If there's to be a debate, we need to join the issue. There is the matter of the small school: the issue of size and its impact on the educational process.
And there's the issue of technology in schools, and the role it plays among other instructional modes and pedagogies. And there's the issue of the technocentric school: the school of any conceivable size that has all or most instruction connected to the new and the old technologies. Do you insist on conflating all of these: on talking about the small technocentric school? If so, my position on that proposal is simple: the virtues of the small schools are negated by technocentrism, and the virtues of technology can better be realized in one of Diane Ravitch's large schools--and at less cost. I refer you to two aged and still powerfully relevant accounts of this matter of institutional size, as an independent variable, and learning. In the 1950s Roger Barker, professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, and his colleagues studied thirteen high schools in eastern Kansas: school ranging in size from 40 students to 2000 and more, and published their findings in 1964 in a neglected educational classic, BIG SCHOOL, SMALL SCHOOL. A helpful summary and analysis of Barker's work is to be found in Kirkpatrick Sales' 1980 book HUMAN SCALE, a work whose concern with the size of institutions is summarized in its title. The second book is Arthur Chickering's 1969 brilliant work, EDUCATION AND IDENTITY Here is Chickering: "...institutional size has implications for student development in its own right...when students are superfluous they don't develop much, or to put it more elegantly, development varies inversely with redundancy..What does "redundant" or "superfluous" mean? Redundancy is five persons for a game of bridge, or ten persons for a baseball team...It's twenty persons on a trout stream or two thousand on a beach. It's a class play that calls for twenty in a class of eighty, or an athletic program with places for eighty in a school of eight hundred. To put it more generally, redundancy occurs when increases in the number of inhabitants of a setting lead to decreasing opportunities for participation and satisfaction for each individual." So: I want to disaggregate the matter of size, the smallness of the school, just for a while, from the matter of technology, to see if there is agreement to the proposition that smallness alone has great potential benefits to learning. And then if we agree on that we might be able to agree on the proposition that suitably enveloped in the small school and taking its rightful but not dominant place, technology can bring into that small and warm and supportive environment the skills and knowledge that are not already within it. Steve Eskow [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Joseph Beckmann [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 5:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'The Digital Divide Network discussion group' Subject: RE: [DDN] personal vis social and the academic Ahh, a debate. Observing classrooms in Gates schools, where technology was ample, there were few times when students were urged to "find out" rather than "turn to" specific pages or websites. Even then, their searches were largely limited to Google, both because of the filters built into the schools' net connections and due to teachers' hesitation to challenge students to really open searches. In those same classrooms, teachers would turn to specific, pre-identified pages to support their discussions, as a lecturer might use PowerPoint, but never, in two years of observing these schools, encouraged students to search while a discussion was ongoing. In contrast, as an observer, I searched and found plenty to amplify, make more relevant, and make more interesting the often academic didacticism of even the best of traditional secondary school teaching. And this when there is substantial research (see, for one example, Ellen Langer's Power of Mindful Learning) that we learn more when we multi-task than when we limit and narrow classroom activities to exclude everything but the teachers' focus. Of course teachers are gadget freaks, but they are very rarely early adopters - OF ANYTHING. Very, very few teachers have telephones in their classrooms, incidentally, and that's after a century of adoption! The old Everett Rodgers stuff on the diffusion of innovations paced the adoption of any educational innovation at 25 years for 50% of the schools to adopt anything like that innovation. That's as true for a technologically infused classroom as it is - or was - for new math or ability level grouping. The computer is not the Great Instructor, but, rather, a really responsive library to which any student can contribute and from which any class can be improved. Surely the small school movement has stressed the interpersonal networking of a team of teachers with teams of students, but such teams are not exclusive to the size of the school. They are, rather, reflective of the leadership style of the school and the district, and, in most cases, Superintendents undermine Principals who undermine teams of teachers, preferring control to dialog. Among "mega-universities," I think Maricopa, in Phoenix, has a better and more contemporary tech model than the older Open University. As their website suggests: "In 2002-2003, of all high school graduates in Maricopa County, 33% attended one of the Maricopa Community Colleges within one year of graduation. With more than 61,500 culturally and ethically diverse credit students attending annually, some 17,500 international students, 25,000 Internet students and close to 16,000 students age 50-plus, the Maricopa Community Colleges reflect the varied ages, interests, backgrounds and ethnic mix of our communities' populations. In 2001-2002, approximately 40% of all adults