Teaching
History Online
Number
4: March, 2001
The Laptop Revolution
Richard
Jones-Nerzic
The International School
of Toulouse
Introduction
John Simkin's
excellent article The
Internet Revolution
(European Schoolnet Virtual School, History
Department) is right in all aspects but one. In a nutshell,
he argues that the Internet has created the first significant technological
development in the history of education, since Guttenburg told the
monks to put their quills away. Whilst I accept that the Internet
is a critically important development, it will not cause a revolution
on its own. As long as we continue to educate our children in classrooms
without computers, the effects of the Internet will be limited. For
what will really cause a computer driven revolution in the nature
of teaching and learning, is student ownership of their own (portable)
computer. Until students can access and process their learning anytime,
anywhere and in a variety of different formats, then that learning
will suffer unnecessary restrictions. Without laptop computers, our
classrooms, our teaching and most importantly, the children's learning,
will continue to be recognizable to the acquaintances of John Simkin's
time travelling teacher from any period of the last two hundred years.
2001 but
no longer science fiction
Let's begin
by recognising that giving children laptop computers to use in school
is no longer in the realms of science fiction. Australian schools
began the laptop revolution more than ten years ago (David Loader,
quoted in John Simkin's article, led Methodist
Ladies' College down the laptop road in 1989). Now, more
than 50 000 Australian students have their own laptop. My school,
The International School of Toulouse, claims to be Europe's first
fully laptop school with all students from Primary to IB Diploma Level
owning their own machine. However, according to the news at the recent
BETT 2001 show, there are currently 2700 schools in Europe that have
integrated laptops in at least some of their classrooms. Furthermore,
laptops have now been in schools long enough for serious research
to be done on how portable computers impact on teaching and learning.
In 1996, laptops introduced into 29 "pioneer schools" in
the United States produced results that will have delighted even the
most ardent of educational traditionalists. Children are apparently
more motivated; they spend longer on their homework, have higher literacy
levels and enjoy significantly improved ICT skills. Whilst this is
interesting and might in itself justify the capital outlay necessary
to equip children with laptops, researchers have tended to focus on
the educational aspects of laptop learning that students used to be
able to do before the introduction of laptops:
Laptops lead
to more student writing and to writing of higher quality. In response
to an open ended question, more than one-third of the surveyed teachers
named writing as the academic outcome or skill that has been most
directly affected by use of the laptops. Some teachers said simply
that writing had generally improved; others said that students were
doing more writing more often. (Rockman
et al, 1998)
It is a similar
story in schools that have spent large sums of money furnishing ICT
suites. Computers are generally still being used to do the sorts of
things that could have been done before computers. I imagine that
this is particularly true of history lessons, where word processing
and perhaps desktop publishing are the norm. Even the Internet, something
that is new and dependent on students having access to computers,
tends to be used in very traditional ways. Students use it to find
out things that they could have found out more reliably using an encyclopaedia.
I can't help feeling that at the moment, the use of computers in education
resembles the arrival of the first motorcars in the days of the horse
drawn carriage. Not only did cars initially resemble what they were
soon to replace; most people perceived them as an unreliable novelty
and very few predicted the massive socio-cultural transformation that
eventually ensued. It took a while for people in general to appreciate
that motorcars would change the world, and as John Simkin has argued,
it is only very recently that people have become persuaded that computers
might transform education.
So how
do laptops make a difference?
How laptops
make a difference becomes obvious when we consider what laptops replace.
When I began teaching nearly ten years ago, my mother gave me her
history exercise books from the early 1950s. At the time, I was struck
by how much had changed in 40 years. My mother's work reflected the
'chalk and talk' didacticism prevalent at the time; analytical concepts
like reliability and interpretation were absent and the historical
content was overwhelmingly political. I recently visited colleagues
at my previous (non-laptop) school and had an opportunity to glance
through a pile of exercise books waiting to be marked. In complete
contrast to my earlier 'student teacher' experience, what now stood
out were the similarities with my mother's exercise book of 50 years
earlier.
Despite the
50 years of technological advance, the exercise book full of hand
written words and the occasional pencil drawn diagram, is still the
most important expression of student learning. Perhaps more importantly,
from a student perspective, the exercise book peppered by red-penned
teacher comments and grades is also still the predominant source of
assessment. Doing 'well' in history, whether in 1950 or in the year
2000, is still largely calculated by how well the student performs
within the artificial constraints of the lines of the traditional
exercise book.
