[Update: Be sure to read one of our student’s letter to Ms. Wu, posted on SLA’s site.]

I received this email from Steve Hargadon the other morning dealing with the quickly becoming infamous NY Times article on how some schools are abandoning 1:1:

Mark Brumley sent me this link this morning:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html?_r=3&…

My first thoughts are:

1. Just because you are using laptops instead of desktops wouldn’t necessarily change the fact that most educational computing is not transformative in any way. I’m very interested in hearing from those who know more than I do about 1:1 laptop programs, since I would imagine that pedagogy, not technology, is the key to success in these programs.

2. This reminds me of the recent study on educational software. Again, if computing just mimics the current teaching methodologies, how could you expect a change?

3. I think there is some good, common sense buried in this mess. Until you have teachers who are prepared to really integrate the technology into what they do, using a tool like Moodle, or the collaborative tools of Web 2.0, handing out a lot of laptops is probably exactly the wrong thing to do, and will result in exactly what the article describes.

In my to-read-more-carefully pile is an article that I think really relates to the current use of technology in schools: http://stager.org/articles/acecshark2006.html

I sent these notes to some online friends for discussion, and Andy Carvin said that he is right now blogging about this for his PBS Learning.now blog (http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/).

Thoughts?

So here was my reply…

Steve,

Great points, and I was thinking MUCH the same thing as I walked around SLA today and saw kids using their laptops in powerful, collaborative ways. It does require a paradigm shift, tons of planning and then, it also requires an understanding that it’s still not a panacea. Will already wrote about how we’ve struggled with the issue of iChatting this year, finally getting to the point where we walk a balance that is occasionally messy, but in the words of our esteemed colleague, Brian Crosby, learning is messy.

But also, too many folks have this thought that if we just hand the kids laptops, presto learning happens. You need a web-based learning environment that acts as a virtual center of the community, that gives the kids something to anchor the learning that happens, you need courses that teach kids how to use the laptops to further their learning, not just how to use them, and you need a vision of education that is progressive and project-based so that the kids can use them as research, communication and creation tools.

And yeah, I just described SLA.

… And that was a few days ago… and I want bullet it out because it bears elaboration:

• You need a vision of education that is progressive and project-based so that the kids can use [ANY NEW TOOLS] as research, communication and creation tools. It doesn’t just happen. It does require a ton of planning, mid-course correction and reflection. And it does need to be centered around a new way of thinking.
• There is no panacea. It requires understanding that it does create new problems. You have to imagine as many of them as you can, you have to mitigate as many of them as you can, and then you have to accept that some of the new problems will be things you have to deal with and create policies and procedures for. (And then there are the problems you don’t anticipate.
• You need to center the learning. Laptops are lovely. They are nifty. Schools need a web-based learning platform that serves as the virtual center of the learning that happens. Without scienceleadership.org, our laptop project would be about 1/10th as effective. The internet is vast and what we don’t want is lots of surface level information transaction with little depth and little understanding. A well-thought through web-portal that serves as a place for the students to start and return to is a big technological piece to that puzzle. (Good, thoughtful planning is the pedagogical piece to that as well.)
• And just in case it’s not explicit — planning and vision needs to be supported by tons of professional development time. Some of it needs to be tools-based, but just as much of it needs to be pedagogy-based. It matters that, in every class at SLA, we talk about writing the same way… we talk about learning the same way… and that only happens when there’s the time for a group of teachers have the time to think and plan and learn together.

That’s the start… there’s more, but that’d be my opening salvo in response to the NY Times article.