residing in Maricopa County received educational services at one of the Maricopa Community Colleges. Nearly 8.7% of all Maricopa County residents, age 18 and above, attend one of the Maricopa Community Colleges." To serve those students they have many campuses, and many more formal study groups, that go way beyond the traditional classroom structure in supporting individual and group student learning projects and activities in community, corporate, worksite, and traditional collegiate settings. That's an example of how technology infuses a college into a community, largely by increasing reliance on small support groups of students in community settings where the schmooze factor exceeds the delights of dialup or the anomie of large, lecture classes. Technology is delivery, only rarely content, and the size of the school often obscures the units of instructional activity. Like Ms. Coombs, Dr. Eskow poses a false dichotomy: technology does not diminish the interpersonal value of a good teacher, and substantially enhances the capacity of good teachers to work in teams, to demonstrate collaborative and interdisciplinary dialog, and to support open inquiry, which is the heart of "liberal education." Too often, however, even good teachers like to hear themselves more than their students, like students to read what they tell them to read rather than find and then justify alternatives, and like to regulate rather than celebrate the learning of their learners. Technology undermines these likes, regardless of a teacher's method or a school's organizational capacity. Students do find out how to talk, how to read alternatives, and how to celebrate their own ideas. It's just a shame that too often, even in the most sophisticated, most advanced, and most celebrated of the Gates innovative schools, they make that discovery independent of and often as a result of resistance to those very teachers who could be doing so much more. The most innovative school I have seen in 30 years of looking at schools was a vocational education program in a general high school where, after a fine and interesting focus group on school-to-work issues, a student asked the Voc Ed Director for a course on "writing games." The Director, bemoaning the narrowness of the vocational skills program of a decade of tight budgets, asked the student what he'd like. When the student then described his scenario and the 32 characters for whom he'd independently, with no instruction whatsoever, wrote code, the Director matched him with a teacher and they proceeded - immediately - to create an independent study within an existing course title. That's the point. It's not a matter of fancy innovations. It's a matter of teaching students what they want and need to know, in a timely and humane fashion, using absolutely everything you can get to deliver that instruction in any form the student can best use. The organizational innovations of the small schools, and their coincident technology, are fine and support collaboration - among both teachers and students - and are therefore certainly worth the investment. Yet it's neither the technology nor the "warm feeling" that makes the difference. As one teacher explained, quite patiently, 30 years ago in North Carolina, "if you want kids to have a warm feeling, tell 'em to pee their pants. That's not the point." Joe Beckmann -----Original Message----- From: Dr. Steve Eskow [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 6:06 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; 'The Digital Divide Network discussion group' Subject: RE: [DDN] personal vis social and the academic Joseph Beckman has the beginnings of a powerful case for the small school that incorporates technology. Unfortunately, he clutters the case with some conventional assumptions about the resistance to technology by academics, and some questionable recommendations about the role technology should play in such schools. And this issue of small schools with teacher resources augmented by technology is critical for the issue of the digital divide: many schools on the wrong side of the divide are and have to be small by necessity of geography and demography. The Academy, he says, "is notoriously technophobic." The usual indictment. Now, many of the teachers I know have radios and telephones, a few have television sets and air conditioners, and almost to a man and woman they have computers in their homes. The problem, then--or at least an important piece of it--lies not with technophobia but with technophilia, with those who so enchanted with their cell phones and computers that they would turn the small school into an endless connection between students and these devices. If the computer is to become the Great Instructor there is no point to the small school. The large school can have many more carrels with many more computers. Indeed, such defenders of the new technologies as Sir John Daniels also write books and advocate for "mega-universities": universities like the British Open University that have 100,000 or more students. The great virtue of the small school is the relationships it can create between teachers and students, and students and students. In the small school the teacher knows the student by name and need, and can help each student. Students can study together, support each other, have more of an opportunity to engage in music and art and athletics, since the small school encourages participation rather than varsity excellence for a few and passive spectatorship for the many. In the small school it is easier to reach out to the community for support and opportunities for work and service experiences that are educational. The disadvantages of the small school, say the critics, is that it cannot afford the range of curricula of the large school; it cannot afford the range of qualified faculty... All the available