A few weeks earlier, I had challenged the 5th graders to write a computer program in MicroWorlds EX that would draw fractional representations of a circle for any fraction a user requested. Feeling a bit cheeky, I said that I would buy lunch for the first kid or group of kids to write a successful program. After a few class sessions dedicated to the challenge, three fifth grade girls were the first to succeed.

I know. I’m a hypocrite.

I reject behaviorism and its evil friends; grades, punishment, bribes and rewards. However, this felt different. The kids were going to join me for lunch like colleagues celebrating an accomplishment. Best of all, their classmates continued working on the programming challenge, without hard feelings, even after “winners” had emerged. Perhaps they knew that their turn would come. I routinely bring treats from my travels into the classroom. If I worked in an office, I might stop occasionally and buy Dunkin Munchkins for my co-workers. I do the same with my students. Why not?

I loved telling the girls that they could order anything they wanted and learning about their dietary habits and favorites. Conversation covered sick babies, interior decorating, roller coasters, face blindness and Khan Academy. The last two topics were introduced by a girl who matter-of-factly stated, “I watch 60 Minutes.” I was jealous of their classroom teacher who knew more about their parents, siblings, friends and neighbors than I do, but a good time was had by all. The genuine gratitude expressed by the girls (including their teacher) made it all worthwhile.

Perhaps the highlight of our lunch was watching the girls color their kid’s menus at a lunch celebrating their computer science prowess.  Once again, Seymour Papert is correct.

Below is the program the girls wrote. It required figuring out how to “teach the turtle” to draw a circle and utilized a bunch of mathematical concepts, including radius, fractions, variables and angle.

For those of you lacking the skills of a 5th grader and can’t read a Logo program, I’ve included a video demonstrating their program at work.

to Pie
 repeat 360 [fd 3 rt 1]
 end

to fraction :n :d
 cg
 setc "black
 pd
 Pie
 pu
 rt 90
 fd 172
 rt 90
 pd
 repeat :d [fd 172 bk 172 rt 360 / :d]
 repeat :n [rt 360 / :d fillit ]
 end

to fillit
 setc color + 5
 pu
 rt 5
 fd 20
 fill
 bk 20
 lt 5
 end

to mem
 repeat :n [fillit pu rt 1 fd :l / :d lt 1]
 rt 1
 bk :n / :d * :l lt 1
 end

 .

Sure, the iPad is light, easy to use and has a good battery life, but of all the students in a school or district, younger children need the most computing power for speech, graphics and video.

Since most high schools steadfastly refuse to change in any way shape or form, note-taking, looking stuff up and word processing are about all one might expect computers are used for.

Therefore, wouldn’t it make more sense to give the less powerful computers to the older students in a school and the real computers to the little kids?

Feel free to read, share and enjoy the PDF here.

Such concerns have only grown during the intervening five years. Keynote speakers have been selected based on popularity contests and a greater emphasis is being placed on fads than reflection.

I love ISTE and want the annual conference to realize its potential as a place where serious issues and policies are debated – where minds are blown. The June 2012 ISTE Conference will be my 25th NECC/ISTE as a presenter. I go at my own expense because I think it is critical to be part of the largest gathering of colleagues in my chosen field.

However, how is it possible that such an enormous educational event has failed to announce its keynote speakers two months before we all travel to San Diego?

Don’t believe me? My mentor, Dan Watt, sold over 100,000 copies of a book entitled, Learning with Logo in the 1980s when much fewer teachers and children had access to a personal computer.

Things sped downhill when we removed “computing” from our lexicon and replaced it with “technology” (like a Pez dispenser or Thermos). We quickly degraded that meaningless term, technology, further by modifying it with IT and ICT. Once computing was officially erased from the education of young people, teachers could focus on keyboarding, chatting, looking stuff up, labeling the parts of the computer and making PowerPoint presentations about topics you don’t care about for an audience you will never meet. The over-reliance on the Internet and the unreliability of school networks ensures that you can spend half of each class period just logging-in.

Teachers with post-graduate degrees are being compelled to receive iPad training. My 95 year-old grandmother figured it out all by herself. No tax dollars were harmed in the process. Apparently, we also need to provide teachers with interactive white board training so they may hung unused in their classroom, just like all of their peers.

We have National Educational Technology Standards published by the International Society for TECHNOLOGY in Education that are so vague pedestrian that no computing is needed to meet them. In fact, it’s likely one can satisfy the NETs without the actual use of a computer. Despite standards and district tech plans that are a cross between a shopping list and a desperate plea for teachers to consider modernity, most school kids are powerless over the technology so central to their lives. Nobody even bothers to ask the question Seymour Papert first posed 45 years ago, “Does the child program the computer or does the computer program the child?” This is a tragedy.

What kids do get to do with computers tends to be trivial and inservice of the educational status quo. Gone are the days when educational computing conference programs were home to the most progressive thinkers and revolutionary ideas in education. Teachers were considered thought leaders and scholars who were required to write peer-reviewed papers in order to present at such events.  Today one merely has to promise 75 quick and easy things to do in 37 minutes with the hottest product being peddled to schools. Another popular topic is incessantly about how your colleagues won’t or can’t use the latest fad.

I am sorry, but social media is not a school subject. There are conference workshops on using Twitter and masters degrees in educational technology that culminate in a rap about hashtags.  If social media is any damned good, it needs to be as complex and reliable as a dial-tone.  PLN, PLC, PLP, etc… are just fancy alphabet soup for having someone to talk with. We should not need an National Science Foundation grant to make friends.

I had an educator approach me at a conference recently to volunteer that “Our school is not ready for Google Docs.” Set aside whatever you happen to think about Google Docs; it’s a word processor in a Web browser, right? I told the tech director, “Congratulations, your school district has apparently managed to employ the last breathing mammals in the solar system incapable of using a word processor.” Isn’t it odd that technology directors are not held accountable for such failure over three decades? Could they possibly be enabling co-dependent behavior and helplessness in the teachers they are meant to lead?

If the percentage of teachers using computers remains constant over time, regardless of how we lower expectations, shouldn’t we ask a great deal more of them and set our sights higher?

I’m so old that I knew the guy responsible for “Guide on the side, sage on the stage” (Chris Held) and “Ask three before me,” (Leslie Thyberg) I even knew the gentleman responsible for “computer literacy.” (originally called computing literacy) His name was Arthur Luehrmann. I often find myself mumbling, “I knew Arthur Luehrmann. Arthur Luehrmann was a friend of mine. You sir are no Arhur Luehrmann.”

When Luerhmann coined the term, “computer literacy,” he intended it to mean computer programming the intellectual pursuit of agency over the computer and a means for solving problems.

Don’t believe me? Read this 1980 paper transcribed  from a 1972 talk.

I know what some of you are thinking. Not every kid needs to learn programming. You don’t have to be able to fix a transmission to drive a car, blah blah blah…

First of all, the educational technology community and schools seem to have decided that no kids should learn to program. I’d be happy with the same nine-week programming class I was required to take in 1975.

Second, computer programming is not like fixing a car. It’s much more like designing the car, making sure all of its systems work in an integrated fashion, mitigating the environmental impact of cars and imagining their impact on society. Computer science is a legitimate science that has profound implications for learning all sorts of other powerful ideas, working in diverse fields and making sense of the world. You just would not know this if you go to school.

Why would it even occur to educators to deprive children of such rich learning opportunities?

If you have the audacity to speak of digital literacy or technology literacy and do not teach computer science, then this is the first time in the history of education when the functional definition of “literacy” has been so devalued, diminished and degraded. All other expectations for literacy increase over time.

There you go Stager, you radical crank. How dare you ask teachers to develop new knowledge and empower students? You’re just some stupid utopian who happened to have a great 7th grade computer programming teacher 35 years ago. Well, I’m not alone.

In January, I was in London to keynote at BETT. At the same event, the Secretary of State Michael Gove announced that the UK government was scrapping the “harmful and dull” national ICT curriculum and replacing it with computer science at all grade levels. He called the current curriculum a mess and wondered aloud why schools bother to teach Excel or PowerPoint to bored students? Coincidentally, I wondered in 1996 why we were investing so heavenly in ensuring that we create a generation of fifth graders with terrific secretarial skills?

When a conservative politician and I agree on education policy, who could possibly be on the other side?

Related reading:

• The Daily Papert
• The Case for Computing
  A chapter from the book, Snapshots! Educational Insights from the Thornburg Center
• What’s a Computer For? Part II
• What’s a Computer For? Part 1

Computer science is the new basic skill

Originally published in the July 2008 issue of District Administration Magazine – Read part 1 of this article

In an educational setting, granting agency to the learner represents the wisest allocation of resources with the greatest potential return on investment. When used as material, the computer can help a student learn what we have always valued with greater efficacy, efficiency or comprehension. Yet the real power emerges when a student is able to learn new things that were previously not learnable, and in new ways. The power of the computer lies in its ability to be used to create a wider, deeper range of personally meaningful projects.

A teacher’s technological fluency and awareness of computers’ potential predicts what students can do. Despite popular myths and a few exceptions, children rarely know more about computers and their applications than adults.

Teachers who lack technological fluency may still value the computer as an instrument for project-based learning. In their classrooms, kids can make a five-slide PowerPoint presentation about frogs, write a five-paragraph essay on a blog, publish a book report via a wiki, or use iMovie to report on a summer vacation. These are hardly transformational activities, but they grant some agency to the learner.

Bad Standards

According to renowned computer scientist Alan Kay, the computer revolution hasn’t happened yet. Look at the average American student’s twelve-year course of study and you will be hard-pressed to find any study of computer science. MIT mathematician Seymour Papert suggests that an impartial observer might conclude that we have enacted a conscious policy of depriving children of understanding the very technologies central to their lives, which seems antithetical to education.

Don’t believe me? ISTE’s National Educational Technology Standards and groups such as the Partnership for 21st Century Skills don’t mention programming or computer science once in their educational visions for the future. One of the AP computer science tests has just been dropped, and few students have any meaningful computer science experiences during their K12 careers.

Computer science matters for several reasons: (1) mastering the machine, (2) addressing economic imperatives, and (3) understanding the world.

Mastery of the computer leads students to understand the strengths, weaknesses and appropriate use of technology. It places them in a position where they are empowered to make informed decisions, explore powerful ideas, and express themselves in ways we have yet to imagine.

It is undeniable that knowledge of computer science has great implications for personal career prospects and our nation’s economic development. Curiously absent from the hyperbolic discussions of flat worlds and global competitiveness are concerns over statistics such as those from the Computing Research Association that show that the number of college freshmen who list computer science as a probable major has fallen by 70 percent since 2000, or that computer science remains a rarity in the K12 curriculum.

The Power of Computer Science

I disagree with those who protest that not every child needs to be a programmer. We expect students to have all sorts of learning experiences. Why not explore the most powerful new science of the past century? In 1975, my junior high expected every student to learn programming in a nineweek course between baking a souffl? and making a wooden tie rack. Nobody ever questioned the value of souffl? baking, yet anti-intellectualism or fear of computers makes us question the value of programming. More than three decades later that school’s computer curriculum consists of keyboard instruction. The “Algebra II with Computer Programming” course I took is now part of the fossil record.

If mathematics is a way of making sense of the world, computing is a way of making mathematics. The power of computer science is evident in all of the natural and social sciences, not to mention the arts, commerce and politics. Agency over the computer not only has vocational benefi ts but also is required for understanding the world. The computer should be used transparently across grades and disciplines, but students also need the formal understanding necessary for solving problems unforeseen by the traditional curriculum. Computer science should be taught as a basic skill.

“Gary is a well informed educational reform thinker. He brings a wealth of knowledge and passion to his speaking engagements and challenges people to think about the best possible learning environments we can create for students to be successful in their lives. Gary has been well received by audiences around the world.”

Peter Reynolds: Bestselling Author and Founder of FableVision

“Any conference seeking a keynote speaker to provoke its attendees to think deeply about authentic learning and inspired teaching should get in line to request Dr. Gary Stager. He sees through the No Child Left Behind fog with laser vision with eye-opening suggestions on how to truly engage and challenge learners. Having seen Gary work with children around the world, I can atest that Gary is a true champion of children.”

