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As a new school year gears up and parents rush out to buy laptops for their elementary students and digital smartboards fire up in the classroom, it's worth asking: what sort of role should technology play in education? In children's lives in general?
Most advice about screen time (none for children under two and less than an hour or two a day for older children, according to the Canadian Pediatric Society) is based on television. But TV is a passive medium. Screen time for today's children can mean reading ebooks, playing math games or video chatting with grandparents. And most classrooms today use technology, whether it's Internet-linked screens at the front of class or student laptops.
Philip McRae, an Alberta Teachers' Association executive and UAlberta adjunct professor, is part of a team embarking on a major long-term study of how children and youth interact with technology. It's called Growing Up Digital. In collaboration with Harvard Medical School, McRae will track thousands of young people's exposure to technology to assess the educational, medical and developmental outcomes.
"I think we're on this exponential curve with technology; things are happening so fast that we're in a bit of future shock," McRae says. "We're trying to provide a long-term lens."
The study is still in its, ahem, infancy, but based on his research so far, McRae believes "balance" is the best approach. Here are his tips on what that balance might look like - and how parents as well as kids might find it.
1. Technology is a Tool
It's easy to see technology as an inevitable component of the future, an unstoppable force we must adapt to and accommodate. But whether it's a stick, a bow and arrow or an iPad, technology is just another tool. It's up to the user to use it wisely and effectively.
McRae suggests that we beware of lazy ways of using so-called "educational" technology. Too often, he says, children's early exposure amounts to a kind of "digital baby rattle," trusting that kids will learn as long as they're plopped in front of the right screen or the flashiest computer program. We're selling short the tremendous possibilities of educational technology - and our kids - when we do this.
2. Human Relationships Are Still No. 1
Like any technology, educational technology is good at some things and bad at others. It is, McRae says, a good tool for building community and facilitating communication, especially with those far away.
But there's a danger if it becomes a veiled way to cut costs in the classroom. Having a computer program read to a child is nowhere near as beneficial as having a teacher or a parent interact with them over a book, for example.
For this reason, McRae has reservations about the increasingly popular "blended classroom" that combines face-to-face teaching with Internet or online teaching. "The new teaching machines do not build more resilient, creative, entrepreneurial or empathetic citizens through their individualized, standardized, linear and mechanical software algorithms," he wrote in a controversial Washington Post article. "On the contrary, they diminish the many opportunities for human relationships to flourish, which is a hallmark of high-quality learning environments."
3. Future Citizens, Not Future Consumers
"Technology should be used to help empower students as citizens in a digital age, as opposed to creating passive consumers," McRae says. Technology can be used as a tool to build social connections and extend and expand young people's voices. He points to how, when the Washington Post story was published, people scattered across North America took part in the debate about his views, commenting online, on Twitter and by emails back and forth. "Geography has really limited us in the past, and information wouldn't move virally. Now it can."
4. There Will Be Trial and Error
McRae points out that many teachers already use a lot of technology in their classrooms. It always takes time - and trial and error - to figure out when to use it, how to use it and why to use it. Some technologies might work for imparting certain information or building some skills and not for other types of learning. As long as we keep focused on what's important - building human relationships and empowering students and their voices - McRae is positive about the future.
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