The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made technology in the schools one of its primary causes. Public school districts across the nation are looking for money to ensure that their students are computer-literate enough for a high-tech era. It’s a given that kids should know how to navigate the computer world. But what does teaching with computers add to education?

A number of child development education experts say computers should not be introduced into classrooms until at least middle school. They say that computers download information but don’t teach children how to think. That hasn’t stopped the push to put more technology into American classrooms nor the rush to create computer programs or games marketed as educational tools. …

Marcie Sillman: Patricia Ebrey, I understand that you prepared an online viewbook and incorporated it into your Chinese history courses at the University of Washington. Can you tell us about that?

Patricia Ebrey: So many things that are important about China (especially anything having to do with technology, art, and so on) are better conveyed visually than through words. The Internet gave me the opportunity to incorporate visual materials as well – to deal with topics like the visual side of Buddhism, for instance, not just the textual side.

Sillman: So you gathered photographs, videos? What kinds of things?

Ebrey: It was mostly collections of colored images that we scanned in to make a course book online. We created a great deal of material. I had a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, and graduate students who helped me in the summer. So we put in lots of hours of creating our own material for the class. This would not just be for the University of Washington—we were trying to make a site that would be available across the country.

Sillman: So how is that different from a book of photographs, paintings, or video documentaries?

Ebrey:  The cost of a book of colored pictures is much too high to use in classes. We would have needed 5 or 6 of them. The students wouldn’t be able to buy them. The other thing about it is you can go in a variety of different directions. You can add new material, restructure it in different ways, which you can’t do with books. Textbooks often include many black and white illustrations, but not the range of things you can do on the Internet.

Sillman: How long did it take to put this visual sourcebook together?

Ebrey: Well, I had done a little bit on my own one summer with one graduate student helping me, and then I got a grant from NEH for two and a half years. Mostly we worked in the summers, in terms of putting things together. During the year, I tried it out in different classes.

Sillman: Judy Lightfoot, how do you use the Internet to teach English?

Judy Lightfoot: Well … judiciously. Not all the time. I was interested in talking with Pat before the program began about the fact that she doesn’t bookmark sites on the Internet for students to visit; she actually scans in the images. The Internet itself is not really a very good resource for education in English, either. Certain archive sites are valuable – museum sites, archived Civil War photography at the Smithsonian, photos of mid-19th-century life that are useful for students to use in conjunction with literature. But by and large the Internet isn’t very helpful, and this is not just because free searches don’t tend to turn up good sites. It’s because even when students are working with good sites the material tends to be orchestrated in ways that don’t help them be more thoughtful.

Sillman: But you did use the Web for a poetry project.

Lightfoot: I did. This was my grand experiment this year, one that was successful enough that the Poet Laureate of the United States linked it to the Favorite Poem website. I’m very pleased about that and so are my students. In 10th grade, normally we have a unit of between 3 and 6 weeks on studying poetry. And it’s hard to find an anthology that really contains the kind of poetry that will appeal to all students – enough of a range, in other words, that isn’t orchestrated to death with all kinds of addenda, readymade questions the editors have put in, that kind of textbook apparatus. Also, students tend to look on poetry as an academic subject. When they get in contact with it, it’s generally in school. So what used the Internet for was to help them see how many poems are out there that they could find by going to sites I had bookmarked for them, and also to see that poetry is an ongoing, living enterprise with a lot of really enthusiastic living people who are doing all kinds of things with it, including performance poetry. Students put together their own anthologies of e-poems, wrote their own introductions, and we posted each one on the Web. Now, I hope, students all over the world are reading the selections of poetry by my 10th-graders.

Sillman: So you are working mostly with high school kids – who all have daily exposure to computers at home.

Lightfoot: Yes.

Sillman: So did they want to use the Internet for school? Is that something they led you on?