The problem
with artificial constraints in education is that students are increasingly
aware of this artificiality. As John Simkin points out, for students
the educational context is becoming increasingly 'unreal' and therefore
irrelevant. History students have for quite some time been learning
through a range of different media. In contrast to my mother's generation,
students now have access to well designed (no longer just textual)
'textbooks' and they learn about the past through television and video,
sometimes even in the classroom. With the advent of CDRoms and, in
particular, the Internet, students can now interact with a multimedia-learning
environment that starkly contrasts with the exercise book based classroom.
For me, no-where is this mismatch better exemplified, than in the
few hypertext history 'lessons' that are available online. A student
may experience a 'shockwave' and video-clipped, (scanned-in) original
source based historical adventure, but the activity sheet must still
be printed out, filled in by hand and stuck in the exercise book at
the end of the lesson.
In contrast
to exercise books, laptop computers have at least two distinct advantages.
Firstly, when equipped with good software, laptops become educational
'toolboxes' that can help the student to learn. Secondly, although
it may resemble a typewriter, a laptop will allow students to store
evidence of their learning and achievements that might not easily
be expressed through the written word.
Laptops
as multi-media learning 'toolboxes'
The laptop
can help to 'scaffold' student learning in a variety of ways. Take
for example an activity based around a traditional skill like writing
a history essay. As teachers, we know that many students find it difficult
to put their ideas together before putting pen to paper. We also recognise
that not all students have the patience to draft and redraft their
work before they do so. A laptop with a word processor and a student
with an electronic writing frame, eradicates these difficulties and
allows the student to concentrate on what has always been important:
the argument, the analysis and the evidence. As a bonus, the essay
produced on a laptop also allows the teacher to make interventions
in the 'work in progress' without the soul-destroying red ink of exercise
book 'corrections'.
But a laptop
computer is not a glorified word-processor. What is really exciting
about laptop education is that the 'toolbox' helps a student to express
their learning in a format that suits their own learning style. I
have lost count of the number of different types of intelligences
that Howard Gardner has added to his theory of 'multiple intelligences'
in recent years, but I know that a history classroom, restrained by
exercise book learning, is a classroom over-dependent on narrow linguistic
abilities.
After only
a few weeks with a laptop computer, a 12-year-old student (and much
younger) is capable of producing multimedia presentations that express
sophisticated conceptual understanding without the need for written
words. Some students will continue to produce presentations that look
and read like essays. They might have used different 'slides' of the
presentation as writing frames for different paragraphs and they might
incorporate illustrative pictures scanned from books or downloaded
from the Internet. But other students will have incorporated self-composed
music, complex programmed animation sequences and video of themselves
and friends acting out an historical role-play. These students may
have dispensed with written text altogether, choosing instead to narrate
their presentation. Back in 1984, Howard Gardner writing about the
possible impact of computers in education, identified this prospect:
… the
potential utility of computers in the process of matching individuals
to modes of instruction is substantial…the computer can be a
vital facilitator in the actual process of instruction, helping individuals
to negotiate sequences at their preferred pace by using a variety
of educational techniques… (Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind)
Gardner's
vision has been made possible by the laptop computer because it offers
scaffolding for students' personal learning styles. It is as Gardner
puts it, 'a vital facilitator of instruction' because it allows the
student to learn and express that learning in a format that is appropriate
to the individual student's intelligence profile.
Laptops
as multi-intelligence 'portfolios'
The second
advantage of the laptop over the exercise book centres on the laptop's
flexibility as a portfolio for a wide-range of different types of
student work. The laptop allows students to store and present evidence
of their learning in a way that genuinely represents what has gone
on, in and outside of the classroom. Let me give you two examples
of what I mean.
Recently,
I did a cross-curricular project with the Music and Drama teacher,
taking as our theme Shakespeare's London. During the course of three
weeks of lessons in our subjects, we (students and teachers) made
extensive use of digital photo and video to record the students at
work: writing and performing music, taking part in role-plays and
debates etc. This photographic and video diary was stored along with
all the students' other work in a folder on the school server. After
three weeks, the students were asked to produce a history of their
three weeks of learning, based on the electronic 'evidence', in a
ten-minute multimedia presentation.
The results
of the project illustrated the power of a laptop to allow the students
to create a much more 'reliable' record of their learning and achievements.
