[tt] NYT: New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology

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New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/education/07education.html

On Education
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Halfway through the semester in his market research course at
Roanoke College last fall, only moments after announcing a policy of
zero tolerance for cellphone use in the classroom, Prof. Ali Nazemi
heard a telltale ring. Then he spotted a young man named Neil Noland
fumbling with his phone, trying to turn it off before being caught.

"Neil, can I see that phone?" Professor Nazemi said, more in a
command than a question. The student surrendered it. Professor
Nazemi opened his briefcase, produced a hammer and proceeded to
smash the offending device. Throughout the classroom, student faces
went ashen.

"How am I going to call my Mom now?" Neil asked. As Professor Nazemi
refused to answer, a classmate offered, "Dude, you can sue."

Let's be clear about one thing. Ali Nazemi is a hero. Ali Nazemi
deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Let's be clear about another thing. The episode in his classroom had
been plotted and scripted ahead of time, with Neil Noland part of
the charade all along. The phone was an extra of his mother's, its
service contract long expired.

Just as fiction can limn truths beyond the grasp of factuality,
Professor Nazemi's act of guerrilla theater, which he recounted last
week in a telephone interview, attested to the exasperation of
countless teachers and professors in the computer era. Their
perpetual war of attrition with defiantly inattentive students has
escalated from the quaint pursuits of pigtail-pulling,
spitball-lobbing and notebook-doodling to a high-tech arsenal of
laptops, cellphones, BlackBerries and the like.

The poor schoolmarm or master, required to provide a certain amount
of value for your child's entertainment dollar, now must compete
with texting, instant-messaging, Facebook, eBay, YouTube,
Addictinggames.com and other poxes on pedagogy.

"There are certain lines you shouldn't cross," the professor said.
"If you start tolerating this stuff, it becomes the norm. The more
you give, the more they take. These devices become an indisposable
sort of thing for the students. And nothing should be indisposable.
Multitasking is good, but I want them to do more tasking in my
class."

To which one can only say: Amen. And add: Too bad the good guy is
going to lose.

At age 55, Professor Nazemi stands on the far shore of a new sort of
generational divide between teacher and student. This one separates
those who want to use technology to grow smarter from those who want
to use it to get dumber.

Perhaps there's a nicer way to put it. "The baby boomers seem to see
technology as information and communication," said Prof. Michael
Bugeja, director of the journalism school at Iowa State University
and the author of "Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in
a Technological Age." "Their offspring and the emerging generation
seem to see the same devices as entertainment and socializing."

All the advances schools and colleges have made to supposedly
enhance learning -- supplying students with laptops, equipping
computer labs, creating wireless networks -- have instead enabled
distraction. Perhaps attendance records should include a new
category: present but otherwise engaged.

In the past three years alone, the percentage of college classrooms
with wireless service has nearly doubled, to 60 percent from 31
percent, according to the Campus Computing Survey, an annual check
by the Campus Computing Project of computer use at 600 colleges.
Professor Bugeja's online survey of several hundred Iowa State
students found that a majority had used their cellphones, sent or
read e-mail, and gone onto social-network sites during class time. A
quarter of the respondents admitted they were taking Professor
Bugeja's survey while sitting in a different class.

Naturally, there will be many students and no small number of
high-tech and progressive-ed apologists ready to lay the blame on
boring lessons. One of the great condemnations in education jargon
these days, after all, is the "teacher-centered lesson."

"I'm so tired of that excuse," said Professor Bugeja, may he live a
long and fruitful life. "The idea that subject matter is boring is
truly relative. Boring as opposed to what? Buying shoes on eBay? The
fact is, we're not here to entertain. We're here to stimulate the
life of the mind."

"Education requires contemplation," he continued. "It requires
critical thinking. What we may be doing now is training a generation
of air-traffic controllers rather than scholars. And I do know I'm
going to lose."

Not, one can only hope, without a fight.

The Canadian company Smart Technologies makes and sells a program
called SynchronEyes. It allows a classroom teacher to monitor every
student's computer activity and to freeze it at a click. Last year,
the company sold more than 10,000 licenses, which range in cost from
$779 for one teacher to $3,249 for an entire school.

The biggest problem, said Nancy Knowlton, the company's chief
executive officer, is staying ahead of students trying to crack the
program's code. "There's an active discussion on the Web, and we're
monitoring it," Ms. Knowlton said. "They keep us on our toes."

Scott Carlin, an instructor of teacher interns at Michigan State
University, advises his charges to forbid personal use of tech
devices in the classroom. Of course he occasionally has to pause in
his own lesson to make one of his graduate students stop scrolling
through text messages.

"If the students actually found some creative way to use a cellphone
or a BlackBerry in a class demonstration, I'd be all for that," Mr.
Carlin said in a recent interview, recalling his own years as a
middle school and high school teacher. "Or if they could demonstrate
how a chat room or AOL instant messenger would help them present a
project. But what I found in most cases is that it was just a fancy
new way of passing notes."

In the end, as science-fiction writers have prophesied for years,
the technology is bound to outwit the fallible human. What teacher
or professor can possibly police a room full of determined goof-offs
while also delivering an engaging lesson?

I am reminded of a story I heard from an Ivy League junior at a
social gathering last year. She and a friend walked into the lecture
hall for a class and noticed two young men in a back row surfing
Internet pornography sites. They called out and waved to alert the
professor.

He stopped his lecture. He turned his eyes to the young women, those
would-be whistle-blowers. And as the pornography show proceeded
undetected, he chastised them for interrupting.

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia
University. His e-mail is sgfreedman at nytimes.com.