Michael Furdyk: Director of Technology & Founder of TakingITGlobal

“Gary is a thought-provoking visionary for educators and school leaders looking for help navigating the challenges of engaging students in this ever-changing information age. I’ve had the pleasure of listening to several of Gary’s keynotes, and they’ve always provided audiences with a challenge: whatever the fad or buzzword of the day happens to be, never stop questioning whether you’re doing the best you can to support students in constructing powerful learning outcomes.”

Roger Wagner: Designer of HyperStudio

“Gary Stager is one of the most energetic, engaging, and most importantly, provocative, speakers on the issues of the effective use of educational technology. He challenges, in fact, demands, audiences to examine their own beliefs about the use of technology, and to look closely at whether something is just the fad of the year, or something that makes (or can make) a meaningful difference in education. Because he is such a popular speaker, it is not easy for him to share his insights with as many groups as would like to have him present, but those that are able to have him appear will be very much rewarded for their effort.”

Gordon Dahlby, Ph.D.: Educational Technology Consultant: Leadership in Policy, Planning and Practice. Former member of the ISTE Board of Directors

“I highly recommend Dr. Stager as a keynote and featured speaker for the wide variety of education conferences and events that span our education landscape. His wide ranging experiences and research network sharpen and add credibility to his message for thoughtful change and reform in education and enhances conversations surrounding this cornerstone of every great society. I know him best for his writings and speaking events in the realm of best practice for effectively using technology to enhance education; removing barriers and encouraging problem solving. Dr. Stager’s wit and delivery will ignite a fire of curiosity into the status quo and into the what is possible. Since education is fundamentally about investing in a country’s future, it is prudent that your best thinkers be challenged by another great thinker, writer and speaker. Your institution and conference will grow deeply by Dr. Stager’s challenge to do strive to do better and be better as educators. It is, after all, for our kids and the foundations you lay for their future.”

Dr. Jorge Nelson: Founding Head of School at AMADEUS International School of Music, Vienna

“Dr. Gary Stager is, by far, one of the most innovative and charismatic leaders in educational technology and constructivist pedagogy in the world. He has decades of experience and brings his passion, commitment and expertise into the classrooms of international schools for the sake of the children. He can talk to kindergartners as well as superintendents with equal ease and effectiveness. I would hire Gary in a heartbeat. If you want the best practices in philosophy, pedagogy as well as instructional and communications technology there is no one better than Gary. Therefore, I give Dr. Gary Stager my highest recommendation without reserve.”

Larry Kahn: Director of Technology, The Kincaid School

“In 2010 I served on the committee that hired Gary Stager to serve as the Keynote speaker for the ISAST conference. Gary did a terrific job and conference attendees reported learning a great deal from him. This month Gary worked with my school’s department chair’s and administrative leaders. Many have reported to me how Gary got them thinking deeply about their practice and about how they need to change to meet the needs of today’s learners. I recommend Gary Stager highly to you.”

Margaret Riel, Ph.D.: Professor & Researcher at Pepperdine University and SRI

“Gary is one of the most creative instructors that I have worked with. I have learned a great deal from watching him revise his courses every time he teaches. He takes students on learning adventures with technology that they never forget. He is one of the most valued faculty members of our Pepperdine Masters online program.”

David Loader: Previously Principal of MLC in the 1990’s and later Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, Melbourne Author of three books: The Inner Principal, Jousting for a New Generation and Our School Our Future

“I can only comment on Gary’s contribution in Australia and in this country his contribution to education has been outstanding. Gary has played a pivotal role in the introduction of technology in schools in Australia since 1990 when he was a consultant to MLC*, the first school to require all 2000 students above Grade 5 to own and use a laptop as part of the student’s schooling program. Without Gary’s knowledge, skills and enthusiasm this major initiative in change in schooling could not have been achieved as successfully as it was. While Gary did not lead the program, he was the very wise and supportive consultant at a time when such advisors and collaborators were extremely rare.

Since 1990 Gary has been a regular visitor to Australia speaking at conferences and supporting individual schools to understand the wise use of technology, how it might be introduced and supported, and very importantly, in the training and support of teachers working with new technology. He is always welcomed here in Australia and his insights and knowledge keenly sought.

Gary has provided a fresh voice in schooling, not just in technology. He is without doubt an educational visionary. He is focused on students, their welfare and particularly their learning. His insights and often unorthodox methods have contributed to healthy debate and to the development of more student friendly student learning settings and curriculum.

Gary has contributed to the educational literature, not only with his research that led to his Doctorate at the prestigious Melbourne University in Australia, but through his writing and speaking at seminars and conferences. His knowledge is fed by his significant reading and through his partnership with other outstanding leaders.

Gary is a supportive friend to many and maintains a vast network of people with whom he collaborates on a regular basis. He is tireless in working for a better future for all students and for his support for teachers and leaders as they address current problems and an uncertain future.

I believe Gary to be among the educational greats and would be nominated by many as the most influential person in their educational thinking.”

Victor Rivero: Writer & Former Editor of Converge Magazine

“Gary is both a pioneer and a leading-edge visionary in the education and technology world who is an effective articulator of everything and anything that might just be a fleeting but strongly ingrained thought in the collective unconscious of the educated masses. That’s why he’s so fun to listen to as a speaker, and why he is also so effective on a one-on-one level. And though he may very well be a laser-like education provocateur, he’s also a very big-hearted guy that communicates because he cares so much.”

Read additional recommendations

I was reminded of the books when Sugar Labs, the folks behind the operating system for the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, featured the challenges as an activity to accompany TurtleArt software on the XO.

Screenshot of the XO Turtle Confusion Activity

The books’ author, Dr. Barry Newell, gave me permission to share digital copies of the book for personal, educational and non-commercial use. Click here to go to the download page.

These books are best used with versions of Logo such as MicroWorlds EX or Berkeley Logo. Some of the puzzles are very difficult or impossible to solve in Scratch, but it’s worth trying if that is all you have. SNAP! is another potential option. TurtleArt is another possibility. Although, mathematical programming is often easiest and best achieved through the use of textual language (IMHO). A bit of dialect translation might be necessary. For example, CS is often CG (in MicroWorlds EX).

As we approach the new millenium, technology – and its use in schools – continues to evolve
© 1998 Gary S. Stager
Published in Upgrade, The Magazine of the Software Publisher’s Association

1. Lower cost hardware and software
   
2. The locus of technological innovation shifting from school to home
   
3. The Internet
   
4. A sea-change from software predicated on passive instruction and entertainment to an expectation to use computers as vehicles for intellectual construction
   
5. Miniaturization/Mobility

Many of these trends are interdependent and support one another. The overlap reinforces the changes taking place.

Lower cost hardware and software

Moore’s Law continues to hold and the educational promise of the Internet has caused millions of new computers to be purchased by families, while schools rush to “get wired.” There is an enormous demand for sub-$1,000 computers and the success of Apple’s iMac provide evidence of the increasing availability of low-cost, powerful, “Internet-ready” computers. The couple of years will see computers approach the price of a few pairs of Air Jordans.

This phenomena will cause more homes to own personal computers and allow for more telecommuting and learning outside of school than has been possible in the past. Schools will find that the level of access demanded by students, coupled with reduction in cost of computing will have a profound impact on the nature of teaching and learning. At the simplest level, ubiquitous computing will move computers out of specialized labs and in contact with every aspect of schooling.

Equity will improve as the cost of computer ownership drops. Several studies already conclude that socioeconomic status no longer determines a child’s level of computer literacy – at least the modest level desired by traditional school computing curricula.

Increased access to powerful, less expensive technology is also creating new ways of learning and expressing oneself. MIDI keyboards and software allow fifth graders to compose and perform original musicals while $50 drawing tablets and digital cameras provide children with new palettes for expressing their artistic talents. Such technology is welcome news in an age where art and music education is in serious jeopardy.

Challenges to the profitability of the software industry

One concern for software developers is the public’s demand for products with higher production values at lower prices. Many customers no longer perceive the value of software priced at $499, but they don’t understand why it costs forty-nine dollars when a home video of Titanic costs $9.95.

Whether due to high-volume licensing or the availability of increasingly powerful shareware/freeware on the web, the price of software increasingly approaches zero.

The home

Increasing access to powerful computers, expressive software and the Internet has shifted the locus of technological innovation from school to the home. There is no way for schools to catch-up. They are likely to have less powerful computers and connectivity than some of their students have at home. This presents educators with a challenge and opportunity to view the home more as a learning resource than a place where kids do trivial homework assignments and stop learning until they return to school.

While parents will continue to purchase software designed to drill their children in specific skills, kids are likely to ignore these tasks in favor of controlling the computer to achieve more personal and complex objectives. Just as shooting down math problems are less interesting to kids than “surfing or chatting,” making things to share with the world will consume more computer time.

The net

Much has been said about how the Internet offers learners of all ages with unprecedented access to information. This fact alone has revolutionized learning, however the greatest impact of the net lies in its ability to democratize publishing and expand opportunities for collaboration.

While schools assimilate the Internet by using it as a way to find discrete facts or deliver information to sometimes unwilling students, kids at home are beginning to use their personal computers to create web sites, collaborate in online communities of practice and express themselves in new ways. This should come as no surprise as schools struggle against the clock, irrational fear of Internet abduction and the institutional expense of providing students with sufficient access. The home provides learners with a level of freedom, contemplative time and computer access necessary to construct knowledge.

Even when schools begin to discuss online learning, the reflexive response is to scan everything they have ever used in a traditional classroom in preparation for “pouring the information down the pipe” and into the computer of the online students. A “push” mentality permeates the discussion, rather than viewing learning as the act of “pulling and shaping understanding” in the mind of each individual learner. You can lead a school to the I-Way, but you can’t make it think.

The Concord Consortium (http://www.concord.org) is dedicated to creating rich online environments for learning math and science by doing. Their collaborative projects include Haze-Span, a project in which children are collecting and analyzing important scientific data and sharing that data with interested scientists, and the Virtual High School in which students explore areas of mathematics and science in ways beyond the school curriculum.

Pepperdine University (http://gsep.pepperdine.edu/online/) is perhaps the first university to offer accredited online graduate programs in educational technology, based on constructionist principles of learning. Educators enrolled in the Pepperdine master’s and doctoral programs use a combination of synchronous and asynchronous technologies to build community and construct knowledge within a personal context. Guest speakers, faculty members and even other classes of students join discussions of powerful ideas in virtual settings in which every member of the community is a learner. Access to classmates and faculty members is available virtually around the clock. Pepperdine is working to invent the future of learning and teaching without relying on an old correspondence school model.

Mamamedia (http://www.mamamedia.com) is a unique Internet start-up designed to provide children with a safe, creative and intellectually stimulating place on the web. Mamamedia extends the traditional notion of the 3-Rs, by adding the three Xs, “Exploration, Expression and Exchange” as the design philosophy of their site. Mamamedia founder Idit Harel’s goal is to “sell learning to kids” in an environment they will wish to return to over and over again. Anything children can use may also be collected, created or manipulated by the child. The future development of the net has to not only include faster bit delivery, but greater opportunities for users to construct things online.

Educast (http://www.educast.com/) provides educators with a free screensaver that is updated with timely news, views, resources and teaching ideas based on a push technology similar to Point-Cast. The system is optimized to make the best of slow or infrequent net connections.

Every Internet user is depending on software and hardware engineers to increase bandwidth and more intuitive tools for web publishing. Web design still requires too much “monkey work” and “two percent” of users understand the process of uploading a page to a web server.

Learners of all ages have the unprecedented opportunity to not only “look things up,” but use the Internet to publish their ideas in all sorts of ways – from dancing poetry, special-interest groups and TV/radio broadcasts. The web is full of places where you can publish your work for free and powerful tools for expressing your ideas. As the courts and educators are discovering, school know longer has sole jurisdiction over what goes on in a kids’ bedroom, personal computer or head. For an increasing number of kids, “high-tech means my tech.” (Idit Harel)

From passive to constructive computing

Recent research demonstrates that computer use is most effective for learning when students use it to “problem solve.” Inside and outside of school, the thing computers do best is provide learners with an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self expression. Children need better, more open-ended, computationally rich tools than their parents in order to sustain their interest and leverage the potential of computers for making connections between powerful ideas.