research reveals that these advantages are true but largely of little impact on students, and more than compensated for by the advantages of intimacy and concern of the small school. Joseph Beckmann's emphasis on technology and what it can bring in to the small school is the central and clinching point, I think. We can say to those who believe that the technophiles would undo all of the advantages of the small school by their technocentrism by making it clear that those advantages of the small would continue to be featured: teachers and students would talk and think and collaborate together as warm and intimate human community for a good part of the school day, and supplement those learnings with those specialties and programs and possibilities that the computer can bring in from the nation and around the world. Joseph Beckmann says the only way to benefit from technology is to use a great deal of it--and that's the fear of the small school advocates. A legitimate fear, some of us who are not technophobes believe. The only way to benefit from the small school is to insure that there is a great deal of the talk and the connection and the participation that justify the small school in the first place. Steve Eskow [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Joseph Beckmann [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 30, 2005 6:07 PM To: 'The Digital Divide Network discussion group'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [DDN] personal vis social and the academic You've hit a topic that is still too largely ignored. Technology promises to realize the social liberal vision of transparent government, policy, program, business and development. Yet The Academy is notoriously technophobic. Diane Ravitch, in the US, has recently taken up the argument against small, high tech high schools, arguing, for example, that only large, comprehensive secondary schools have the curricular variety needed to prepare young people for the 21st Century. Compared to a place with a dozen teachers and 300 to 400 kids, her argument sounds rational, and her allies are massing a substantial counter-reform against the new secondary school tech movement. Yet there are over 15,000 online college courses and several more thousand secondary courses. There is an almost infinite range of course material available at subsidies so deep that they might as well be free in most US and European school settings, and Taran's $480 or so is not prohibitive anywhere, just a little steep many places. What is lacking is neither the courseware nor the innovative models. What truly is lacking is enough evidence of student productivity effected by this technology. Schools usually hide their students' portfolios, rather than promote them. Students may create their own web pages, but have neither the capacity nor, frankly, the need to promote those pages adequately to deliver the message of their creative portfolio, interdisciplinary, and multimedia products. I know of famous innovative schools - in California, Ohio and elsewhere - where they have hundreds of disks of student portfolio material and neither promote it nor analyze it for fear of loss of control. As in one school I visited where the otherwise sensitive and creative tech coordinator claimed that "wifi would have these teenagers burn up the bandwidth," to which I asked, "who or what else is worth that subsidized bandwidth supposed to be for?" In other words, the only way to defend technology - the ONLY way - is to use it. A lot. And to get kids on it, using it, producing with it the best possible intellectual inquiry, and documentation of that inquiry, in the history of education. That is, after all, the point. Joe Beckmann -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tom Abeles Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 6:01 PM To: The Digital Divide Network discussion group; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [DDN] personal vis social and the academic Hi Steve I want to take my remarks in another direction. The basic background is the growing number of conservative academics and students, particularly in the United States who are arguing that The Academy has a liberal bias making it difficult for dissenting voices to be heard from the faculty side and an even more difficult for a voice to be fairly heard from the side of the student. This plays critically in the issues surrounding the digital divide where it is an article of faith that the introduction of appropriate technology, in this case computers, as the way for social change to occur. Both the hope and the vehicles of possibilities (technoloty and process) are products of a liberal vision (not the Enlightenment liberal or libertarian, but social liberal). What makes this of concern is that this dogma is also being formalized and propagated in The Academy in a somewhat cloistered environment (mostly to protect an emerging faith amongst young turks who have to play the publish/perish game or who are trying to create sacred liturgy). And it is not subject to the critical analysis so needed if substantive change is to be promulgated. The problem, of course, is that the funds from foundations and public agencies are also members of this faith based community and dogma apostates are certain to become fiscally isolated whether they embrace the liberal social models or the more traditional neo-classical ideals. This, of course, paralyzes critical thinking at a time when such is badly needed. It doesn't sit well within The Academy because they too are fiscally dependent; but more importantly, they are tied to peer acceptance as both faculty and students, a powerful pair which checks most critical thought, especially if it is seen to immediately affect efforts to bring help to the disenfranchised. thoughts? tom abeles _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