Lightfoot: No, they didn’t lead me, but they do get engaged with the screen. The colors, the constant possibility of manipulating images – they’ll get quite involved with this to the point where they’re irritated by interruptions. By the way, the celebrated notion that students collaborate around technology is nearly always students talking about what isn’t working – why they can’t get to this site, why that button doesn’t work.

Sillman: They talk about the technology…

Lightfoot: …not about the subject matter. Of course a teacher can set things up so that other kinds of conversations happen. But this is the teacher, not the machine, making this happen. What tends to engage them is the machinery, not the thinking.

Sillman: Thirty-three years you spent teaching English. And Pat Ebrey, how long have you been in academia?

Ebrey: Twenty-seven years.

Sillman: So it’s fair to assume neither of you had computers in your school classrooms. How much training did you have to get, how much tech help did you need to use them in teaching?

Ebrey: I had a little help. Largely it was step by step – you discover that wordprocessing is better than typing, then find that e-mail is awfully convenient,  then … I took a 2-hour workshop on how to make a web page, but from there on I largely used the “help” menu and occasionally asked somebody else for assistance. The graduate students who worked with me did have people who could teach them about scanning, but a lot of that I just sort of figured out. I would say that would be typical. Faculty in their fifties have not resisted technology.

Sillman: I was wondering how much it added to your work. From my own experience, the extra help of technology often requires extra work, especially as it changes – of getting up to speed with either new programs or just new ways of organizing information. I would imagine, Judy Lightfoot, that you had books when you first started teaching—textbooks …?

Lightfoot: …and handouts …

Sillman: …things you prepared in a certain way. The random nature of information online requires you to think about things in a different way or at least might require initially more time to organize the information you’re going to present to students?

Lightfoot: A tremendous amount of work has to go into it. One of the ironies is that textbooks are made by companies with highly trained professionals who put materials together for you, sigh of relief, so that you can then help students understand them, think about them, ask questions about them. Admittedly, not always are they the exact source one might want, but by and large, there are a lot of materials out there—books—that are extremely useful to use because someone else has done the editing. What’s happening now is that on top of all the other things a teacher is doing, he or she has to collect, edit, organize, orchestrate the things the students are going to use, on top of all the things they already do. And a teacher’s time is really tightly scheduled, the days are tightly choreographed, it’s hard to fit it in. Administrators and the public get impatient when teachers say that, but no one who hasn’t actually been a classroom teacher for a long time and worked with kids and tried to make sure every individual in his or her classroom is actually connecting with this material and looking at it in the best way realizes that it takes a lot of thought. It’s not done mechanically.

Sillman: Are there computers with Internet access in all the classrooms at Lakeside?

Lightfoot: No, there aren’t. I appreciate that Lakeside has taken a thoughtful, deliberate, measured approach to incorporating technology, when a lot of local schools were jumping in, making sure all students were carrying around laptops, or making sure that all classrooms were wired. We have task forces and committees trying to figure all this out. We have computer labs, every classroom is now hot-wired, but we would not call ourselves a school of computer-centered instruction, though they’re certainly more often used in math & science than in the humanities.

Sillman: Was the school intentional about being a non-computer-centered place?

Lightfoot: Well, it’s an ongoing process, you see. There are going to be some big decisions made next year, because last year was the first year of a laptop pilot in the 7th grade, that was just extended to 8th grade. It feels as if the camel has his nose under the tent flap, and the camel may come all the way in. One of the things that’s really clear to me as I talk to people about this, and read, is that there’s too little critical thinking being done about technology. Certainly technology is useful, but it’s useful up to a point, for certain things, under certain circumstances, for certain lengths of time. The thinking that asks, what do we give up in order to get this, what are the benefits and drawbacks, the thinking that will weigh the advantages and disadvantages – I would like to see more of this happening.