Five year-olds ought to be able to see themselves as software developers by using MicroWorlds to design a video game. Children should be able to collect data, perform experiments and discuss their conclusions with other children and experts. Kids who build and program LEGO robots may use physics, measurement, feedback and perhaps even calculus in a meaningful context. Seymour Papert and others point out that children who have had such deep learning experiences will demand much more of school.

Miniaturization and mobility

Computers are not only getting cheaper and more powerful, they are getting smaller. I have enjoyed working with Australian schools in which every child has a laptop for more than eight years. Approximately 50,000 Australian children have had personal laptop computers and the number of American school districts embracing truly personal computing is growing as well. The Australian pioneers viewed laptops as a way to make learning more personal and as a catalyst with which teachers could rethink the nature of teaching and learning. The ability to use the computer as your own portable laboratory and studio has had a tremendous impact on the social, cognitive and artistic development of children. Learning can not only occur anytime and anywhere, but new deeper forms of learning have become possible.

Students with laptops need two essentially two pieces of software, an integrated package for doing work and environment for messing about with powerful ideas and learning. This is why so many schools use ClarisWorks or Office for writing, calculating and publishing and MicroWorlds (http://www.microworlds.com) for designing interactive multimedia projects that may be run over the web. The software requirements for laptop schools include: being open-ended, non-grade specific, inexpensive and have a life-span of at least three years. Developers need to begin thinking about how they will distribute and license software to schools in which every student has a personal laptop.

High schools have been embracing low-cost graphing calculators for several years. These devices cost less than one hundred dollars and have been used to help students visualize mathematics that was previously abstract. A new innovation, calculator-based labs (CBL), allows students to connect scientific probes to the graphing calculator and collect experimental data. This data may then be analyzed and shared in ways never before possible. These probes place students in the center of their own learning and enriches mathematics education by making tangible connections to science.

Nicholas Negroponte once joked that we need to “melt crayolas down into Crays.” He meant that toys would become more and more computationally rich. The recent Tamagotchi craze offered creative teachers with a tool for connecting student toys to curriculum topics like: senses, life-cycle, probability and artificial life. New twelve dollar HotWheels cars have computers in them capable of measuring velocity and distance traveled. Perhaps the most exciting new product is the LEGO Mindstorms programmable brick set that allows children to construct autonomous robots of their own design.

These trends provide parents, educators, developers and children to enter into a new discussion of the nature of learning. If we trust the natural learning inclinations of children, provide them with rich open-ended tools and don’t do too much to get in their way, we will witness an explosion of learning in the very near future.

Gary S. Stager is a contributing editor for Curriculum Administrator Magazine and editor-in-chief of Logo Exchange. He has consulted with LEGO, Disney, LCSI, Compaq, Tom Snyder Productions, Netschools, Universal Studios and Microsoft. Gary is an adjunct professor of education at Pepperdine University, a frequent speaker at conferences and has spent the past seventeen years helping educators around the world find constructive ways to use computers to enhance the learning process. Gary may be reached at http://www.stager.org.

In 1990, I had the great opportunity to lead professional development at the world’s first “laptop” schools. Australia’s Methodist Ladies’ College and Coombabah State Primary School were the first schools anywhere to embrace 1:1 computing. MLC is a large independent school that committed to 1:1 computing in 1989. Coombabah is a public school and often overlooked for its place in edtech history. The efforts of the teachers at both schools changed the world and I am enormously proud to have played a major role in that effort.

In the early 1990s, I spent months working at MLC, and then numerous other schools eager to embrace 1:1 and the constructionist principles demonstrated by this pioneering school. In 1993, the MLC faculty and principal wrote a book to share their expertise, philosophy and wisdom with educators in other schools. I hope you find the nearly twenty year-old learning stories, recommendations and tips useful to you. I especially call your attention to the audacity of embracing 1:1 computing more than 20 years ago and the fact that laptops were a way of bringing Papertian constructionism to life.

The book, Reflections of a Learning Community: Views on the Introduction of Laptops at Mlc by Methodist Ladies’ College is long out-of-print and sadly removed from the Web where it resided for several years. As a public service to researchers, educators and historians (and with the help of the Wayback Machine) I am able to share the complete book here. Check out how hip the title of this book is for 1993, since “learning community” has just became all the rage twenty years later!

With any luck (and lots of effort) I will soon be able to publish the first doctoral dissertation evaluating the efficacy of 1:1 computing, originally published in 1992!

You should also read Bob Johnstone’s history of educational computing up to and including the early days of innovation at MLC, Never Mind the Laptops: Kids, Computers, and the Transformation of Learning!

The chapters marked by an * indicate that the text describes some of my specific work at MLC.

Reflections of a Learning Community:

Views on the Introduction of Laptops at MLC

Acknowledgements
Foreword

Section one: Computing at MLC

• Reconstructing an Australian School by David Loader, Principal at MLC
• The Promises of Educational Technology by Margaret Fallshaw, Computing Consultant, MLC
• The Audacity of Sunrise by David Loader, Principal at MLC
• A Laptop Revolution An interview with Pam Dettman, Head of Junior School
• Educational Computing: Resourcing the Future by by David Loader, Principal, MLC & Liddy Nevile, Senior Lecturer RMIT.
• A Practitioner’s Viewpoint by Maggie James, JSS (junior secondary school, grades 7-8) History Co-ordinator
• Computers for Kids ..Not Schools by Gary S. Stager *
• Initial Research Report by Helen McDonald
• A Technology School for the Future: A Proposal by Ruth Baker, Jeff Burn and Di Fleming
• Design and Technology: The Next Challenge by Ruth Baker, Head of Junior Secondary School, 20.9.1992
• Using Laptops in Schools: The Administrative Implications by Margaret Fallshaw, Computing Consultant, MLC
• Learning with Laptops: Who Pays? by Roger Dedman, Director of Finance, MLC
• Junior School Computing Curriculum by Steve Costa, Deputy Head, MLC Junior School (K-6)
• Computing and the New Teacher by Alison Brown, Teacher, MLC Junior School
• Holiday Program by Alison Brown, Teacher, MLC Junior School *

Section two Professional Development at MLC

• Professional Development at MLC:Requirements for Teachers by David Loader, Principal, MLC
• Computer Pathways: A Model for Change by Di Fleming, Head of Middle School
• MLC Community Education and Technological Developments by Joan Taylor, Head of Community Education MLC
• An Elaborate Pyjama Party by Alison Brown, Teacher, MLC Junior School *
• Teacher Change: Philosophy & Technology by Helen McDonald, secondary English teacher & PhD. student from Monash University *
• Staff Development by Pam Dettman, Head of Junior School, MLC

Section 3 : Appendix

• MLC College Computing Policy
• A Constructionist Environment by Jeff Burn, Di Fleming & Margaret Fallshaw

Here is the text:

Gary S. Stager: No

In 1990, I began helping schools across the globe realize the transformational learning
potential of a laptop for every child. From the start, there was a recognition of the inevitability that every student would own a personal mobile computer in the near future, whether school provided it or not.

However, BYOD is bad policy that constrains student creativity, limits learning opportunities, and
leads to less support for public education in the future. It’s a reckless idea for the following reasons:BYOD enshrines inequity. The only way to guarantee equitable educational experiences is for each student to have access to the same materials and learning opportunities. BYOD leaves this to chance, allowing more affluent students to continue having an unfair advantage over their classmates. This is particularly problematic in a society with growing economic disparity.

BYOD creates false equivalencies between any objects that happen to use electricity. Repeat after me! Cell phones are not computers! They may both contain microprocessors and batteries, but as of today, their functionality is quite different.

We should not make important educational decisions based on price. A mentor told me that basing important educational decisions on price is immoral, ineffective, and imprudent. Doing the right thing is a matter of priorities and leadership, not price point.

BYOD narrows the learning process to information access and chat. Information access, note taking, and communication represent the tiniest fraction of what it means to learn. Looking up the answers to someone else’s questions online to type an essay or make a PowerPoint reinforces the status quo while failing to unlock the opportunities that computational thinking provides.

BYOD increases teacher anxiety. Schools have largely failed to inspire teachers to use computers in even pedestrian ways after three decades of trying. A cornucopia of devices in the classroom will only amplify their anxiety and reduce use.

BYOD diminishes the otherwise enormous potential of educational computing to the weakest device in the room. The computer is an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that makes it possible for children to learn and do things in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. We impair such empowerment when we limit educational practice to the functionality of the least powerful device.

BYOD contributes to the growing narrative that education is not worthy of investment. We reap what we sow. If we placate those who slash budgets by making unreasonable compromises at the expense of children, we will find ever fewer resources down the road. We must not view education as some “every man for himself” enterprise that relies on children to find loose change behind the sofa cushions. Democracy and a high-quality educational system require adequate funding.

Check out the new Macbook Pro, iPhone, iPad, and high-def video camera carried by the tech coordinator who decided that students should be happy with whatever hand-me-down devices he can scrounge up. The message here is: “Let them eat cell phones!”

It takes chutzpah to ask a school to buy something for every student. You better make sure you ask for the right device. Kids need a computer capable of doing anything you imagine they should be able to do, with plenty of room for growth and childlike ingenuity.

—Gary S. Stager, PhD, is the director of the Constructing Modern Knowledge Institute
(http://constructingmodernknowledge.com).

If you wish to read the argument for BYOD, click here.

Please share widely.

I originally wrote a version of this article in 2007, but the topic is even more timely during today’s period of introspection regarding violence, civility, gun control, widening wealth disparities and education reform. Our daily discourse is filled with reckless nostalgia for the good ol’ days of the White Citizens Councils and the preposterous claims that Dr. King would love charter schools, the destruction of unions, the demonization of public school teachers and having poor children do the work of school janitors.

It is unconscionable to reduce Dr. King’s life, work and sacrifice to the few paltry sentences fed to us by the textbook industry or Republican politicians cherry-picking happy talk rather than confront the societal demons King identified and that are still with us.

This epidemic of ignorance can only be cured by educators! (also read: The Help: A Teacher’s Guide for more resources)

This Monday is Dr. Martin Luther King’s Birthday and February is African American History Month. Both occasions were created as a way of honoring the sacrifice of Dr. King and the contributions of millions of African Americans before him. It is a somber occasion in which to confront the hideous crimes of institutionalized racism and to celebrate the achievements of people who overcame insurmountable odds to enjoy the unfulfilled promises of the United States Constitution.Schools are the natural setting to inform students of our history, warts and all. Yet we tell so few historical stories and most of those narratives are watered down until they become fairy tales and meaningless happy talk. Face it, ______ (Black, Women’s, Latino…) History Months are necessary because the information presented to students is so biased, simplistic, incomplete and often times just plain wrong.

Please take a moment to answer the following questions. Think of it as a quiz if you wish.

1. What do you know about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr?
2. What do your school social studies texts say about his life and work?
3. How much class time is dedicated to the life and times of Dr. King?
4. Have you done any independent reading or research into the life of Dr. King?
5. Why did Dr. King speak in Washington that day in August 1963?
6. What was the event called?*
7. Was Dr. King the only speaker?
8. Why wasn’t’ President Kennedy at the speech? Wasn’t he Dr. King’s friend?
9. Who was A. Phillip Randolph?
10. Who is John Lewis?
11. Who was Bayard Rustin?
12. Where was Malcolm X that day in 1963?
13. Why was Dr. King in Memphis before he was assassinated?
14. Bonus question: Are there serving members of Congress who voted against the federal law establishing the King holiday?

Many teachers use the King holiday as an opportunity to tell students “all about” Dr. King. “He had a dream…” They use resources like these fabulous materials recommended for teachers on the web.

1. http://abcteach.com/peace/martin__king1.htm
2. http://www.windmillworks.com/games/dream.htm

Note: I highly recommend you click the links to see the garbage used to honor one of the greatest men who ever lived.You can’t teach about Dr. King without the “I Have a Dream Speech,” right? Textbooks and various multimedia products have sliced, diced and filleted a 30-second perky excerpt from Dr. King’s speech.

