In his recent New York Times article, “Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Brain?”1Jaron Fanier sets out – via little more than folksy anecdote and pure conjecture – to argue that there is some connection between technology in the classroom and our species' burgeoning inability to proliferate our brains2. In the article, Fanier writes, “Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please.” Putting aside the idea that these two hyperbolic uses for computers in a classroom are either binaries or the only actual two uses for computers in the classroom, one sentiment is made overly clear in paragraph after turgid paragraph of his argument: that there lies some kind of natural tension between all that is good in education, and gol' danged computers.
I've long argued that education remains one of the few industries deeply suspicious of efficiency – that because wonderment and joyfulness and curiosity and deep intellectual engagement feel somehow at odds with organizational tools and automation and systematic sophistication3 our tendency more often than not is to rely on what we've always done as opposed to seeking out certain types of institutional innovation4. We like big libraries a whole lot more than our students do, for example. We like tactile media more than our students do. We like piles of file folders. We like precedent. We like chalk5. Teachers are a preternaturally nostalgiac bunch – few industries seem so connected to the tics of Americana the way ours does (here I mean: to football; to baseball; to fairs; to leaves; to seasons, etc. etc.) – and my guess is some of our folksiness comes directly from our deep and historic connection to our calendars, but I think too there is in each of us a Fanier-like fear that when our faces turn once toward the cathode ray we will forever turn away from each other.
And kids will never go outside again. And no-one will ever play baseball. And the maypole will rust. And our brains will no longer proliferate.
None of this is true of course, and we've been facing these kinds of terrors head-on since the Victor Talking Machine Company made wanton an entire generation of children, but still we wring our hands and we worry.
Whenever I'm asked why the iPad makes sense for my students and for my classroom, I say this: because it makes our lives easier, and because it's really pretty. The second part is the simplest: it's just a pretty thing to have around, it's fun to play with, it's hard to keep my hands off6. But the first part is the important one – it makes our lives easier. It just does. When we finish iPad integration school wide, there will come a day when my students will be able to sit in front of me with their iPads on their desk and pretty much nothing else between us. No reams of paper, no mess of pens, no need for the pencil sharpener, no pencil kit; no lost books; no battered assignment tablet; no planner; no battery cable; no ethernet cord; no keyboard; no lost energy, no misplaced worries, no drag. Just an iPad that contains their entire academic universe in a neat black sleeve, and the best space for conversation I can possibly create in my classroom. And it will be in those moments – when the chaos is pushed to the side, and my students need not feel that drag of their lost detritus – that something truly remarkable will pass between us all. Put another way, there will soon come a time in my classroom where we are using computers neither to represent ourselves nor to build anything at all, but merely to preserve for us all time to be together.
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2Literally, this is what he argues. He writes, “To the degree that education is about the transfer of the known between generations, it can be digitized, analyzed, optimized and bottled or posted on Twitter. To the degree that education is about the self-invention of the human race, the gargantuan process of steering billions of brains into unforeseeable states and configurations in the future, it can continue only if each brain learns to invent itself. And that is beyond computation because it is beyond our comprehension”. This is all true, I believe, Because Jaron Lanier Says So (BJLSS). You'll find BJLSS to be the core rhetorical strategy of the entire article.
3The most absurd section can be found where Lanier writes, “Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to.” This is something of “epic fail” by way of simile: listening to an mp3 is not at all like learning robotics for the sake of simulated erotica, and is exactly the kind of logical non-sequitor Lanier relies on throughout.
4As a clarification, I'd say that in my experience many teachers are quick to test new modes, paedagogies, approaches, etc., but that it is the rare institution for which the same can be said.
5Here when I say, “We” I obviously mean, “I”.
6The same goes for my students, who were drawn immediately to the thing when I bought it. Even today, when I walked down our Middle School hallway, a sixth grader – who's never spoken to me before – said, “Hey! Nice iPad!” The fact that he said that to me today does not serve ipso facto as evidence that iPads are the pre-eminent tool for education, but it certainly speaks to the instinctive level of attraction our students do hold for them. Know why? Because they are pretty.
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