When you say that teachers have to spend more time – have to add on time in order to do technology? We don’t add things on – there’s no room. We do something instead of something else. So what the public and administrators and enthusiasts about technology need to ask is, “What are teachers going to have to give up, what are our students going to lose in order to gain this?” There may be some things that are gained, and some things that are worth losing, but let’s be real specific about that in each case. The web poetry project for instance: the time the kids spent on creating those poetry e-books achieved certain purposes. What we did not do was write poetry – that’s infallibly a way of helping students understand poetry, from the inside out. We also did about half as much as normally of reading individual poems, reading them 16 times, turning them upside down, memorizing and performing them. So in order to achieve the kind of breadth of coverage, which is of value, and a lively sense on the students’ part of the enterprise of poetry out there, which is of value, we gave up other things of value. I wish we had more discussions of this kind of thing as we talk about technology in education.

Sillman: I imagine this is different at the secondary school level and the college level. Patricia Ebrey, I understand that you solicited feedback from your students about the viewbook you assigned in your classes.

Ebrey: I didn’t just assign the viewbook. I assigned the students to newsgroups for which they had to discuss the images, write responses to the group, read other people’s responses, and respond to those. The idea was to try to develop critical looking, in a sense treating the material the way you’d treat verbal texts. There were real pedagogical goals here, to make people think about what it is they’re looking at. It also made them do a large amount of writing, which is good. Usually you tend to think that writing time is lost when students use online sources, but there are ways of getting them to do more writing rather than less.

Sillman: At the college level, where all the students are adept at computers, how much does their use of computers drive a particular class. Is it because you could provide this extra visual material, or is it because there’s a demand, maybe an unspoken demand to have this as a teaching tool?

Ebrey: I don’t think there’s necessarily a demand. Students just take it as natural or normal these days, so that it’s pretty easy to get them on the Internet. Maybe 10% of incoming students need a fair amount of extra assistance to get over the initial burdens, and the rest of the students are used to it.

But an issue came up earlier that seems worth bringing up. If you compare the Internet to other means – lower-level technology such as video – and the issue of teachers’ time, certainly video is by far the easiest thing for a teacher. You just put it in and the next hour or half hour is taken up. But for the students, it’s very passive. They just sit there and someone else has digested it for them. You don’t usually stop the film and ask, “What did you think of that? Why did they pick that image?” or anything of that sort. Slides are fine at the college level where you have a big slide library, but even there, it can take you several hours to prep an hour-long slide lecture. And at the high school level they don’t have big slide libraries. Part of our justification for what we were doing — we kept saying we’re trying to make it easier for teachers. If we’ve designed something with real pedagogical goals in mind, we’ve saved teachers all that work, especially those who might have had to spend hours putting together a slide lecture. We’ve done that in a way that won’t be so passive for students.

Sillman: So in a sense it’s performing some of the function of the textbook editor.

Ebrey: Yes, we see ourselves as doing an online textbook.

Lightfoot: Which, then, remains available and usable over and over again, you’re saying. I think there are instances of “best practices” in the field – best practices in English, best practices in history—of which this would be one. So the question is for me, “What are the 12 best practices of using technology in English” that a teacher can use, instead of everybody using Power Point, which is what’s happening now in the 7th-grade laptop pilot—every teacher using it and feeling quite relieved that they can say they use technology but don’t have to give up so much of what else they do. It’s a kind of fall-back position that isn’t a very healthy one.

Sillman: Judy Lightfoot, I wanted to go back to something else you said, regarding people not taking time enough to think about the use of computers in classrooms. The Web crashed into us in the last decade, and there’s exponential growth in access and ability to surf. It was like a miraculous toy that dazzled people to the point where they thought, especially at the elementary levels, into thinking we have to provide this. Now some parents as well as educators are stepping back and saying, wait a minute, everybody’s plugged in, but why or how? They haven’t asked the 5 journalistic questions.

Lightfoot: Which are really important questions to ask.

Sillman: So of your colleagues do you think teachers are more skeptical of this than the parents and the students?