Since students will be unlikely to be introduced to any of Dr. King’s other rhetorical output, might I suggest that you play the entire speech for your students. Of course you should listen to it yourself beforehand. The entire speech runs approximately 17 minutes. If the Internet has educational value, it begins with the access to primary sources.

You may find a COMPLETE video clip of the ENTIRE “Dream” speech, alongside the unabridged transcription of the speech at the following sites:

• http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

• http://www.holidays.net/mlk/speech.htm

So, what do you think? Do the content, intent and emotion of the whole speech paint a different picture than the one portrayed by the one-paragraph textbook version recited by politicians?In an age when educators profess profound concern about information literacy why not discuss why the entire message of the speech has been hidden by curricular omission. That and the substance of Dr. King’s actual speech should generate a few year’s worth of curriculum alone.

Schools are the natural setting to inform students of our history, warts and all. Yet we tell so few historical stories and most of those narratives are watered down until they become fairy tales and meaningless happy talk.

Even Google got in the business of infantilizing the life of Dr. King with today’s logo.

On this Martin Luther King Birthday National Holiday, I give thanks to the World Wide Web and YouTube for ensuring that future generations of children will be free to learn history aside from the standardized content being currently delivered to them.

Supplemental Resources:Educators serious about sharing the heroic ongoing American struggle for civil rights should read Herbert Kohl’s brilliant book, “She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.” The first half of the book demonstrates how the Rosa Parks story has been turned into a fantasy taught to children and offers the facts children are denied. The second half of the book discusses how teachers can fairly teach complex or controversial issues to children of all ages. I also recommend, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History by James Loewen.

• Factual background information on the 1963 March

• Information about that day in Washington D.C. (including entertainers in attendance)

• NPR Audio, including first-person accounts of that day in Washington.

• Additional NPR resources – Behind the scenes of the march

• NPR Part two

• Wikipedia entry

• The United States government’s biography of MLK

• The US government’s web page about the 40th anniversary of the march

• Taylor Branch’s definitive trilogy of books on the life of Dr. King

• I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr by Michael Eric Dyson

• April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Death and How it Changed America by Michael Eric Dyson

• A comprehensive book about the event, Like a Mighty Stream: The March on Washington August 28,1963, by Patrik Henry Bass

*The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963.

Why do you suppose “jobs” gets left out of the classroom discussion?

Watch the following clip and see how Dr. King might have responded to the magical thinking on race being advanced by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan or Governor Walker or Governor Kasich or Governor Daniels or Governor Christie.

Follow Gary Stager on Twitter: www.twitter.com/garystager

That said,I do not promote anarchy or even believe that “curriculum-free” pedagogy, such as unschooling, result in irresponsible chaos.

For the past several months, I have been working a few days a week as a S.T.E.M. consultant at a school in Los Angeles. The goal is to improve the quality of teaching in the school and I am doing a lot of modeling in classrooms. A couple of weeks ago, I began using robotics in the 5th grade class. I have lots of objectives for using my favorite robotics materials, Pico Crickets, but here are three big ones. I could list a bazillion sub-skills and affective objectives, but I will spare those details.

1. Specific science, engineering, mathematics and programming concepts come to life in a tactile fashion.
2. Students develop important habits of mind and inquiry skills by tinkering, invention and complex open-ended project work.
3. You can learn an awful lot about individual student learning styles, talents and prior knowledge by working alongside them during problem-solving activities. You also learn a lot about their prior educational experiences.

I first introduced the Pico Cricket materials to the kids by quickly showing the special parts in each building kit, asking them to “bunch up” in groups and recreate one of the projects suggested in the pictorial Pico Cricket placemats that come with each building set. After no more than two or three minutes of instruction, I circulate around the room, make suggestions, ask questions, troubleshoot hardware and remind kids to “ask three before me.” I seize the teachable moment and introduce a nugget of information when and where it is needed. Occasionally, I’ll ask one student to pass that along to others or just announce that “Samantha knows how to do X.”

After a session or two of recreating, personalizing and embellishing the project starters, I asked the class to invent new toys. One group built a bowling machine that sent a ball down an alley to knock down pins. Another built a barking walking machine inspired by a book I made available. Two teams approached gumball machine design in different ways, with one even making the machine coin-operated.

Walking machine (click to enlarge)

Another student was teeming with ideas and enthusiasm, but less accomplished at consensus building with peers. So, I gave him his  own building set to work with in an effort to amplify his his strengths while suggesting that he will need to develop greater ability to collaborate. He was the first to program his Pico Crickets and became an asset to other kids who needed to learn to use the Scratch-like programming software.

Noise-sensitive car program

A motorized car was quickly enhanced by the ability to make it GO and STOP by making a loud noise. One or two sessions of adjusting the sensor tolerance to account for ambient noise and the toy car would stop and start on command! Friction, gearing and stable construction techniques were encountered along the way. Some of the programming needed my help because the software runs much quicker than a loud sound.

After joyfully sharing his invention with anyone he could find, the student had an original new idea!

He changed his computer program so that when a loud noise, such as a clap, was detected, the car would travel forward for exactly one second.

Hear a sound and go forward for 1 second

I was busy working with other groups of students and was unaware of the new direction for his project until I saw him lay a meter stick on the ground and grab a clipboard, pen and paper. He decided to measure how far the vehicle traveled (on that surface) in one second.

Testing the speed of the noise-controlled car (click to expand)

The kid knew that an average of multiple trials were necessary to ensure accuracy, so he got his TI-15 calculator. I suggested a strip of tape as a starting line and the experiment was underway. After multiple trials, the kid went to average the data and realized that he made a calculation error – without any intervention from a teacher or peer. He tried again and declared, “On average, the car travels 31 inches per second.”

Obviously, the next thing a kid wants to know is how fast the car travels in miles per hour (or kilometers per hour in nations using that silly metric system). Traditionally, this is the point at which all of the fun descends into math class hell.

How many seconds in a minute? How many inches in a foot? Yard? Mile? Seconds in a mile…” Ahhhhhhhhhhh!

That’s when I made my greatest contribution to the learning adventure. I whipped out my laptop, pointed my browser at www.wolframalpha.com and typed 31 inches per second into the calculation field.

A fraction of a second later, the handy web site told us that the car travels an average of 1.76 miles per hour. Not only that, but it provided context by telling us that the average human walks 2.5 miles per hour. Imagine that? Mathematical context!

This is a game changer! (click to expand)

When simple things, even repetitive calculations, are easy to do, complex things become possible. The student might decide to build a faster or slower car. He might challenge classmates to a robot race or see who can build a vehicle that will climb the steepest incline. These are all invitations to learn about force, speed, mechanical advantage, gear ratios and more. Or the kid may be content with what he has accomplished and embark upon a new learning adventure.

Lessons

1. The project idea belonged to the learner. Occasionally I would ask a question or make a suggestion that would lead to greater experimentation.
2. There was no scripted plan or backward design intended to get a kid from point-A to point-B. He achieved his objectives and learned more deeply along the way.
3. That new knowledge and expertise is an asset to peers who want to try similar experiments or just integrate this kid’s ideas into their future projects.
4. There was no formal show and tell. Kids collaborate and learn from each other naturally when the conditions value freedom, sharing, giddiness, whimsy and movement.
5. There is no need to require every student or team of students to reproduce this project now or next year.
6. There is almost never a time when more than 2-3 minutes of instruction is necessary before the students do something. If you are engaged in too much full-frontal teaching or whole-class instruction, try lecturing for half as long and shave a bit of time off each day until you get to less us and more them!
7. Learning is natural.
8. Learning is personal.
9. Learning is a consequence of experience.
10. Learning takes time, but not as long as it takes to “teach” the same lesson.
11. Less is more.
12. Kids should be allowed to be themselves and learn in a style that best suits them and a specific task. It is not up to the teacher to determine that comfortable style. Learning styles tend to be a lot more fluid and less confining than even well-meaning teachers believe.
13. If you make simple things easy to do, you make complex things possible.
14. Computers amplify human potential.
15. Computing is the game-changer, not information access or ICT.
16. A good prompt is worth 1,000 words!
17. Curriculum was unnecessary.
18. Teacher expertise and fluency with the materials, based on extensive personal use and experience are critical!

Want more information?

• Attend Constructing Modern Knowledge 2012
• Read 3 articles about effective project-based learning by Gary Stager
• Read Less Us, More Them – Creating learner-centered contexts for learning
• Read This is What Learning Looks Like
• Tinkering resources
• Seymour Papert’s Eight Big Ideas Behind Constructionism
• A Constructionism Primer

Note: I’m starting a new series of occasional blog posts in which I share my disbelief at what I see passed-off as “teaching” during my work in schools around the world.

My nephew, let’s call him Vernon Honours, is a 9th grader. His Geometry teacher assigns the kids to read Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott over the December holidays (so far, so good) and then complete some related “projects.” (that’s where the problems begin)

One of the “projects” the kids had to tackle was to “List the first five laws of Flatland and explain why they are needed.” This caused the nephew, his parents and Facebook friends to tear their hair out.

When I was asked to help, I did my best Googling, eBook reading and even tweeted the question to my legion of Twtiter followers. That outreach to my “personal learning network” resulted in  insults from people accusing me of an inability to, in the worlds of former President George W. Bush, “use the Google.”

The problem is that the teacher’s question was hopelessly vague or a trick question. Since the only THREE laws of Flatland anyone could ascertain had to do with the treatment of women, one could conclude that either:

a) the math teacher is merely testing comprehension and testing the kids on their reading

b) it’s a trick question because it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with geometry

Having endured ridicule for sharing this question on Twitter, I was curious as to whether my nephew answered the question correctly. I asked my nephew Tuesday afternoon after his first day back to school and was told, “I don’t know. I have to wait to get my paper back and see what grade he gave me.” On Friday afternoon, the students were still awaiting their fate.

So, there are a few problems here:

1. What makes you think that telling the kids to read a book, answer questions and then never discuss the book or their answers is effective teaching?
2. Where did you get the idea that a comprehension quiz is a project?
3. Flatland features a lot of interesting connections to geometry, Victorian mores, philosophy and more. Why have you left this to students to figure out on their own?
4. Is a teacher’s primary job to catch kids submitting the wrong answer?
5. Is teaching a trick? Are you a magician?
6. What makes you think that a bell curve is the desired learning result?
7. Are you really asking geometry students to regurgitate the sexist views of the author?
8. What should the students do with their grade a week or more after the assignment?
9. Can’t you be replaced by a worksheet dispensing and grading machine?
10. Do you get paid a bonus for every student you get to hate your subject?

I awoke to a tweet from my friend Will Richardson announcing that he was asked to be in one of those New York Times online “debates” where a handful of people are asked to write short essays without knowing who the other combattants are or what they had to say. I participated in such a “debate” about online learning in 2011.

I then read an entry by popular edublogger and teacher Vicki Davis that was so problematic, I felt compelled to respond.

Ms. Davis’ essay begins as follows:

“My fourth grade child plays adaptive games on my iPad as part of his weekly routine. I am convinced that games like “Stack the States” and “Math Rocket” have helped him learn. These adaptive programs are great but fall short for one reason: there is no feedback loop. I need to know if my child consistently forgets the capital of Rhode Island or where Wyoming is on the map.”

and includes other whoppers like:

“Adaptive testing is really about personalizing the knowledge of the student. It is about understanding the individual student. If we can understand enough individual students and aggregate the data, then a school can create a plan to help those students progress and move ahead.”

Unfortunately, the NYTimes web site only allows for short comments. Therefore, I have included a few of my thoughts here.

With all due respect to Lori (commenter) and Vicki (the columnist), the scenario you describe has little to do with the potential of computers to amplify human potential.

Computer-assisted instruction or drill and practice software, apparently now dressed-up as the fancy-sounding “adaptive learning” has been the holy grail of those wishing to reduce education costs and shortcut education for the past half century.

Any teacher who thinks he can be replaced by a computer, probably should be. Yet, this handful of magic beans promising that computers can “teach” where humans have failed is folly folks have unwisely invested their faith in for decades.

First of all, at best such software merely TESTS PRIOR KNOWLEDGE. It does not teach. Just like flash cards don’t teach, electronic flash cards will result in similar short-term results – temporary memorization without understanding or long-term comprehension.

