iPad, or not iPad? That is the question...

"[I]t is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." — Abraham Maslow, psychologist.

One of my good friends, over in Washington, Conn., is an iPad "True Believer." Clay has always been an Apple fan — he's written, published or edited many Apple computer books and manuals — but claims the iPad is a true game-changer. And although I've always bought Microsoft products, grudgingly, due to their far lower price... I think Clay's right.

So does that mean I support Brookfield High's proposed plan to issue half of incoming freshman, as part of a pilot project, “loaner” iPads? No: in fact I think it's a terrible idea, even though I love high-tech stuff (a few years back I networked all seven of my home/work computers, to access almost every bit of data I'd generated over the last 20 years). I'm all for students learning the “21st-Century skills” that Superintendent Bivona advocates... but those skills, in my view, need to be built on old-fashioned, 20th Century critical-thinking skills, which few high school freshmen have.

I've taught college courses online for nearly a decade now, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that technology, in the learning environment, can do as much harm as good. Why? Because it encourages “cream skimming” — allows students to produce work that's credible rather than accurate, more shiny than substantive. In a couple hours, by cribbing from websites, downloading illustrations, picking appropriate templates, etc., you can create a paper, or report, or PowerPoint, that “looks good”... all without having to think about the assigned topic. 

I have to read a lot of college papers, and students, typically, gloss over complexities rather than “drill down” to basic issues... and I'm pretty sure there's a relationship between this “skimming” approach to learning and technology's ability to “fake” reality. (That's one reason the "case study" method, as used in many professional schools — law, business, medicine — is so effective: you have to  wrestle with real-world "practice" as well as in-class "theory.")  Why work hard to understand something, when you can get “passable” knowledge with 20 percent of the effort?

Or as Billy Crystal's “Fernando” character purred on Saturday Night Live back in the 1980s, “When you look mahvelous, you feel mahvelous!” Perception becomes reality, and “reality,” in our Tweet-filled, spam-collecting, too-much-information world, now seems to have no more value than a good fake.

I don't intend to “blame the messenger” here — technology didn't create this love for the shiny and superficial. But it has aided, abetted, and accelerated this “race to the surface”... and I think students are better served when they're compelled to consider problems in depth, in a logical framework, using words they actually understand, rather than being distracted by the “media rich” representations — Music! Video! Slideshows! Animation! Moving maps! — that tech companies sell by the boatload and hope we'll become addicted to.

I like the “cutting edge” as much as anyone... but it's more important, first, to be able to put together a rational, sequential, convincing argument, and that's something a huge percentage of today's college students can't do.

“Media rich” often means “dead wrong,” because the entertainment values (consider Disney's good-cartoon/bad-history Pocahontas) often bury established facts... and students who come to value gee-whiz “bells and whistles” in high school may have a hard time in college. Though I may be wrong there, too: education at all levels seems to suffer from the idea that students are must-be-catered-to “customers” rather than you're-here-to-use-your-brain “learners.”

I understand the need to “engage” students — indeed, that's my teaching mantra. But teenagers already have too much technology in their lives and introducing them to tablet computers at the age of 14 seems, to me, a step backward.

Computers can make the acquisition of information so easy that students — and adults, too — forget that the real work lies in organizing that information into an argument, in separating the plausible from the true, in determining whether “accepted norms” deserve that status.

One day, tablets will be a useful educational device for teens... but today, I fear, they represent just another new-must-be-better distraction, more toy than tool. And today's students need fewer toys, especially when those toys (and technology) make them ever-more-passive consumers of others' views, and even less able to think for themselves.