Lightfoot: I’m afraid skepticism on the part of teachers often gets characterized as fuddyduddyism, or Ludditism, or technophobia. It’s not a healthy position to be in at a school and even be taking a critical position. Even if you have a critical enthusiasm for technology, people assume that you don’t like it, you won’t use it. But I’d say that many teachers are enthusiastic about some of the features of technology. Many teachers are also – not to divide them into groups, because I don’t think the division is as clean as some people seem to make it when they write about it – some people never want to give up that teacher-student-material triangle, by means of which the teacher makes human meaning come into the student’s engagement with the material. A machine cannot do that. And when machines become the center of instruction as opposed to that triangle, or become introduced into that triangle, it’s interesting how that relationship gets changed.

Sillman: On the university level, particularly here in Washington state, Pat Ebrey, we’re hearing the governor and the president of the University of Washington talk about distance learning a lot. I don’t hear that that’s what you’re doing in your class; it sounds as if there’s lots of interaction with students in your class. Distance learning sounds like a whole different approach to education.

Ebrey: I think it’s very, very different, and I will admit myself that I’m much more optimistic about using technology to improve on-campus instruction – ways we can enrich the experience, ways we can do more in classes. For example, reaching different kinds of students—I often found that students who wouldn’t discuss orally in a discussion section would discuss on line, so tech helps you get people to interact in new ways.

But at least through college age—I’m not talking about 40-year-olds, but about 18-through-20-year-olds—the moral presence of the teacher is enormously important. I even know this from the experience of my own son, who just graduated from college. One summer in high school he took a course in philosophy at the local community college. He was tremendously excited and impressed. The next summer he took an online course in calculus and he gave up after 2 weeks. The sense of having the teacher there, caring whether you learn this, noticing whether you’re there—all of these things make a big difference. My sense of this distance learning—there can be very special cases, there can be a small number of highly motivated people, but 90% of students would do much better off with face-to-face instruction. Language instruction is a good case. 20 and 30 years ago, people thought that once they got really good tapes, really good language labs, really good computer programs, they wouldn’t need this swarm of foreign TAs to be the drill instructors. It simply didn’t work. A live teacher makes everything work much better.

Sillman: Judy Lightfoot, I imagine you agree there.

Lightfoot: I do. The advent of television is another one of those educational Utopia memories. People were saying that television was going to revolutionize instruction because we wouldn’t need teachers any more, we could put TV sets in classrooms, and obviously that didn’t happen.

Caller #1, Steve: I’m an educator, and in my experience kids understand the technology better than teachers, in many cases. It’s part of their culture, and it’s a reality they’re growing up with. They’re very comfortable with it. As far as being able to evaluate information, a lot of kids have their own web pages and understand that anyone can post something on the Internet, that it’s very easy to do. They understand that it’s not necessarily authoritative just because it’s on the Web. I think it’s adults that have problems with technology – teachers and administrators in particular. How can we get them to accept the technological infrastructure that taxpayer money is building? Schools are in some cases being dragged kicking and screaming into being on line. How do we get teachers and administrators to want to utilize technology? Because the kids are there.

Sillman: How do you use computers with students? What age group do you teach?

Steve: I’ve worked with students and teachers, and I’ve worked with elementary right up through high school students. I’ve taught kids to work with digital media.

Sillman: So you’re teaching the technology.

Steve: I’ve also taught literature classes in high school and used some of the same methods talked about on this program. I’ve also done some interactive text publishing, and I agree that this is better than publishing a book because information changes, information is obsolete in a year. With digital publishing you can change that information easily and cheaply.

Sillman: Judy Lightfoot, what about teachers being dragged kicking and screaming into using technology – Steve’s words.

Lightfoot: That’s the public image, I think, that has gotten created.

Sillman: Technology is, as he says, part of the culture of kids growing up in America now. The question you were posing was how do you use or harness that culture in a way that is a positive educational experience. Are younger teachers more gung-ho about using computers in their classrooms?

