CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Are computers in the classroom good or bad for teaching?
Will hooking schools to the Internet save or destroy education?
Nicholas Burbules doesn't like these questions, doesn't like the either/or, pro-con, technophile-versus-technophobe debate. As he and co-author Thomas Callister Jr. note on the first page of a new book on the subject, "No one would think today to pose questions such as, 'Are blackboards good or bad for teaching? Do textbooks help children learn?' ... They are simply part of the way things are."
The same is becoming true for computers and the Internet, they argue, in "Watch IT: The Risks and Promises of Information Technologies in Education," published by Westview Press. Burbules is a professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois; Callister is a professor and chair of the department of education at Whitman College in Washington. "New technologies in education have become an educational issue, a challenge, an opportunity, a risk, a necessity -- all of these -- for reasons that have little to do with willful choices made by educators," the authors note. Such technologies have become important in work, in society and in "a host of learning opportunities outside of the control of schools."
Educators have no choice but to deal with the issues raised by these new technologies, and with "the good, the bad and the unknown" that comes with them, Burbules said.
"Computers are going to become the basic medium of education -- the basic medium of education -- for a large part of our student population. Schools are either going to deal with that, or they're not going to deal with that, but that's going to happen," he said.
From the authors' "post-technocratic" perspective, these technologies bring with them "a mixture of transformative possibilities and deeply disturbing prospects." Between the good and bad, between the technophilia and the technophobia, "are the much, much tougher choices," Burbules said.
The book looks at issues such as access, censorship, privacy, commercialization, and information glut, all of which, they argue, present educators with complex and contradictory choices.
Technology boosters who see the computer as a panacea in education place too much faith in the technology itself, the authors note. Those who see it as just a tool place too much faith in people's foresight and restraint, not recognizing there will be unintended consequences or that the tool will change the user. Those who would just throw it out risk making themselves irrelevant, Burbules said.
"This isn't just another new tool being brought into the classroom," he said.
"This is going to have transformative effects on the way schools are organized, the way classrooms are organized, the ways in which teachers interact with students ...[Computers] raise new issues and new challenges unlike anything we've faced before. And there's every reason to think that the educational institutions that we have in this society are going to look -- in 10 years, certainly in 20 years -- totally different."