Such “memorize the capitals,” “multiply faster” or “memorize vocabulary words quicker” systems address the low-hanging fruit of education, recall of facts, and as you demonstrated in your article – fail at even that.

I truly do not understand how anyone, especially educators, can conflate and confuse testing, teaching and learning. They are neither synonymous, nor interchangeable.

You cannot personalize knowledge! Knowledge by its very nature IS personal. It is constructed by the learner and is the result of experience. It is not the result of test-taking.

It is one thing to let your kid play with such software on a long car trip via 99 cent iPad apps, but the same misguided nonsense is being packaged as adaptive learning systems, integrated learning systems, “School of One” or other similar junk that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per school.

These “systems” are likely to be implemented in schools with the greatest needs and most at stake. In such cases, only stockholders profit at the expense of children who need much richer learning opportunities; the kinds that computers could offer if used to give agency to the learner and amplify human potential. Instead of learning to program, build robots, compose music, make films, design simulations, educationally impoverished children are being fed a steady diet of expensive low-level test-prep dressed up as artificial intelligence and adaptive learning.

I won’t bore you with all of the ways such software gets motivation wrong or how the content “taught” lacks relevance and context. Feedback is a whole lot more complicated than “wrong, try again” or “wrong, here’s an easier problem.”

Pretending that artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where competent teachers may be replaced by apps is at best wishful thinking, regardless of what the vendors tell you.

I am saddened most by educational technology enthusiasts advocating uses of computers that reinforce the worst aspects of schooling.

I am horrified that you actually believe that “I need to know if my child consistently forgets the capital of Rhode Island or where Wyoming is on the map.” That is the example you choose to debate the future of education?

I strongly urge you to read the following books to gain a deeper perspective on these issues:

“The Connected Family” by Seymour Papert

“Computer Environments for Children: A Reflection on Theories of Learning and Education” by Cynthia Solomon

Note from Gary Stager…

In 1989, a great friend, colleague and pioneer in educational computing, Steve Shuller, authored the following literature review. Steve was Director of Outreach at Bank Street College during its microcomputer heyday, co-created New Jersey’s Network for Action in Microcomputer Education (N.A.M.E., now NJECC) and was a Director of the IBM Model Schools Project. Shortly before his untimely death Steve prepared this literature review for the Scarsdale, NY Public Schools, hoping that it would contribute to the end of tiresome discussions regarding keyboarding instruction.

Steve would be horrified that this trivial issue lives on in a field that has matured little in the past twenty-two years. I share his work with you as a public service and in loving memory of a great educator.

Stephen M. Shuller
Computer Coordinator
Scarsdale, NY Public Schools

August 1989

Introduction

We are currently in the midst of a world-wide revolution, moving from the Industrial Age to an era in which information is the primary product (Toffler 1984). As information processing tools, computers are central to this revolution. The ability to interact with computers is an essential skill for the Information Age, one which our schools will need to address to prepare our students to meet the challenges of this fundamentally changed world.

The educational reform movement of the 1980′s has recognized the importance of computers in education. For example, A Nation at Risk (1983) calls for the high school students to:

(a) understand the computer as an information, computation, and communication device;

(b) use the computer in the study of the other Basics and for personal and work-related purposes; and

(c) understand the world of computers, electronics, and related technologies. (A Nation at Risk 1983, 26)

Virtually every other reform proposal has included similar recommendations. The educational community has responded to the futurists’ visions of the Information Age and the reformers proposals by working to integrate computers into the curriculum at all levels.

At present, people interact with computers by typing words on typewriter-like keyboards. Even though computers may someday be able to understand handwriting and human speech, in the currently foreseeable future-which in the Information Age may be only a dozen years or so at best-keyboarding skills are necessary to make computers do our bidding. Thus, keyboarding is an essential enabling skill for using computers in schools and in society, and must be included in Information Age curricula (Gibbon 1987).

Even though there is virtual unanimity that students should learn to keyboard, there is considerably less agreement on how, how much, when, and by whom. This paper will consider the teaching of keyboarding in elementary schools, examining these questions as a guide for curriculum development.

Keyboarding and Typing: Historical Context

Computer keyboards are similar to typewriters, Industrial Age tools invented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and first marketed by Remington in 1873 (Yamada 1983). By the end of the 19th Century, typewriters were considered reliable writing tools, and started becoming widely used in offices (Pea and Kurland 1987). The first typing instruction was provided by typewriter manufacturers in about 1880 (Yamada 1983). It took public schools until 1915 to begin teaching typing as a high school occupational skill (West 1983).

By the 1920′s, educators began to experiment with using the new technology-typewriters–to help children learn to write (Pea and Kurland 1987). These experiments were quite successful. In the largest-scale controlled study, Wood and Freeman (1932) followed 2383 students as they learned to write on portable typewriters over a two year period. They found that the students who used typewriters wrote with more expression, showed higher reading scores, became better spellers, and enjoyed writing more than students learning to write using conventional methods. Similarly, Merrick (1941) found that typewriters helped the English development of high school students. Even so, typewriters did not catch on in education.

In the 1960′s and early 1970′s, there was another smattering of interest in using computers in language arts (Balajthy 1988). Edward Fry, a noted reading specialist at Rutgers University, published a book on using typewriters in language arts which was not widely used. Perhaps seeing a new window of opportunity, Fry (1984) revised his text and reissued it as an approach to keyboarding in language arts.

Since we have known for more than half a century that keyboarding can help elementary school children learn language skills, why have typewriters only rarely found their way into elementary school classrooms, in sharp contrast to the current push to put computers into schools? One answer is that schools by and large reflect the perceived needs of society. Industrial Age schools resembled factories, and funds for typewriters were only available to prepare the relatively few students who would become clerks and typists. Information Age schools must prepare the vast majority of students to use computers because they are information management tools.

But why start elementary school students on computers? Here there is less direct pressure from society and more interest from educators who see the potential to enhance education. The two main factors spurring this interest are the transformation of professional writing through word processing (Zinsser 1983) and the transformation of writing instruction through the process approach (Graves 1983). Computers can greatly facilitate implementation of a process approach to teaching writing (Green 1984; Daiute 1985), so many educators are interested. In the current social milieu, the taxpayers are often willing to supply the necessary equipment.

Keyboarding in Elementary Schools: Curricular Issues

Given that we would like to use microcomputer based word processing as a tool to teach writing, what sort of keyboarding skills will elementary school students need? There seem to be three main alternatives. If they have no familiarization with the computer keyboard, they will have to “hunt and peck.” If they know where the keys are but not how to touch type, they can “peck” without much “hunting,” preferably using both hands. Finally, they can learn to touch type.

Everyone seems to agree that keyboard familiarization is in order, but whether to stop there or to teach touch typing to elementary school students is controversial. Advocates of the keyboard familiarization approach argue that students can type quickly enough to facilitate their writing without touch typing, that touch typing demands too much from limited time and computer resources, and that touch typing skills are quickly forgotten unless the students continue to practice regularly. Advocates of touch typing counter that students who develop the “bad habit” of keyboarding with two fingers find it very difficult to learn correct touch typing skills later and that such skills will ultimately be very important because of increased speed and efficiency.

There is widespread agreement that elementary students need to be able to type at least as fast as they can write by hand to avoid interfering with their writing process. A number of investigators have determined elementary school student handwriting rates. Graham and Miller (1980) found that students in grades 4 through 6 can copy text at a rate of 7 to 10 words per minute (wpm). Graves (1983) found a range of 8 to 19 wpm for 9 and 10 year olds when composing. Freyd and Kahn (1989) found an average rate of 11.44 wpm among 6th graders. With no keyboarding instruction (familiarization or touch typing), students of these ages can generally type 3 to 5 wpm (Wetzel 1985, 1987; Stoecker 1988). Different testing procedures probably accounts for most of the variation in these results. Wetzel (1987) reports that 10 wpm is generally accepted as a benchmark writing rate for students in grades 4 through 6.

Can students learn to type as fast as they can write with a keyboard familiarization program and word processing practice alone? The results are mixed. Freyd and Kahn (1989) report two studies in which students were able to type at writing speed with just keyboard familiarization and practice. one group of 6th graders started with an average rate of 6.62 wpm in October. With one hour of word processing per week, they had increased their average speed to 10.12 wpm in May. On the other hand, Daiute (1985) found that 11 and 12 year olds could write more words by hand in 15 minutes than they could type on the computer even after six months of word processing experience. Dalton, Morocco, and Neale (1988) found that 4th graders were initially comfortable word processing without touch typing instruction, but became frustrated later in the year as they needed to enter longer texts into the computer. In this study, however, students began using the word processor with no previous keyboard familiarization, so the results are not surprising.

Advocates of touch typing frequently claim that teaching touch typing to students who first learned to type without proper fingering techniques is very difficult or impossible (Kisner 1984; Stewart and Jones 1985; National Business Educators Association 1987; Abrams 1988; Balajthy 1988). No empirical evidence is presented to substantiate this claim, however. Wetzel (1987) interviewed several typing teachers, some of whomwere concerned about the “hunt and peck unlearning” problem, but others were not concerned, based on their own teaching experiences. West (1983) reports successfully teaching “hunt and peck” typists to use correct touch typing finger positions with about 10 hours of instruction.

By grade 3, children are developmentally able to touch type on electric keyboards. Advocates of touch typing generally agree that students should receive instruction just prior to the time they will need to use touch typing skills for word processing. If studen ts do not regularly practice typing, their skills can deteriorate in as little as six weeks (Warwood 1985). Wetzel (1987) found that students regress in their skills if they do not practice regularly after 20 hours of initial instruction. He cites business education research that students tend to retain their skills once they reach a plateau of 20 wpm. Gerlach (1987) ,found that with continued practice, students continue to improve their speed. In her study, 6th grade students who averaged 9.71 wpm after a 6 to 8 hour keyboarding course improved to 12.27 wpm four months later with continuing word processing practice.

Business educators have proposed a number of touch typing programs for elementary school students, some based on a recommended amount of instruction, others based on a performance criterion. Kisner (1984) recommended touch typing instruction in 20 to 30 minute periods, to a criterion of 20 wpm in Grade 3 or 25 wpm in grades 4 through 6. These recommendations seem to comefrom the experience of business education teachers with high school students rather than from keyboarding experience with elementary school children.

Jackson and Berg (1986) recommend 30 hours of instruction spread over two or three years, with weekly 30 minute review sessions. Instruction should take place in 20 to 30 minute periods, using a combination of software and a textbook. The recommended course sequence follows the traditional typing course, starting with the home row and introducing two new keys per session, with appropriate drills. Teachers should monitor the students continuously to make sure they are using proper form. Instruction should emphasize speed, not accuracy.

In 1987, the National Business Education Association (NBEA) proposed standards for keyboarding instruction in elementary schools. The NBEA recommended that elementary school students learn touch typing to a criterion of 15 wpm, and middle school students further develop their skill to a criterion of 25 wpm. Not surprisingly, the NBEA recommended that business education teachers, rather than elementary school classroom teachers, provide the instruction.

Wetzel (1985) surveyed the literature on touch typing programs for elementary school students, finding that fifth graders could be taught to touch type 22 wpm with a nine-weeks of daily instruction for 45 minutes, and fifth and sixth graders could achieve 40 wpm by spending one hour daily for a full year.

Alternatively, a more limited keyboarding instruction program consisting of instruction in correct fingering techniques and practice with a computer typing tutorial could lead to an average typing rate of 10 wpm in four weeks of 35 minute sessions or 15 wpm in nine weeks of such sessions. He also observed third, fourth, and fifth graders using word processors without touch typing instruction, finding that those who could type from 7 to 10 wpm were able to make adequate use of the computer for word processing. Given the heavy demands on teaching time in elementary schools, the relatively low level of typing skill needed to facilitate word processing and other computer activity, and the students’ ability to increase typing proficiency through continued computer use, Wetzel recommended a limited keyboarding program to accomplish a typing speed of 10 wpm in a relatively short period of time.