Lightfoot: The most gung-ho teachers I know are my age, so that doesn’t seem to have much to do with the choice. What teachers and everyone need is a sense – I’ll just repeat myself – a sense of what is given up when a certain thing is gained. When I was observing the 7th-grade laptop pilot, the kids were engaged, on task, they tend not to be distracted by other things – there’s something very gripping and intriguing about what’s going on onscreen. Teachers all agree that kids in this project are better organized, that their work is neater, that they can keep track of things more easily. I would still ask, when those are the advantages achieved, is something given up in the process? If emphasis is on neatness and organization, how do you teach students about the value of the intellectual muddle, how do you teach students about the importance of provisional standpoints instead of making up their minds like a bed that’s never going to get slept in again? There are values to writing extremely bold and messy rough drafts. At this point now, and not just because of computers, in my 11th-12th-grade classes, I have to teach my students how to undo their process so that they’re not rushing to a final product so quickly, in order to deepen their thinking.

Sillman: Pat Ebrey, you had some comments as well.

Ebrey: On the issue of what you give up, and how things change. There’s another level at the university that has changed a lot. Most people now will put their syllabus on the web. This seems to me very easy, and highly convenient – you don’t have to hand out extra copies, just tell people to download what they need. But it keeps escalating, where then people say, put up your overhead outlines on the Web, put up your lecture notes on the Web, and as a result students take many fewer notes in lectures than they used to. The old method of taking lecture notes and maybe even reading the textbook twice, or at least looking back at what you’d underlined, had its own value for learning. A lot of people think, well, the information is up on the Web, I don’t really have to READ that carefully. So I’m not really sure that those things professors have slowly done to accommodate students by putting course materials on the Web in response to student demand—I’m not sure that anyone would find from a survey of how much they learned in a class that they learned more. They’ve found it a little easier, but I’m not sure you could say they’ve learned more.

Caller #2, George: In business, we’re always trying to keep up and compete and get ahead of one another, and so this constant advancement and scheduled obsolescence of technology and software in particular makes some sense. We all race to get ahead of competitors and constantly renew and replace old technology. In schools, every year you get a new crop of children entering first grade who don’t read, have to learn mathematics and writing, year after year, fairly much the same. In that kind of environment, the sort of consumer or business technology that we’re trying to transport into education doesn’t make nearly as much sense. You live in a more steady-state universe of needs than business does. You don’t need to constantly renew and replace technology and software. Children in elementary school, by the time they’re 18 technology will be so different that much of what they learn in terms of skills in dealing with today’s applications won’t mean much in the business universe.

Sillman: When people talk about the digital divide, about kids having no exposure to how computers work, or with doing websites with HTML, they’re not talking about how and what these kids are learning but about whether they’re ready to have jobs, which is a different kind of education from what you both are talking about, in the humanities.

Lightfoot: A CEO of a major corporation wrote an article that was published online—I do a lot of research online—saying that managers can teach new employees the things they need to learn about technology in anywhere between 2 weeks to 3 months. They cannot teach their employees, in the space of 2 weeks to 3 months, how to think, how to read, critique, how to communicate. Those are things that take years and years to develop. And as our caller just said, there are developmental levels of learning that are wired into the brains and bodies of children, which will not change, even if our technological environment changes. The 2 things that research in education have proven over and over again to make a difference in the learning of children elementary school through college are time on task – do they spend enough time at it, but not too much, and gauging that is always a bit of an art—and class size—is there enough time for teachers to interact with the students. These two things have been shown to improve education, but there’s no evidence that technology itself helps learning except in particular cases.

Sillman: Patricia Ebrey, is the University of Washington a place for job training or a liberal arts education? I’m sure the U.W. still has humanities requirements. The idea of a liberal arts education was that you studied philosophy, the great classics of literature, and history – and then you might study math and science as well, so that you were enveloped in a knowledge that allowed you to do certain things. Or you could go on to get training in medicine or engineering, a profession that is more technical. Have we gotten our lines crossed? We’re using technology to teach humanities…

Ebrey: But I think that’s fine! After all, we’ve all switched to writing with word processors. No one wants to do what I had to do with my dissertation – type, cut, paste, run down to the copy shop, edit and make another clean copy. The whole process of writing has changed now that we can move things around easily. There’s other aspects of, say, intelligent conversation, which can be done online and can be often more thoughtful and more interesting than a strictly oral conversation. But it doesn’t mean we should stop talking to each other. And certainly it doesn’t mean we should stop reading books.

