A few weeks ago I attended an HP Worldwide Summit on Educational Technology (see my earlier post). It was a very interesting experience. We debated the use of computers in the classroom, how technology changes how our students learn and many other interesting topics. We listened to a number of PowerPoint presentations by very successful educators. Yet, I cannot refrain from describing my observations here as what I saw during this conference has been bothering me for a long time.

1) There is a limit to how many PowerPoint presentations one can listen to – even very good ones. [Actually, the majority of the presentations I have listened in my almost 15 years of attending conferences WERE NOT GOOD, yet most of the presenters assume that they know how to do a good presentation… ] So at the Summit, we had times where we would have 3-4 presenters doing 30-40 minute PPT in a row. I found myself listening more or less to the first and kind of to the second one and then just thinking how many more slides I will be listening to. As much as many of these people are great, I could not just listen to a two-hour lecture on the importance of engagement or interactive use of technology or some other things. I would rather have some small group activity or something active I could participate in. Moreover, how much did I learn and got out of it? Not very much. General talks are good for inspiration but THEY ARE NOT GOOD for helping people learn specific skills… and I am supposed to be an experienced learner! I cannot imagine how tough it is for our students to listen to endless PPT lectures! Now let us get to our classrooms – high school or college ones. Our students sometimes are forced to listen to 4-5 hours of our lecturing a day and most of them are just dense PPT slides going very fast one after the other. How much do you think they get out of it? Does it surprise you that lectures often do not work for teaching specific skills?… I think every teacher at a university or a college should be put in a situation where he or she should listen to 4-5 hours of lectures in one day and then asked to write a test, so she or he can see how little they really learned.

2) During the talks many of the attendees brought their HP tablets with them. As I was sitting at the back, I was able to see that most of the attendees were using the tablets to… GO ON FACEBOOK, READ OR WRITE E-MAIL, CHECK OTHER UNRELATED TO THE CONFERENCE SITES. So if we cannot refrain from doing it, why would our students be any different? I was really surprised to see how it is now part of the culture to be on Facebook or My Space or some other social network day and night even when we were invited to have an opportunity to have a conversation with our colleagues from all over the world. I also think people today have a very misleading feeling that they can multitask and do a high quality work at each task. For very few of us this might be true, but for the majority of us, it isn’t. This is just not true. Think why eventually talking on the phone while driving was prohibited in many countries. This brings me to a question regarding allowing our students to use computers in class. I think we have to have a purpose for it. If we just allow the students to bring laptops and they have no reason to use them, the tablets will be just a distraction. The same way, when I was a student, an interesting book unrelated to school was a distraction. So this bring me back to technology. Technology is like a hammer. It can be used to build something and it could be used to break it. The tool by itself is just a tool but the result of using the tool will depend on the skill of its user. So the debate about IF TECHNOLOGY IS GOOD OR BAD in my view is meaningless. We should discuss how we use it to constructively and how we prepare our teachers to incorporate it in a meaningful way in their lessons. Then the possibilities of technology will be unlimited.

Posted: 03|4|10 at 7:14 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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