In a later paper, Wetzel (1987) modified these recommendations to take into account differing amounts of computer usage. If students regularly use computers at least two hours per week, Wetzel feels that they will get enough practice to sustain typing skills, justifying a 20 to 30 hour period of initial instruction in touch typing. If students characteristically use computers one hour per week or less, only a much more limited program of keyboard familiarization is recommended.

Stoecker (1988) developed a touch typing program ofinstruction designed for use by elementary school teachers. After a four week course, 20 sessions of 30 minutes each, fifth and sixth graders achieved typing rates of about 12 wpm. Stoecker’s program consists of student and teacher materials for use with any word processor. He has found that elementary school classroom teachers can learn to use this approach through a one day long training workshop.

Balajthy (1988) emphasizes the importance of integrating keyboarding instruction into the language arts curriculum. He cites recent studies showing that keyboarding can improve language arts skills, results which are consistent with the typewriter-based studies of the 1930′s and 19401s. Balajthy, like Wetzel, finds that students can achieve adequate typing skills with a limited period of keyboarding instruction-about 8 to 10 hours-followed by regular practice with computer activities. Like Stoecker, Balajthy recommends teacher- keyboarding instruction using a word processor rather than use of a software-based tutorial. Balajthy (1987) cautions that unless students have significant amounts of ongoing typing or word processing activity, touch typing instruction is a waste of time because skills will deteriorate rapidly.

One reason why Stoecker and Balajthy recommend keyboarding instruction on word processors with teacher supervision is because computer tutorials cannot monitor correct fingering and other aspects of proper touch typing. Stoecker (1988) reportsthat non-typists tend to use two fingers unless a teacherobserves. In contrast, Mikkelson and Gerlach (1988) performed acontrolled study in which third to sixth graders worked with a computer typing tutorial. Half of the students were supervised and encouraged to use proper touch typing form; the other half were observed but not supervised. The results were surprising–both groups made similar progress in typing skill, and there was no difference between groups in propensity to use correct touch typing techniques.

If Mikkelson and Gerlach’s results are generalizable, it would be possible for elementary school teachers to obtain satisfactory results by teaching touch typing through limited individual work with a computer typing tutorial. Such instruction could take place on classroom computers while other activities were taking place. If students need to be supervised to insure proper fingering techniques, then either elementary classroom teachers will need to be trained to teach touch typing or business education teachers will be needed.

Keyboarding and the Future

In their Database of Competencies for Business Curriculum Development, the NBEA defined keyboarding as follows:

Keyboarding is defined as the act of placing information into various types of equipment through the use of a typewriter-like keyboard. Typewriting and keyboarding are not synonymous. The focus of a keyboarding course is on input rather than output. (NBEA 1987, A-19)

Keyboarding is seen as a way to input information into a computer so that it can be manipulated. Thus, initial accuracy is less important than speed, ability to manipulate text is more important than formatting skills for specific types of documents, and composing is more important than transcribing (so it does not matter so much if the typist looks at the keys).

These distinctions recognize important changes in the purposes for which people type on Industrial Age typewriters and on Information Age computer keyboards. Yet, if we look closely at the keyboarding programs proposed by business educators, we find a methodology geared to the Industrial Age purpose of transcribing rather than the Information Age purpose of composing (Freyd and Kahn 1989).

This discrepancy is not surprising. As Naisbitt (1982) observed, people tend first to use a new technology in the same ways they have used older technologies which seem similar. only after a (sometimes lengthy) period of incubation do we see new directions or uses that grow out of the technology itself. So, at this point it is useful to take a step back and consider whether we might be looking at the keyboarding issue all wrong.

Graves (1983) has determined that five and six year old beginning writers compose at a painstakingly slow pace of 1.5 words per minute. At that rate, writing down a six word sentence can take up to nine minutes. Even five and six year olds who are unfamiliar with keyboards can compose more quickly and easily oncomputers than by hand (Wetzel, 1985). Graves has remarked that “one can imagine starting kids off writing on keyboards and save handwriting until motor skills are more highly refined.” (Green 1984).

Fry (1987) has proposed that schools eliminate the teaching of cursive writing and substitute keyboarding. He points out that cursive writing is not taught in European schools; students learn manuscript, and then develop their own handwriting style through shortcuts. By teaching cursive writing instead of keyboarding, Fry says, “we are training for the last century instead of for the next century.”

The issue of touch typing versus two-finger typing may be similar. Gertner and Norman (1984) have observed that the main advantage of touch typing is in copying. Copying is important for Industrial Age clerks and typists to transcribe business documents, but it is irrelevant to writers using word processing to compose and edit. By insisting on touch typing, are we training for the last century instead of for the next?

The New York State Keyboarding Curriculum

The New York State Board of Regents Action Plan to Improve Elementary and Secondary Education Results in New York calls for instruction in keyboarding to be “included in the State-developed English Language Arts Syllabus.” A state education department curriculum guide entitled Developing Keyboarding Skills to Support the Elementary Language Arts Program further stipulates that “approximately 18 to 20 hours of instruction should be devoted to keyboarding instruction within the framework of the Language Arts Program in the elementary grades.” (New York State Education Department 1986, 23).

The state keyboarding curriculum closely parallels material published by the National Business Education Association and by-state and local business education personnel. As described above, this means that the general thrust of the guide recognizes different needs and objectives between traditional typing instruction and keyboarding instruction, the recommended teaching strategies follow a more or less traditional touch typing approach. The influence of the business education community is apparent from the Suggested Readings offered in Appendix B. Of the 25 references listed on pages 29 and 30, 15 are to business education sources, and only 4 are to computer education and 3 more to general education sources.

The state curriculum clearly reflects the relative strength of business educators compared with computer coordinators in New York. For example, under “General Guidelines for Achieving Outcomes,” the guide suggests that:

business education teachers should be called upon to assist in the development of keyboarding curricula, in-service training, and selection of materials and methodology. (5)

Under “Planning for Teacher Awareness and Training:

… the business education teacher … can be very helpful in developing the plan and for training other teachers inappropriate keyboarding techniques. Business education teachers can also serve as a resource once a program is in place to conduct follow- activities as needed. (6)

Under delivery of instruction, the curriculum calls for students to learn touch typing, including correct fingering, posture, and eye contact (away from the keyboard, that is). The guide stops short of requiring business education teachers to teach the keyboarding courses, but states:

Teachers who have been trained in keyboarding methodology are of considerable importance in achieving these goals. (7)

In contrast, computer coordinators are mentioned only once in thecurriculum guide. The guide clearly views computer coordinators as technicians rather than instructional leaders, suggesting that they can be helpful in scheduling labs, repairing equipment, finding software and the like. The next sentence reminds the reader that knowledgeable high school students can also provide “considerable assistance.” (7)

To its credit, the state keyboarding guide does focus on integrating keyboarding into the language arts curriculum, as suggested by Balajthy (1988) and others. But it leans so heavily for its methodology on the perspective of the past that it is” suspect as a guide to the future.

Conclusions and Recommendations

There is widespread agreement that elementary school students need keyboarding skills. Whether keyboardfamiliarization is sufficient or whether students need touch typing skills depends on the nature of the school’s language arts and computer education curricula.

Touch typing courses are only effective if students receive a substantial period of initial instruction followed by regular practice throughout the school year. Touch typing courses can be recommended when computers are fully integrated into the language arts curriculum and when students regularly have at least two hours of individual computer time per week. In this type of environment, the initial touch typing instruction should occur at the time when students will first become involved with computers on a regular basis. The initial instruction should be provided either by specialists or by classroom teachers who have been given training in how to teach touch typing.

In situations where students make more limited use of computers, the evidence at hand suggests that a program of keyboard familiarization is sufficient to provide adequate keyboarding skills to support word processing and other uses of computers in elementary schools. Keyboard familiarization can be taught by classroom teachers assisted by appropriate computer software.

As we move further into the Information Age, fundamental changes in our school curricula will follow, paralleling the changing needs of society. Envisioning these changes, we can imagine a time when keyboarding will replace cursive writing asan essential skill for elementary school children, complementing a language arts curriculum using computers extensively for such activities as writing with word processors. Developing an Information Age language arts curriculum with keyboarding as a fundamental skill should be a central focus of our long-range curriculum planning.

References

Abrams, Jeri. “Keys to Keyboarding.” Boston Computer Society Education Special Interest Group News 4 (November/December 1988): 6-12.

Balajthy, Ernest. “Keyboarding and the Language Arts.” The Reading Teacher 41 (October 1987): 86-87.

Balajthy, Ernest. “Keyboarding, Language Arts, and the Elementary School Child.” The Computing Teacher 15 (February 1988): 40-43.

Daiute, Colette. Writing and Computers. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1985.

Dalton, Bridget M., Catherine Cobb Morocco, and Amy E. Neale.

“I’ve Lost My Story!” Mastering The Machine Skills for Word Processing. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, 1988.

Freyd, Pamela and Jessica Kahn. “Touch Typing in Elementary Schools-Why Bother?” In William C. Ryan, Ed. Proceedings of the National Educational Computing Conference 1989. Eugene, OR: International Council on Computers for Education, 1989.

Fry, Edward. Computer Keyboarding for Children. NY: Teachers College Press, 1984.

Fry, Edward. Quoted in “Keyboarding replacing writing: Penmanship should be out and typing in, professor says.” The Associated Press, 2 February, 1987.

Gentner, Donald and Donald Norman. “The Typist’s Touch.” Psychology Today 18 (March 1984): 67-72.

Gerlach, Gail J. The Effect of Typing Skill on Using a Word Processor-for Composition. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC, 1987.

Gibbon, Samuel Y., Jr. “Learning and Instruction in the Information Age.” In Mary Alice White, Ed. What Curriculum for the Information Age? Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987.

Graham, Steve and Lamoine Miller. “Handwriting Research and Practice: A Unified Approach.” focus on Exceptional Children 13 (1980): 1-16.

Graves, Donald H. Writing: Teachers-and Children at Work. Exeter, NH: Heinemann, 1983.

Green, John 0. “Computers and Writing: An Interview with Donald Graves.” Classroom Computer Learning 4 (March 1984): 21-23, 28.

Jackson, Truman H. and Diane Berg. “Elementary Keyboarding-Is it important?” The Computing Teacher 13 (March 1986): 8-11.

Kisner, Evelyn. “Keyboarding-A Must in Tomorrow’s World.” The Computing Teacher 11 (February 1984): 21-22.

Koenke, Karl. “ERIC/RCS Report: Keyboarding: Prelude to Composing at the Computer-” English Education 19 (December 1987): 244-249.

McCrohan, Jane. Teaching Keyboarding: The first step in making the computer an effective writing tool. Paper presented at the New Jersey Educational Computing Conference, 1989.

McLean, Gary N. “Criteria for Selecting Computer Software for Keyboarding Instruction.” Business Education Forum 41 (May 1987): 10, 12.

Merrick, Nellie L. “Typewriting in the University High School.” School Review 49 (April 1941): 284-296.

Mikkelsen, Vincent P. and Gail Gerlach. Teaching Keyboarding Skills to Elementary School Students in Supervised and Unsupervised-Environments. ERIC Document Number ED301152, 1988.

Naisbitt, J. Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming our Lives. New York: Warner Books, 1982.

National Business Education Association. Database of Competencies for Business curriculum Development, K-14. ERIC Document Number ED 294064, 1987.

A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office [1983]).

Pea, Roy D. and D. Midian Kurland. “Cognitive Technologies for Writing.” In Ernst Z. Rothkopf, Ed. Review of Educational Research, Volume 14. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association, 1987.

Stewart, Jane and Buford Jones. “Keyboarding Instruction: Elementary School Options.” Business Education Forum 37 (1983): 11-12.

Stoecker, John W. Teacher Training for Keyboarding Instruction– 4-8: A Researched and Field Tested Inservice Model. ERIC Document Number ED290451, 1988.

Warwood, B., V. Hartman, J. Hauwiller, and S. Taylor. A Research Study to Determine the Effects of Early Keyboard Use upon Student Development in Occupational Keyboarding. Bozeman, MT: Montana State University, 1985. ERIC Document Number ED 265367.

West, L. The Acquisition of Typewriting Skills. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1983.