Sillman: About editing, and the whole idea of the value of a messy rough draft? Now we have a draft that we play with on our computer screen.

Lightfoot: It means that students can’t doodle, can’t draw or write in the margins when they read or write. It’s interesting how for some students it’s absolutely essential. In this respect, then, the idea that students will do all of their work on computers contradicts recent research into learning styles that says kids learn in different ways – some kids are visual learners, this or that kind of learner. Students operate in different ways when interacting with a page, whether reading it or writing it. I also wanted to say that some writers really do find it essential to write in soft pencil on a yellow legal pads – some poets can never put away the pencil. My son, who is not a poet, who is in fact a physics student, does all of his writing that way. He says computers really get in his way when he writes, he uses them once in a while for other things. but writes things out by hand.

Sillman: There are some things satisfying about a pen and a piece of paper.

Ebrey: Computers have generated more paper. Many people can’t revise except on the paper printout, so now they have 10 printouts where before they might have used two. This has not saved forests.

Caller #3, Amy: I hope I don’t embarrass Judy, but I’m a former student of hers and am thrilled every time I hear her, anywhere (I’ve heard her read her poetry and other things). My experience with Judy and being at Lakeside was – I took a class with her called Dreams and Literature, and we studied Lawrence, and read books like Their Eyes Were Watching God. And there was just 13 young people in the room, and it changed my life. It was a profound experience, and talking about technology seems so superfluous to the point. It’s important to remember that they’re just tools for editing and research, but really, education is really about bringing new ideas to young people. What happens in the right atmosphere with the right material is that you change their lives.

Sillman: Amy, how old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?

Amy: I’m 29.

Sillman: So when you were in high school, at Lakeside with Judy Lightfoot, were you computer literate by then?

Amy: Oh, yes. In fact, I remember in the 5th or 6th grade in middle school we had computers and were learning Basic. We had just gotten the computer lab in my freshman year of high school, lots of Macs and early Word programs.

Sillman: It’s hard for you to know this, but do you think you’d feel differently now, coming in to school as proficient as kids are now, already setting up web pages, etc.? Do you think you’d feel differently about, at least, learning literature?

Amy: No. Again, making a web page is great, but so what? Yes, they’re useful. I use the Internet every day, it’s great tool. But nothing, nothing, nothing can compare to young people exploring ideas. A computer can’t add anything to that. A computer can add facts and a computer can give children and young adults in remote areas access to information and ideas they wouldn’t otherwise get. But to change the human being, which I think is the point of life, really, to evolve—this only happens with interactions between people. I feel so strongly about this. Thanks for letting me talk.

Lightfoot: Thank you, Amy, for calling in.

Sillman: Well, that’s a testament, that somebody took a class of yours and it profoundly changed her life. I suppose that’s what you as a teacher of poetry and literature and English want to do.

Lightfoot: It is, yes, what I want to do. But you can’t set out to change people’s lives directly. It happens if things go well.

Ebrey: And it’s hard to imagine that happening in a correspondence course.

Lightfoot: Yes. Today, even more than when Amy was a student at Lakeside, kids have had much more experience with videos and computers, etc., than they have with the written word, with conversation with adults, or reading books. And they come to school deeply hungry for that – some of them don’t know it, but they are. And in an environment where efficiency, productivity, neatness, organization tend to be the watchwords—and progress and success—students are also impatient when a teacher says “slow down and think about this again.” So in order to have students do some of the really hard things I have to have them do—any change, any growth involves letting something go, having something come undone, and none of us wants to feel helpless, we all want to feel, you know, in control and in charge and competent and so forth, so that to learn anything feels very risky at a certain level—in order to teach these students I need to have very firm and trustful, mutually trustful working relationships with each of them. Computers do not help with that. Computers in fact can get in the way of that. So we need to keep asking the question, and I need to keep asking the question, “Where do I want to judiciously use this, not to take over my teaching but enhance it.”

