On technological determinism and classrooms
At the same time that I was complaining about technological determinism and law(non)making in my previous entry, The Conversation published an article from Joanne Orlando that I at first took to be a quite different form of technological determinism. Orlando disputes the importance of remembering information in the classroom (though it isn't clear to me who actually claims that it is the high point of learning), and along the way claims that electronic devices can be just as useful, if not more so, than handwriting in classrooms.
According to Orlando, a character who records photos, video and audio of a presentation "can use their digital notes to create something new that builds on the topic", while another character who makes handwritten notes finds this "not so easy". For Orlando, studies showing that handwritten notes provide better recall are beside the point: the character with the recording devices can achieve the same or better by building something out of the recordings.
Orlando doesn't say much about what ensures that the device-wielding character actually builds on the topic rather than simply leaves the recordings where they lie, and doesn't explain at all what stops the pen-wielding character from also building on the topic. I therefore took Orlando to be claiming that the mere availability of electronic recording devices led to intelligent processing and re-combination of recordings, as might be claimed by an enthusiastic proponent of mash-ups and re-mixes.
In writing a response to the article, and re-reading Orlando's article several times in the process, I realised two things. Firstly, Orlando probably didn't mean to claim that re-mixes and mash-ups are necessarily intelligent or useful, only that is possible for them to be. This point, however, is obscured by conflating the actions of memorisation and of constructing new knowledge. Coming to this understanding through the process of writing a blog entry illustrates exactly what Orlando wants to happen, but might not have happened had I simply left Orlando's article on its web site.
Orlando acknowledges that recall of a certain amount of basic information is, in fact, necessary for mastery of a topic as well as day-to-day business. Having a dictionary of French in one's pocket, for example, does not make one a fluent speaker of French, no matter how good one is at looking up words. For memorising information of this sort, writing it out it is surely better than merely making an electronic recording, as the studies cited in Orlando's article say.
Nonetheless, Orlando is correct to say that electronic recordings can be of use in constructing new knowledge — I used The Conversation's web site rather than a handwritten copy of Orlando's article in developing this very blog entry — and that memorisation of useful facts may happen along the way. My experience matches that of Cat Brown, however, whose comment points out that many students' use of electronic material is far from the ideal that Orlando imagines, being to "simply regurgitate chunks of undigested facts that google has delivered to their computers". (No doubt students can write out similarly undigested facts with a pen, though maybe they'd at least remember some of them.)
Teachers with experiences like Cat Brown's and mine may be tempted to subscribe to a form of technological determinism that is opposite to the one that I initially read into Orlando's article: electronic devices lead to unthinking reproduction of search engine results. I now suppose that Orlando meant to critique exactly this view. The real question is not whether pens or cameras and microphones result in better learning, but how do teachers get their students to use their tools intelligently?
