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Both the negative and the positive claims for the effects of information and communications technologies have been greatly exaggerated; the research necessary to establish these effects has not, for the most part, been done. Dr. Kerr has found that those on the anti-technology side, such as writer Cliff Stoll, are dominated by those who are "interested in staking out a position and using it as a base to launch ‘missiles' against the other side," without rigorous research to support their claims. Those on the pro-technology side – Dr. Kerr cites Seymour Papert, John Seely Brown, and John Bransford as examples — are often more interested in examining "proof of concept" and grand visions of education and technology, rather than talking about reality on the ground that would work in today's and tomorrow's schools, homes, and workplaces. While Dr. Kerr recognizes that the projects that have been coming out of MIT, Vanderbilt, and MIT are very interesting conceptually and potentially very powerful, they are designed with "a subtlety, a complexity, and requirements for their successful application that are so demanding they seem highly unlikely to be adopted and implemented on a wide enough scale to generate the widespread resulted claimed and hoped for."
Most schools lack the resource management skills needed to deal with large capital investments in technology. Schools have typically not had to deal with spending large amounts of money on items that depreciate so quickly. While economic models do exist for textbook depreciation, so far, similar models for school technology spending have not developed. Dr. Kerr poses the question, "How do you factor in a large new set of capital items into school budgets that previously were basically labor intense, with occasional infusions of bricks and mortar?" School are getting better at planning for it, but Dr. Kerr says that these plans are "pie in the sky" plans that often say they will replace technology everything 5 to 7 years, but without firm funding mechanisms in place to ensure that it can happen.
Schools have still not figured out to integrate technology effectively into their curricula, and no one is teaching them how to do it. Dr. Kerr cites a local effort as illustrative of this. In his home state of Washington, Microsoft and state government sponsored the Smart Tools Academy, a program to bring school administrators from across the state together to immerse them in technology and demonstrate its benefits. Unfortunately, Dr. Kerr says, most of the time was spent on teaching tools such as Dreamweaver and other applications, with very little discussion for what it means for an ordinary teacher to use them and what successful implementation would reasonably look like at different levels and in different subject areas. "I fear people walked away with a further level of gung-ho enthusiasm for technology, without much in the way of tools that would actually help with practical implementation."
Schools face several major difficulties when trying to incorporate new media. Most schools are not organized along thoughtful lines; they typically have hierarchical structures where the district management is not particularly technologically sophisticated. The priorities of principals, superintendents, and school boards differ, as do levels of support from state governments. Modern schools are wrestling with a variety of other critical issues regarding standards, accountability, and testing. Many communities, particularly in the Pacific Northwest where Dr. Kerr is, face local difficulties about diversity, with large populations of non-English speakers. These are all problems in addition to the perennial difficulties of drugs, violence, and apathy. On top of all this, many teachers see technology as one more demand from above; they feel they don't have time to learn it and don't know what to do with it. Technological sophistication emerges over time and at considerable cost, and it requires administrative support that helps to foster a climate with a different and open approach to teaching. These are in short supply in most of America's schools.
Currently, most schools allocate 10% of their technology budget to training, preparation, and orientation. Dr. Kerr believes that this should be a much higher percentage, with at least as third of the budget going to service preparation for teachers. This preparation should consider less of workshops, which are prominent today, but have little lasting impact on teachers, says Dr. Kerr, and more on release time for teachers to get together and talk about technology use in the classroom. Unfortunately, this rarely happens today. "Teachers need to get together to talk in a collegial but critical forum about teaching methods. The use of tech is a logical focus for such groups and technology can useful tool for those groups as well."
The dearth of good software is a major problem and even the best software places a major burden on the teacher, one that few are thus far prepared to handle. Most software is closed-ended, it provides a certain set of experiences, but doesn't necessary provide a lot of open entry points for teachers to shape the children's experience themselves. The software that is open-ended, however, do not, for the most part, have interfaces that make for ease-of-use by teachers. The burden of learning software packages and developing lessons from the software material is too much for most teachers to handle, given all of their other responsibilities and requirements.
An issue that Dr. Kerr feels is frequently missing from the debate is the fact that the most interesting approaches to teaching with technology are very sophisticated and require a great deal of teachers in terms of balancing different sets of priorities from the school, the state, and themselves. In general, teaching has not selected people into the profession based on their ability to engage in such multiple levels of thinking, nor does the educational infrastructure provide good support once teachers are in classrooms, in terms of developing those skills and helping them carry them forth on a day-to-day basis.
Dr. Kerr Feels there is a significant disconnect between the idealized images and the realities of teaching. "Teaching is a profession in which pay and benefits are not sufficiently high, nor are the training requirements sufficiently high, where people entering make the assumption that this is all I will do with my life." To support this, Dr. Kerr cites a report that says that within 5 years, 20 percent of those who get teaching certificates no longer teach. Dr. Kerr also wonders which 20 percent leave. (Are they the best 20 percent?) From his own program in educational technology, he sees the best, most skilled educational technologists often turning from teaching to technology companies, chasing financial lures while leaving behind the difficulties inherent in teaching.
Kerr, S. T. "Toward a sociology of educational technology." In D. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Educational Technology. (In press).
Kerr, S. T. (Ed.) Technology and the future of schooling: A critical perspective. 95th NSSE Yearbook, Part 1. (In press).
Kerr, S. T. "Visions of sugar plums: The future of technology, education, and the schools." In S. T. Kerr (Ed.) Technology and the future of schooling: A critical perspective. 95th NSSE Yearbook, Part 1. (In press).
Kerr, S. T. "Technology and the future of schooling: Some final questions." In S. T. Kerr (Ed.) Technology and the future of schooling: A critical perspective. 95th NSSE Yearbook, Part 1, (In press.).
Kerr, S. T. "Educational technology is not about technology." Journal of Thought, 25(1-2), 19-33, 1990.
Kerr, S. T. "Technology, teachers, and the search for school reform." Educational Technology: Research and Development, 37(4), 5-17, 1989.
Kerr, S. T. "Pale screens: Teachers and electronic texts." In P. Jackson and S. Haroutunian-Gordon (Eds.), From Socrates to software: The teacher as text and the text as teacher (pp. 202-223). 88th NSSE Yearbook, Part I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Kerr, S. T. and Taylor, W. (Eds.) "Social aspects of educational communications and technology." Thematic issue of Educational Communication and Technology Journal, 33(1), 1985.
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