information to solve daily problems.
After substituting tools, does the conclusion of opposition to the general use of the Tablet PC hold? That is, do educators gain advantage over students and others by controlling use of a Tablet PC in schools, rather than providing open use of one for each student?
Someone can answer that question formally with empirical data. It’s an interesting precipitating question for a dissertation.
Until those data are published, grant application writers must figure out how to address such political questions about who obtains which benefits from controlled access to Tablet PCs in schools with less objective, less systematic observations. Then, figure out how to use these observations to persuade school decision makers to authorize, acquire, and distribute the most advanced technologies for all students.
Over one hundred schools have issued Tablet PCs to students in order to support their programs. Perhaps these educators as well as students will share more about how they persuaded decision makers.
This is interesting. I think I’ll comment more about political obstacles to advanced technologies in schools.
Post Script.
Farber’s fantasy implant seems more real now than it did 30 years ago. Joel Garreau suggests in Radical Evolution that such body enhancing is already real, and just the beginning of what’s to come in the next five to ten years. Maybe you read about it in Science. (Sorry, I gave my copy to a college library, so don’t have the citation, but it was a published couple of years ago, with Belle on the cover with electrodes sticking out of her head.) Belle, a primate at Duke University, has an electronic implant that permits operating a robotic arm 600 miles away at MIT by telekinesis. Also, Vanderbilt University has primates trained to stop bleeding of their bodies more rapidly by focused “thinking.”
Teachers, I wonder if we have a problem we don’t even know we have yet? I don’t know if it’s problem of politics or something else. I wonder if we’re making “it” (whatever it means) a problem for our students by what we aren’t doing to address advanced technologies in schools more rapidly?
GATTACA