Wetzel, Keith. “Keyboarding Skills: Elementary, My Dear.” The Computing Teacher 12 (June 1985): 15-19.

Wetzel, Keith. “Keyboarding-An Interview with Keith Wetzel.”

Making the Literature, Writing, Word Processing Connection. The Writing Notebook, 1987.

Wood, Ben D. and Frank N. Freeman. An Experimental Study of the Educational Influences of the Typewriter in the Elementary School Classroom. NY: MacMillan, 1932.

Yamada, Hisao. “A Historical Study of Typewriters and Typing Methods: from the Position of Planning Japanese Parallels.” In Dudley Gibson., Ed. Wordprocessing and the Electronic office. London; Council for Educational Technology, 1983.

Zinsser, W. Writing with a Word Processor. NY: Harper and Row, 1983.

1. The Constructivist Consortium has compiled an extensive online book store for creative educators. Be sure to peruse these recommendations!
2. Wanna be a School Reformer? You Better Do Your Homework! Required reading for school leaders, administrators and policy makers.
3. Tinkering resources for educators
4. Overlooked gems, books kids (especially boys) will love

The two best education books of 2011

Tricia Tunstall’s beautiful new book, Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music, tells the story of El Sistema, perhaps the world’s most exciting large-scale (systemic) education project. At a time when presidential candidates call for children to clean toilets as a way of “learning the dignity of work,”, El Sistema, teaches hundreds of thousands of children to achieve their potential as productive citizens by learning to play classical music at a level previously unimagined.

This book is a must-read. It’s incredibly well-written and reminds us of how arts education can change lives. The lessons for all educators, politicians and parents are multitudinous. I sincerely hopes this book reaches a wide audience, it asks much of each of us, but the rewards are extraordinary. It reminds us what it means to be human. You should also get the fantastic DVDs, El Sistema: Music to Change Lives and The Promise of Music to bring music and motion to the ideas in Tunstall’s fantastic new book.

Soon-to-be-released Books I Can Hardly Wait to Read!
The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformationby Edwards, Gandini and Foreman is the most comprehensive book on the phenomenal “Reggio Emilia approach” to education.The 3rd volume of this comprehensive anthology will be available any day now. It is a must read and re-read for many years to come.Lella Gandini has made a spectacular contribution to Constructing Modern Knowledge over the past few years.	One of the great honors of my life was being invited by legendary educator and author of 40 seminal education books, Herbert Kohl, to make a small contribution to this new book about the importance of the arts in education.Being included in a book with Deborah Meier, Bill T. Jones, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Ayers, Lisa Delpit, Rosie Perez, Phylicia Rashad, Diane Ravitch and Maxine Greene leaves me speechless.I cannot wait for The Muses Go to School:Inspiring Stories About the Importance of Arts in Education to arrive!

Deeply moving & often hilarious book

Regardless of your politics or how you feel about his films, Michael Moore’s new book, Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life, is a poignant, witty and exceptionally well written memoir of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. This book really captures one person’s realization of the American dream. I highly recommend this page-turner for idealistic teens and their parents.

My Ten Favorite Jazz Recordings of 2011
Unsung Heroes by Brian Lynch	Songs of Mirth and Melancholy by Branford Marsalis and Joey Caldarazzo	In the Element by Emmet Cohen	Roy-alty by Roy Haynes	Road Shows volume 2 by Sonny Rollins
This extraordinary new album of modern jazz in tribute to unsung trumpet heroes is by my friend Brian Lynch and earned five stars from Downbeat Magazine.	I’ve known Branford for 30 years. This new album is a duet with his longtime pianist, Joey Caldarazzo. The result is quite beautiful.	I met young Emmet almost a year ago and we’ve hung out ever since. He recently placed 3rd in the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Piano Competition. His debut recording is quite good and he is going to be a monster in years to come.	I heard Roy Haynes for the first time when I was 14 and his music has brought me more joy than perhaps anything else in life. He not only represents the history of American music, but at 86 years old, Mr. Haynes swings harder than any drummer alive.	Sonny Rollins may be the world’s greatest living musician and he’s finally enjoying the respect he deserves. He was given a Presidential Arts Medal and Kennedy Center Honor in 2011. This recording includes recent live recordings, including a rare duet with Ornette Coleman.
Forever by Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke & Lenny Whtite	Pinnacle by Freddie Hubbard	LIVE in Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1 by Miles Davis	Warren Wolf	Christian McBride Big Band - That Good Feeling
The first CD in this 2-CD album is unbelievably exiting and hard swinging. The second disc? Not so much.	I saw Freddie Hubbard perform live dozens of times and each note he played was exhilerating. This live recording is available for the first time.	Unreleased “bootlegs” by Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter & Tony Williams – what’s not to love?? Here’s my credit card!	This young vibraphonist has been called the “Mike Tyson” of the Vibes. Check out his terrific major label debut recording produced by mentor Christian McBride.	It’s been a busy year for the hardest working man in jazz. Christian McBride’s big band and all-star duet recording are must-haves.

The weather outside may be frightful, but summer is right around the corner. You deserve to spend four days next July reigniting your creative flame, recharging your battery and learning with world-class educators, artists and inventors.

Join us to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Constructing Modern Knowledge, the world’s premiere project-based learning event in Manchester, New Hampshire – July 9-12, 2012!

Why not replace visions of sugarplums with the opportunity to learn storytelling with award-winning filmmaker Casey Neistat; tinkering with the Editor of Make Magazine, Mark Frauenfelder; project-based learning from one of its originators, Dr. Lilian Katz and explore the ultimate 21st Century toy factory, the MIT Media Laboratory, with Dr. Leah Buechley? Nine year-old faculty member, Super Awesome Sylvia, reminds us of the meaning of education.

Give yourself the learning experience of a lifetime and register today!

1. Alfie Kohn’s, “How Children’s Play is being Sneakily Redefined.” (terrific article – will inspire provocative discussion)
2. “Hard Fun” a newspaper column by Seymour Papert. (high priority read)
3. “Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning ,” Seymour Papert’s exploration of gaming, fun and learning.
4. Vivian Paley, “You Can’t Say You Can’t Play,” profile from This American Life. (12 minutes – audio)
5. The Journal of Play
6. “I Wonder…” 2008 short article by Deborah Meier
7. “What Happened to Play?” 2006 short article by Deborah Meier
8. Tinkering Resources compiled by Constructing Modern Knowledge

Books (click on author’s name for other books)

You Can’t Say You Can’t Play by Vivian Paley

Playing for Keeps: Life and Learning on a Public School Playground by Deborah Meier, Brenda S. Engel and and Beth Taylor

Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by M.D., Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan

What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? by Susan Ohanian – Susan Ohanian’s web site

Paik’s article, Bernards Twp. district encouraging use of mobile devices, ran in the December 4th issue of The Star Ledger. That article completely misrepresents and distorts my answers to his questions. I cannot claim to be misquoted since the attributions to me are not printed as quotes. Sneaky, eh?

The following is how Mr. Paik reports my views on the matter of BYOD in Bernards Township, NJ.

Gary Stager, an international school-reform consultant and advocate for laptops in classrooms, said there are other issues as well. Not only are there challenges in training faculty on different devices and phone applications, but many school districts also mistakenly assume all electronic devices are alike.

A focus on mobile devices could prevent students from becoming familiar with software and hardware that require an actual computer, Stager said.

Here are my major issues with the reporting of my views.

1. I NEVER EVER use the word training. It is antithetical to learning. Anyone familiar with my work knows this to be the case. You do not train professional educators! Training is what you do when you’re trying to get your chihuahua to piss on The Star Ledger.
   
2. While I understand the space constraints required by writing for publication, the author decided not to raise my major objection to BYOD policies – inequity.
3. I never said anything about students becoming familiar with hardware and software. My advocacy of computers in education is based on depth, breadth and fluency.

I truly wish that educators and reporters would pay greater attention to nuance and stop tossing around terms like “training.”

Here are Mr. Paik’s interview questions sent to me and answered on November 27th. My quite precise answers are indented.

Gary,

Just a little bit of background about the policy. The district, in
Bernards Township in New Jersey, is mulling the proposal for its high
school and middle school students. They would use their smart phones,
tablets and laptops for instruction, and those who don’t have those
devices would be asked to share with students who do.

Here are my questions:

1.) The most common concern I hear about is that students would use
their cell phones to goof around (chat, use Facebook) under the guise of
information gathering. Obviously, the issue goes far deeper than that,
but I’m wondering if you agree that this would be an issue. Or are
critics incorrectly calling this the biggest problem when there are many
other issues to be concerned about?

I have worked in schools where every student has a personal laptop computer since 1990. Most recently, I launched 1:1 in a new Korean international school where every student down to first grade has a personal MacBook computer. Theft, breakage, loss have not been a problem anywhere in the world from Harlem to Sydney.

As for goofing around, there is a good deal of anecdotal and scientific evidence that children with computers are not only more social, but their social interactions tend to be work related.

If kids are goofing around or aimlessly surfing the Web, this is a function of an unimaginative curriculum or lackluster teaching.

I view the computer as an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that amplifies human potential. When the goal is not to use the computer to teach what we have always hoped kids would learn, perhaps with greater efficacy or efficiency, but to learn and do things that were impossible without the presence of computing, the work takes on a sense of life and urgency much deeper than Facebook.

It seems odd to me that an affluent district with a long tradition of educational computing, like Bernards Township, would adopt such a policy. Bernards’ students are much more likely to own real portable computers than kids in other districts where the BYOD policy seems to be “Let them eat cellphones!” Even if every kid can afford the quality of personal computer I advocate for learning, BYOD is still terrible public policy.

2.) One of the issues arising out of this is the divide between the
“haves” and the “have-nots.” It would appear that this would set an
uneven playing field for certain students. Could you explain a little
more about the significance of this? Would sharing devices be enough to
solve this problem?

First of all, if schools did not create moronic knee-jerk policies banning things kids own, they wouldn’t need to enact new policies to allow them back on campus. While there might be educational potential in cell-phone use, the real reason not to ban them is that we should not be arbitrarily mean to children. Schools need to do everything possible to lower the level of antagonism between adults and kids. Any idea, passion, question, expertise or gadget a kid brings to school should be viewed as a potential gift. It is incumbent upon teachers and administrators to build upon such gifts. That does not mean that BYOD is sound policy.

One problem with BYOD is that it enshrines inequity while pretending to be democratic. Some students will have much more power and capability when educational policy is left to the accident of family wealth. Not every object requiring electricity is equivalent. Since the computer is today’s primary instrument for intellectual and creative work, every child needs as much power as possible. The cost of providing every American youngster a multimedia laptop computer has never been more than a few percentage points of the annual per pupil spending and that price would fall dramatically if we committed to every child having a portable personal computer as Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon proposed in 1971.

3.) You mentioned the issue of teacher anxiety, and I’ve heard stories
in New Jersey about some teachers who aren’t familiar with smart phones
at all. In your opinion, do those kinds of teachers represent most
educators? Even if they form a minority, how big of a problem would that
be?

Teachers, for a variety of reasons, are among the least comfortable users of computational technology in society. Asking them to teach in an environment when kids have random “devices” only exacerbates the problem and raises their anxiety. This is a bad idea for two reasons. 1) Not all devices are created equally. So, educational activities need to be predicated upon the weakest device in the room. 2) There is a tendency to think of technology in education as “looking stuff up online.” This is the low-hanging fruit and represents the most trivial potential of the computer.

4.) Considering the shrinking budgets many school districts are seeing,
why shouldn’t this policy be considered a good compromise between
educational quality and cost? I’ve heard some say that school-issued
laptops for students typically are not well maintained or cared for.
Wouldn’t students take better care of the equipment knowing it was their
own?

Kids do take better care of their computer, even if it is on loan from the school. However, it is terrible policy to leave 21st Century learning up to the financial liquidity of children. Educators will suffer more dire financial conditions when they endorse the idea that the public need not finance high-quality public educational opportunities for all of its young citizens.

5.) I thought your argument about BYOT policies narrowing the learning
process was intriguing. What are the skills that students would not
develop under this policy?

