Doug Johnson

Geting Wise About Technology
Head for the Edge, Technology Connection, September 1995

What’s wrong with these pictures?

• A teacher pulled me aside not long ago and complained, “They say these computers are time savers. Hah! It took me about 45 minutes just to print one envelope. I could have typed it less than a minute.”
• I spent a frustrating few months with a computerized date book. The program itself was terrific. I could easily enter meetings, set goals, create to-do lists, and it even had an alarm which would sound half an hour before I was to be at a meeting. Problem was every time I wanted to consult my calendar, I had to have my computer turned on. Fine for when I was at my desk, but frustrating when I was in another building or at meeting. I wound up keeping two date books - the computerized one and a paper one. And like the man with two watches, I was never quite sure which was accurate.
• I teach that the most effective means of finding someone’s e-mail address is to call them on the telephone. The phone bill will cost an organization less money than it would pay in employee salary for a long, possibly fruitless search.
• A district spent about three times as money putting in a distributed video system in a new school as it would have cost to put a VCR and laser disk player in each classroom. The media specialist or clerk now “schedules” all video programs each morning. The telephone system is less than adequate because it also has to do double duty as the video controller. VCRs and TV on carts are still in big demand by teachers despite each classroom having a new ceiling mounted monitor hooked to the system.
• A media specialist sends a reference question to LM_Net which could easily be answered by checking The World Almanac and Book of Facts.
• We are using an “integrated learning system” in one of our remedial programs. The salesman was not happy when I insisted that students would have to make more progress using the ILS than they would have if they had been taught by conventional methods for the system to be judged as effective.
• A recent piece of software developed for schools “filters” Internet sites. The makers have identified resources as “inappropriate” for children and their software blocks user access to those areas. So if Johnny types in http://www.playboy.com, he gets the message that he is not allowed in that area. The company promises to keep patrolling the Internet and will sell updates which will filter out new bad places on a regular basis. I have teachers and administrators clamoring for this item.
  

Literacy, especially technological literacy, is more than knowing just how to do something: it is also knowing when to do it! Technology should be used on the job only when it allows a person to be more efficient, or to do worthwhile things which would be otherwise impossible.

Technology increases efficiency in two ways. It helps you do the same things you’ve always done but more quickly or more economically, or it allows you to use the same amount of time to do more. A really efficient use of technology would let you do more with less.

E-mail, word processing, and computerized databases of inventories, phone numbers and addresses increase my efficiency. But so does handwriting envelopes, using a paper datebook and looking up the definition of a word in my pocket dictionary.

There are plenty of places schools can use technology to do things they otherwise could not. Key word searches are impossible in a paper card catalog. The chance of reaching reluctant learners is greatly improved with involving computer programs. Concepts which are nearly impossible to verbally comprehend can be illustrated with videotapes or computer animations. Spelling checkers can keep mechanics from getting in the way of a student (and teacher) ideas. But I question what computerized integrated learning systems and a video distribution systems do for students that worksheets and stand-alone VCRs cannot.

There are also times when you may not want technology to supplant other, more human ways of getting a job done. Answering machines during school hours, grammar checkers, and Internet “filters” do not (yet?) have the judgment, intelligence or sensitivity to be effective. I have a difficult time trusting a machine to make decisions which depend on taste, values, respect, or empathy!

Check your syllabi! Are you also teaching when to use technology?


SIDE BAR QUOTE
I use a computer. This enables me to be highly efficient. Suppose for example I need to fill up column space by writing BOOGER BOOGER BOOGER BOOGER BOOGER. To accomplish this in the old precomputer days, I would have had to type ‘”BOOGER” five times.

But now all I have to do is type it once, then simply hold the left-hand “mouse” button down while “dragging” the “mouse” so that the “cursor” moves over the text that I wish to “select”; then release the left-hand “mouse” button and position the “cursor” over the “Edit” heading on the “menu bar”; then click the left-hand “mouse” button to reveal the “edit menu” ; then position the “cursor” over the “Copy” command; then click the left-hand “mouse” button; then move the “cursor” to the point where I wish to insert the “selected” text; then click the left-hand “mouse” button; then position the “cursor” over the “Edit” heading on the “menu bar” again; then click the left-hand “mouse” button to reveal the “edit menu”; then position the “cursor” over the “Paste” command; then click the left-hand “mouse” button four times; and then, as the French say, “voila!” (Literally, “My hand hurts!”)

If you need this kind of efficiency in your life, you should get a computer.

from Dave Barry’s column, “Only stud hombre cybermuffins can handle DOS and Windows”