Technology & Education
When it comes to the viewpoint of most interested parties and scholars, technology has led to a boom in education. Whether it be laptops, tablets, smartphones or other devices, technology is seen as a way to supplement or create learning opportunities and thus improve the educational outcomes of anyone that uses those solutions. However, there are some minds that are less than optimistic about technology and its effect on the educated and education in general. Samuel Freedman and Maggie Jackson, just to name two, note that technology is the antithesis of an education panacea and rather creates a situation where students can become distracted or even uneducable. While technology can assist in education and should be used for the same, the means and methods that are used need to be carefully controlled or the technology in question will actually make things worse rather than better.
Analysis
As noted in the introduction, there is a lot of concurrence that technology is ultimately a benefit to education and its progress. However, there is more than one corner of the academic and news media world that is a lot more caution and muted when it comes to this optimism. To be specific, there are those that assert that multi-tasking in general between technology and other things such as listening to classmates, listening to a teacher or other tasks actually takes away from learning and leads to children and situations that are not optimal (if they are workable in the first place) to learning. Beyond that, students getting enamored, at home or at school,...
Gaming and streaming movies are just two examples of this.
One of the voices that points to this potential (or already-present) problem is Samuel Freedman. In 2007, he wrote an article that drove the point home rather strongly, especially when it comes to distractions from learning that should be entirely controllable. The article starts off by describing a situation where a teacher has a no-tolerance policy on
cellular phones in his
classroom but a student has apparently violated that rule. There are then two huge curveballs that adds greatly to the story. First of all, the teacher seizes the phone and then proceeds to smash it with a hammer. The second curveball is that the "offending" student was in on the whole thing in advance and it was scripted to
play out precisely that way. Even with the theater involved, the
professor was trying to make it clear that exterior or other technology-based distractions would not be allowed for in his classroom. What is causing that teacher's concern and ensuing actions is not fiction. Indeed,
Baby Boomers see cell phones and such as tools to be used. On the other hand, the young people of today see the same devices as social devices and
entertainment. As such, the propensity for the young to be using those devices when they should not be is absolutely real (Freedman).
The…
