Let’s Think Through the Great Digital Rush
From Richard C. Larson
Technology and teaching and learning, the times are a changing! Recently on the BLOSSOMS Twitter site, I tweeted this Blog from Huffington Post: Technology Education for Students Is Essential in Creating a Future STEM Workforce, and It Starts With Educating Teachers, by Felix W. Ortiz III. This Tweet was re-Tweeted and “favored” by more people than any other Tweet I have ever posted. So, I thought it might be time for some reflection on the message.

The point of the blog was that teachers, at least half in their mid-40’s and older, were not raised and trained in the digital age now so familiar to our young people. So that bringing technology into the classroom must start with bringing our teachers, usually decades older than their tech-savvy students, into the digital age – to train them before trying out all sorts of fancy digital gadgets in the classroom and before offering computer coding or programming lessons.

First, let me say I agree with the general argument. But I have hesitation in the implied context of the argument. First, it is not true that going digital is all good and not doing so is all bad. Research and experience have shown that overreliance on digital tools can remove common sense reasoning and knowledge that we all must have. Example: How many students today have an intuitive feel for order of magnitude? Can they catch decimal point mistakes as they use a calculator or similar device? My experience has often been “No.” And that includes not only students (yes, even MIT students!), but also young physician specialists who almost overdosed one of my children due to lack of intuition for quantity of an anesthetic in a syringe. We have recently posted a BLOSSOMS lesson that requires students to use pencil and paper (no calculators!) to estimate order of magnitudes. (How Big Is a Mole? Do We Really Comprehend Avogadro’s Number?) This is a skill that must be retained, not relegated to digital devices whose answers are only as accurate as the finger strokes inputting data. Another example: How many young people can read maps? I mean old-fashioned paper maps. They often rely on Google or equivalent digital directions and have no idea how to find ‘south’ in a strange place on a sunny day. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, research has shown that doing digital much of the time can rewire the brain. Now activities are often multi-tasked and usually of short duration. The ability and willingness to concentrate long and hard, like a laser beam, on one difficult topic is a needed life skill that may be slowly vanishing.

One last thought: In high school and in college, students have many teachers, one for each subject taught. No one would expect a physics teacher to teach biology. Or a math teacher to teach chemistry. So, why should we expect any k-12 teacher necessarily to be fluent in computer programming? If ‘coding’ is now thought to be a necessary skill in primary and secondary education (and I believe it is, to develop algorithmic thinking), why not have coding/computer-programming specialists come into the classroom to offer that teaching module? A special topic taught by specialists, even in elementary school. In k-12 we do that routinely for teaching musical instruments and sports skills, so why not computer programming?

Richard Larson is the Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He is also the Director of MIT LINC and the Principal Investigator of MIT BLOSSOMS.

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