Sillman: As Judy Lightfoot was talking about literature, I was thinking about history, and the fact that during the Tiananmen Square uprising and the subsequent violence, a lot of the information that came from dissidents in the People’s Republic of China came via Internet. There were people online, sending stuff out.

Ebrey: Actually, I think in 1989, it was more the fax. The fax was really the big thing – fax machines had gotten all over China, and people were faxing things in. Now of course if it were today, it would be the Internet

Sillman: Technology has allowed, at least in students taking courses in contemporary China, access to people we had no access to at all before, when I was studying China.

Ebrey: Right, and you can even send things in Chinese, in virtually all languages. All sorts of messages can go over the Internet in different languages. You can communicate with people all over the world. It’s really amazing.

Sillman: So if you were a student interested in what was happening in China beyond the visual sourcebook you provide, they can actually have that communication. The technology would be an enhanced tool to connect with people one-on-one.

Ebrey: Students who study abroad can keep up with people after they come back. You can find all sorts of information today. The Chinese government isn’t the best in terms of having all sorts of sites out there. If you were talking about a country in Europe, that’s where people would be able to become fully absorbed in the country, via the Internet.

Sillman: And also, just from our work in radio, you can send audio as well as visuals, very quickly.

Ebrey: I think the international side of this is just astounding. Just in my professional life, you can communicate with colleagues abroad, check what books are in the libraries abroad, It’s really changed things.

Sillman: So in that sense, for some of the disciplines, particularly in higher education, this would give students a concrete sense of people far away somewhere. These are people with names and this is what they do for a living, and this is how they live. And here they are communicating with us.

Ebrey: In the same way, of course, television has already done. The rest of the world seems much more a part of our lives than when I was a child.

Sillman: What television doesn’t do is let you communicate with an individual, of course. It’s broadcasting and not one-on-one interaction.

Ebrey: Yes.

Caller #4, Lou: I built my first microcomputer in 1967 and got my first modem in 1973. I was one of the students who went to Al Gore in 1977 to get money to build the academic defense information network. I am sitting at a bench with 3 computers on it, one of which is tied up doing structural analysis. Now having said that, computers in the classroom are a major waste. My eldest daughter graduated from high school a year ago, my youngest will graduate in 2 years, and I had to fight to keep my daughters from using calculators to do arithmetic in grade school. The only kids who I see today who can do algebra, simple basic algebra in high school, are ones whose parents fought the use of calculators in grade school. What I see very clearly in my daughters’ peers is that their idea of research is to go on the Net and cut and paste information into a document and call it a research paper. There is no actual thought or organization to it, and quite frankly most of the kids I see in junior high and high school to day cannot write a paragraph. Nothing on the Internet can change that.

Sillman: It is true, in that sense, that the role of the teacher—Judy’s argument is that something has to go—but there has to be that sense transmitted to students that they have to approach what they find there critically.

Lightfoot: I’m sure that if we had someone on the panel who is an uncritical enthusiast and who would like everything in education or nearly everything in the classroom done on the computer would rightly say that teachers who use the technology well will do better than teachers who don’t. But that’s circular reasoning, a redundancy rather than a logical statement. The fact is this: the time it takes to do something right is useful time. The time it takes to deal with the technical difficulties that crop up is not useful time, but every computer class that I have watched or taught has had difficulties that interfere with learning and take up time that would otherwise be used more productively. This is not to say that computers aren’t useful in education. They are. I really want to convey a balanced middle position about this. But we have to talk about tradeoffs, and there’s not enough of that kind of talk going on.