Science, technology, engineering, mathematics, computer modeling, programming, computer science, music composition, film-making, personal fabrication are but a few of the learning opportunities rendered impossible or very difficult on a cell phone or tablet device – at least for the next couple of years.

Thanks so much for the quick turnaround. I appreciate it.

Eugene

Feel free to contact Mr. Paik and express your concern about this reporting.

Read my original post, igniting this controversy.

In a perfect world, members of the edtech community would know better and stop equating cellphones with computing.

Earlier this week, I had a meeting in Reggio Emilia, Italy where I picked up a pamphlet explaining their awe-inspiring approach to early childhood education. It looks like the sort of document you might see scattered at the DMV or local health clinic, but its contents are profound.

Here is how the infant-toddler centers and preschools of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia define learning:

“Learning as a process of individual and group construction

Each child, like each human being, is an active constructor of knowledge, competencies, and autonomies, by means of original learning processes that take shape with methods and times that are unique and subjective in the relationship with peers, adults and the environment.

The learning process is fostered by strategies of research, comparison of ideas, and co-participation; it makes use of creativity, uncertainty, intuition, curiosity; it is generated in play and in the aesthetic, emotional relational, and spiritual dimensions, which it interweaves and nurtures; it is based on the centrality of motivation and the pleasure of learning.”

Infant-toddler Centers and Preschools Isituzione of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia. (2011). Indications – Preschools and Infant-Toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia. page 11.

Interested in learning more about the Reggio Emilia Approach to education?

• Attend Constructing Modern Knowledge 2012
• Explore these books and/or videos

Casey creates several super creative short films per week using consumer-level cameras and iMovie (samples). His films, entertain, inform, inspire and mobilize.

Today, Casey published a film he made documenting this week’s police raid on Occupy Wall Street. The film is arresting (pun intended), disturbing and deeply moving. Despite its simplicity, the film’s climax will take your breath away. In fact, Casey’s film may document this moment in history the way that The Execution Of Nguyễn Văn Lém mobilized Americans against the War in Vietnam or the photos from the Edmund Pettus Bridge led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Don’t you deserve four days of creative and intellectual stimulation this summer?

Super early-bird registration for Constructing Modern Knowledge 2012 ends December 1st. Register today and save $75 per person.

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually, if you push in, something will pop out the other side – you can change it. You can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing.” (Steve Jobs)

(Photo credit: Johnathan Mak)

I would be most grateful if as many of you as possible would nominate me by November 13, 2011. I am confident that I possess the experience, skill, courage and humor to make you proud while contributing to the progress of an academic field I care so much about. You may read my bio here and watch video of recent presentations here.

Here are some reasons why I, Gary Stager, should be a keynote speaker at ISTE 2012.

1. Three anniversaries:
1. ISTE 2012 will be the 25th NECC/ISTE Conference I have presented at.
2. 2012 marks my 3oth anniversary of working in the field of educational computing.
3. I met my spectacular significant other 20 years ago at NECC (now ISTE).
2. I estimate that I have made more than five dozen presentations at NECC/ISTE conferences over 25 years. No school district or university has ever paid my expenses.
3. I was a signatory to the charter establishing ISTE (see below).
4. The father of educational computing, Dr. Seymour Papert, was never invited to keynote NECC/ISTE. As someone who worked with Dr. Papert for decades and continues to promote his work on a daily basis (constructionism, robotics, Logo programming, school reform, 1:1 computing), I can bring his powerful ideas to a new generation of ISTE attendees.
5. During these dark days for public education, ISTE needs a keynote speaker who can give voice to the concerns of creative educators, regardless of political whim or corporate interests.
6. Too few ISTE keynote speakers have anything to do with the purpose of the conference, to advance learning through the appropriate use of digital technology. I have dedicated my life to using computers and related technology to amplify human potential while making schools more productive contexts for learning. The keynote speaker should galvanize discussion, offer a potential direction for the field and do so in an entertaining fashion. At a time when school budgets are tight and it is difficult for educators to attend conferences, organizers have a sacred obligation to feature speakers who will inspire, challenge and provoke the audience. I promise to do my best to be a great keynote speaker.
7. I have always done anything ISTE ever asked of me from editing The Logo Exchange journal for several years as a volunteer, contributing articles and a willingness to speak anytime, anywhere, in any format.
8. Just a few days before the 2009 NECC conference, a speaker scheduled to be part of the keynote debate canceled. ISTE asked me to fill-in. I did so at my own expense and for no compensation. People often tell me that my participation contributed some of the most memorable ideas in NECC/ISTE keynotes.
9. My keynote address will not be an excerpt from a get-rich quick book or a recitation of a TED talk. It will be original and crafted for the ISTE audience.
10. In addition to teaching children and teachers from pre-k to the doctoral level, I work in classrooms around the world regularly. This allows me to see patterns and gain a unique perspective on the state of educational practice while helping educators keep their eyes on the prize.
11. I am a professional speaker who has keynoted many state conferences, national and international conferences around the world. You may watch some recent talks here.
12. At at a time when many stress the importance of S.T.E.M., I hold a Ph.D. in science and mathematics education, work as a school S.T.E.M. coordinator and can demonstrate innovative S.T.E.M. practices rooted in the best traditions of progressive education.
13. While thought leaders speak of the importance of creativity, I have led well-known efforts to promote creative computing and educational practices in real schools and with real educators.
14. My work with public, private, international, urban, suburban, rural and homeschools is well-chronicled.
15. Too many edtech conferences, including ISTE, feature speakers of varying quality who have have written pop businesses books, been sponsored by vendors or driven a car into a tornado. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a keynote speaker from the community served by the conference?
16. My career has been distinguished by many milestones:
1. Created one of the world’s first computer camp programs for children in 1982
2. Started the New Jersey Educational Computing Conference and chaired the first seven
3. Led professional development at the world’s first laptop schools in 1990
4. Began organizing online collaborative projects in the late 1980s
5. Created one of the world’s first online Masters degree programs in the mid-1990s
6. Formed the Constructivist Consortium to promote creativity, computing and constructivism
7. Published hundreds of articles for District Administration Magazine and other publications
8. Recently launched the first school in the world with a laptop for every child from first grade onward
17. Awards
1. Lifetime achievement award from the NJ Educational Computing Cooperative
2. NSBA - Twenty Leaders to Watch
3. Tech & Learning Magazine – “One of today’s leaders who are changing the landscape of edtech through innovation and leadership.”
4. Was the new media producer for a multicultural album that won a Grammy Award.
18. I am fearless and willing to speak truth to power when the quality of life or welfare of children is at stake.
19. ISTE 2012 is in my home state.
20. Being the keynote speaker at ISTE would be a great honor and a whole lot of fun.

If this appears to be an exercise in vanity, I apologize. I care a great deal about educational computing and remember when conferences like NECC/ISTE organized educators around revolutionary principles that would make the world a better place for children. I fear that we have lost our way.

I take the responsibility of being the ISTE keynote speaker seriously and pledge to do my best to honor the aspirations of the children we serve.

Please nominate me on this web site provided by ISTE.

Ask colleagues to do so as well.

Thank you so very much for your kindness and support!

Click for PDF of iSTE Charter

• For information on bringing Dr. Stager to your conference, school or district, click here.
• For biographical information about Dr. Stager, click here.
• For a list of new keynote topics and workshops by Dr. Stager, click here
• For a list of popular and “retired” keynote topics by Dr. Stager, click here.
• To learn more about the range of educational services offered by Dr. Stager, click here.

“Gary Stager My Hope for School”
Clip from the imagine it!² The Power of Imagination documentary

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Ten Things to Do with a Laptop – Learning and Powerful Ideas
Keynote Address – ITEC Conference – Des Moines, Iowa – October 2011

Children, Computing and Creativity
Address to KERIS – Seoul, South Korea – October 2011

Gary Stager’s 2011 TEDxNYED Talk
NY, NY – March 2011

Gary Stager Discusses 1:1 Computing with the Omar Dengo Foundation
University of Costa Rica – San José, Costa Rica – June 2011

Gary Stager’s Plenary Address at the Constructionism 2010 Conference
Paris, France – August 2010

Gary Stager Excerpts from NECC ’09 Keynote Debate
June 2009 – Washington D.C.
For more information, go to: http://stager.tv/​blog/​?p=493

Dr. Stager interviewed by ICT Qatar
Doha, Qatar – Spring 2010

Learning Adventures: Transforming Real and Virtual Learning Environments
NECC 2009 Spotlight Session – Washington, D.C. – June 2009
More information may be found at http://stager.tv/​blog/​?p=531

© 2009-2011 Gary S. Stager – All Rights Reserved Except TEDxNYED & Imagine IT2 clip owned by producers

I presented in a “classroom of the future” complete with horrific card readers with True/False-type buttons (response systems) affixed to wooden desks. Given the orthodoxy associated with the staid nature of the Korean education system, I decided to go all-in and offer learner-centered progressive alternatives.

I wish they had included the Q&A period following my talk. I hope to get a copy in the future and will share it if I do.

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From: kocw.net/​home/​special/​newSpecial/​forumList.do?kemId=297260

Despite the video quality, this is one of my best recorded presentations in recent years.

Ten Things to Do with a Laptop – Learning and Powerful Ideas
Keynote Address – ITEC Conference – Des Moines, Iowa – October 2011

For more information, check out stager.org/​shortbios.html, stager.tv/​blog or stager.org/​stagerdifference

Constructing Modern Knowledge 2012

Sylvia’s enthusiasm, curiosity, ingenuity and passion have inspired hundreds of thousands of children and adults to tinker with cutting-edge technology. Her videos share wisdom and  whimsical ideas for projects. This pint-sized pedagogue also teachers viewers about art, science, engineering and technology with remarkable clarity.

It will be super awesome to have Super Awesome Sylvia as a co-learner at CMK 2012! I can’t wait to see what we make together!

Links

• Super Awesome Sylvia’s web site
• Gary Stager’s article, Super-Awesome Sylvia in the Not So Awesome Land of Schooling
• Constructing Modern Knowledge’s amazing guest speakers and faculty
• One of Sylvia’s recent instructional videos (below)

Dr. Katz’s expertise in early childhood education learning through project work will make a significant contribution to CMK 2012. Register today and learn with a world-class faculty and amazing guest speakers, award-winning filmmaker Casey Neistat; MIT Media Lab professor and Lilypad Arudino inventor, Dr. Leah Beuchley; Mark Frauenfelder, Editor-in-Chief of Make Magazine, Founder of BoingBoing.net and author of Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World and Super Awesome Sylvia.

About Lilian Katz, Ph.D.
Lilian G. Katz is Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) where she is currently on the staff of the Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting (CEEP). Dr. Katz is a Past President of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and the first President of the Illinois Association for the Education of Young Children. Dr. Katz is currently Editor of the first on-line peer reviewed trilingual early childhood journal, Early Childhood Research & Practice (English, Spanish & Chinese).

Professor Katz is author of more than one hundred publications including articles, chapters, books, pamphlets, etc., about early childhood education, teacher education, child development, and parenting of young children.  For thirteen years she wrote a monthly column for parents of three- and four-year-olds for Parents Magazine.

Dr. Katz was founding editor of the Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and served as its Editor-in-Chief during its first six years.  Her most recent book (co-authored with J. H. Helm) is Young Investigators: The Project Approach in the Early Years.  Her book titled Talks with Teachers of Young Children (1995) is a collection of her best known early essays and several more recent ones. In 2000 she published the second edition of Engaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach, co-authored with S. C. Chard. It has been translated into several languages, as have many of her other works.

Dr. Katz has lectured in all 50 US states and in 55 other countries. She has held visiting posts at universities in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, India, Israel, the West Indies (Barbados campus) and many parts of the USA.  Dr. Katz is the recipient of many honors, including two Fulbright Awards (India & New Zealand), an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (DLitt.) from Whittier College, Whittier, California and an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Goteborg in Sweden. In 1997 she served as Nehru Professor at the University of Baroda in India.

Professor Katz, was born and raised in England and became a US citizen in 1953. She received her B.A. degree cum laude from San Francisco State University (1964) and her Ph.D. in Psychological Studies & Education from Stanford University in 1968. She and her late husband Boris Katz have three grown children, five grandsons and one granddaughter.