Blandin on Broadband

A few people have been sending me links to a recent article in the NY Time: Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality. Here’s an excerpt that I think reflects the article as a whole…

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

The article specifically draws from three research studies:

• Home Computer Use and the Development of Human Capital: Ofer Malamud at the University of Chicago and Cristian Pop-Eleches at Columbia University studied low-incomes families in Romania.
• Scaling the Digital Divide: Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University follow the arrival of broadband in North Caroline between 200 and 2005.
• Evaluation of the Texas Technology Immersion Pilot: where authors report on a project in Texas that spent $20 million in federal money on laptops distributed to 21 middle schools whose students were permitted to take the machines home.

In short the reports found that students grades declined in every area except computer use. Hmmm. The article was countered recently by folks at Computers for Youth and in email exchange among BTOP recipients a few other counter-studies were mentioned (like the following, not necessarily these reports):

• The Internet and Education: Pew surveys teens and parents, most report using computers/Internet for homework. Only 6 percent of parents think Internet has been harmful to their kids. (The report does not focus on income differentials.)
• Really Good News About Your Children’s Video Games: Mark Prensky, a proponent of gaming and computers in schools talk about how video games are not the enemy, but the best opportunity we have to engage our kids in real learning.

I was tempted to ask folks to chime in to say how they feel. Are computers a help or hindrance (still would be happy to hear it)? But a colleague at Blandin Foundation (Mary Magnuson) had a better approach…

It would probably be worthwhile to find out what sort of training or support would be useful to families to take full advantage of the educational benefits of a computer. How to make it help and not hinder them.

Especially when working with lower income households I think her point is excellent. (Computers for Youth call these wrap-around programs .) No amount of training in the world will give parents the time they need to help and monitor kids – but at least when I have the time I also have the experience and training to work with my kids on the computer. There are programs out there and I think the ARRA (BTOP) funding will help both develop and promote others. I think it’s a matter of seeing what works.

I think it also makes sense to get teachers involved. The final line of the NY Times struck me…

When devising ways to beat school policing software, students showed an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning. Too bad that capacity didn’t expand in academic directions, too.

I think this points out that kids who use computers are prepared to learn differently – and more importantly perhaps not flourishing via traditional approaches. Teaching has always been a hard job and straddling the front lines of the digital divide is not making it easier. But it’s time. There are great resources for learning to use technology in the classroom – but it’s going to take a shift and unless parents shift too it will be a painful shift.

Finally, I think we can get the game developers in on the action too.  There has been great research (such as Prensky above) that talks about the potential for gaming in education – but I think my favorite example was the discussion on ShalshDot on the NY Times article and the plea from the inside for developers to step up to the plate.

There used to be a program in the schools called “Everybody wins when adults read to kids” maybe we need an “Everybody wins when we wraparound kids”. I’m thinking about technology specifically but obviously that can be broadened.