Internet Education and the Possibilities of Technology

Note: this is a regular reading response, my abstract is posted previously.  Just to clarify.

Ellen Seiter’s chapters on media and internet usage in the classroom were particularly interesting to me this week in light of my own experiences working with students (and being one myself).  Seiter stresses the concern that internet- and computer-based learning modules, such as SuccessMaker, emphasized “rote memorization rather than critical thinking” and that they were no better than standardized tests as teaching and evaluation methods.  The possibilities of such technology are broadly understood to be limitless, particularly when implemented in low-income school districts, but as these chapters indicate, the complications that arise when actually used in such classrooms negate any possible benefit. 

            It is true that basic computer, typing, and internet skills are crucial skills for today’s job market, but it is also true that these skills are necessary for true cultural participation in today’s world of media convergence and online consumption and production (prosumption, I believe, was the word we used). As Seiter’s article indicates, even when these technologies are made available, schools are not capable – financially or pedagogically – of teaching proper usage methods and maintaining this equipment. 

            As an undergraduate, I studied abroad in London, where I worked once a week as a teacher’s aide in a low-income public primary school.  My students were three years old, the youngest in the school, and largely came from immigrant families.  The school provided computer class once a week to this grade level through the use of the lab at the local middle school, which had a computer station for every student and two dedicated instructors.  For most of the students, this computer time was their first experience engaging with the technology, but a deep class divide was visible in the few students who demonstrated a previous knowledge and could, at the age of 3, open programs, interact with them, and print their finished products without instruction.  While these students only used the computers as a new method of art instruction (MS Paint, I believe, was the program of choice), the initial engagement with computers was supported strongly by the school system (perhaps an indicator of the different priorities between US and UK educational systems).

            Seiter also points out the lack of direction in proper internet usage in public schools, and the notorious lack therein of in-depth research instruction.  In order to make computer literacy classes successful, students need to be taught to do more than surf newspaper articles.  My high school was located in a district that so feared the negatives of internet usage that firewalls were implemented on the servers that prevented access to any website not preapproved by the board – this included university websites (blocked under the category “higher education”), search engines (with the inexplicable exception of ‘Ask Jeeves’), and even the website of the Center for the Arts located next door (blocked under “Arts & Entertainment”, regardless of our status as an school of the arts).  This example indicates the preference of districts to limit access to technology in light of the inability – or perhaps unwillingness – to educate students on ways to learn through these systems and interact on a critical level with media.