Cell Phones and Technology

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, with technology uses that are not mundane to learning and education is also an issue. 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 other primary source that this paper uses is Maggie Jackson and her recent book titled Distracted. She makes a similar, albeit different, point. Her take could be likened to the commonly accepted message of the song Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel. Meaning, her concern is that people and their use of technology has led to communications and interactions that are increasingly shallow and wasteful. Rather than having rich and true interactions with each other, we are instead engaged in interactions and learning situations that are polluted or rotten by nature due to what is unnecessarily injected into the interaction and what is lacking. In other words, communications and learning is becoming increasingly superficial and learning is suffering as a result because this same dynamic is pervading and infecting the educational environment and paradigm (Jackson). When it comes to cell phones, even college-age students have an ostensible issue when it comes to splitting attention between phones and academic matters and performance. Rather than just assert and theorize about the matter, there have been actual academic and scholarly studies that have sought to prove the case using samples, full-blow hypotheses and laboratory or similar testing (Lepp, Barkey & Karpinski)