Amongst much else, they were able to use the digital photos to show
themselves dressed in the Elizabethan costume that they had made for
the role-play, or they showed their empathetic accounts as the coffee-stained
and oven baked 'parchment' that had been temporarily displayed on
the classroom wall. The students were able to use the video footage
to show themselves performing music that they had composed to accompany
the contemporary print of a London street scene c1600. Or they used
video to show interviews they had conducted with each other at the
end of the project to find out exactly what everyone had learnt. The
size of the students' 10-minute presentations ranged from about 20Mb
to 300Mb, not easily portable unless the students are carrying their
own 6Gb laptop computer. When a project of this sort is finished,
the student can burn their completed work onto a CDRom and clear the
workspace on their hard drive. Just like a completed exercise book
they can file it away. But unlike an exercise book, a CDRom of a student's
work is a multimedia record of a much wider range of learning and
achievement that would otherwise be ephemeral and quickly forgotten.
As history teachers many of us are reluctant to invest classroom time
in activities that students may not take seriously and for which there
is no easily stored record. With laptops and a digital video camera,
all the students can have a permanent portable record of their work
before the end of the lesson. In this situation, students tend to
prepare as seriously for a performance-based lesson, as they would
for any traditional test.
The second
example of how laptops allow students to store and present their learning
in new and powerful ways occurs when students are encouraged to design
their learning as web pages. When a student is first given a laptop
they tend to treat them as exercise books. They create folders for
different subjects and store their 'exercises' in chronological order,
lesson by lesson. The logic of this system of organisation is tested
almost immediately by the very nature of lessons in a laptop school,
which do not always begin and end at the sound of a bell but continue
wherever the student has their laptop with them. The system is further
undermined when they are introduced to the concept of hyperlinking
their different assignments in different subject areas. Finally, exercise
book logic becomes completely redundant when they start completing
assignments as web pages and multimedia presentations, rather than
as word-processed and desktop published paper documents.
Learning
to work in web formats might begin quite simply by expecting students
to build a hyperlinked 'glossary' for all the new words they encounter.
For example, my Y9 students (13-14 years old) began their glossary
around the topic of the Industrial Revolution. A technical development
like the 'spinning jenny' in an activity on industrial development
might be hyper-linked to a brief description in the student's glossary.
Before long, the brief description in the glossary is itself hyperlinked
to a specially created page containing pictures and further details
about the new inventions. Next, the name James Hargreaves is hyperlinked
to a picture and some simple biographical details about the man behind
the spinning jenny and so on. It soon becomes apparent to the student
that word-processed documents limit their ability to hyperlink their
work and that they are better off using web publishing software. Eventually,
the student's history exercise book is replaced by a history 'homepage'
which is just one part of their self constructed learning website.
Their folders still exist, but now they use a browser to surf around
their work. This can be stored on the students' laptops but for ease
of assessment it might also be stored on the school server or indeed
in cyberspace. The occasional visit to a student's website is an attractive
alternative to the shopping bags full of exercise books which accompany
most teachers home for the weekend.
For the student's
learning the advantages are obvious. The student website grows with
the student's learning. At the beginning the student will ask 'should
I add this word to my glossary?' within a few lessons it becomes an
almost natural reflex. The student continually revisits work 'completed'
earlier and also links across subject boundaries. Perhaps most importantly,
the website becomes much more a reflection of the individual student's
learning style than any production-line exercise book can ever be.
For it to work, the students must be able to pursue their interests
and answer their questions as they arise, which is why constant laptop
connection to the Internet is essential.
Even the
youngest of my students now talk in terms of 'linear' style and 'web'
style learning. In making this distinction they are becoming aware
of the different types of audiences available for their work. By 'linear'
learning they mean traditional, exercise book style presentation.
In a 'linear' presentation the audience (usually only the teacher)
is passive and has no control over the content of the presentation.
This might be a film, an essay or an automated multimedia presentation;
it starts at the beginning and runs through to the end. In contrast,
'web' style learning allocates an active role to the audience of the
student's work. The audience is presented with choices and in order
to progress the user (no longer simply a reader) has to make selections.
If this form of presentation is to be successful, then not only does
the student need to 'know' the subject she is presenting, she also
needs to be able to teach it. And this, of course, requires a much
greater depth of understanding.
I recently
invited my students to make a multimedia guide on 'how to use historical
documents'. Although some students chose to make a 'linear' presentation,
after viewing all the presentations the class agreed that the most
effective 'teaching' presentations were in a 'web' format that allowed
varying amounts of interactivity between the user and the programme.
At a basic level this interactivity might simply involve giving the
user a choice of routes through the presentation; at a more complex
level, students are able to incorporate relatively sophisticated interactive
games. Gary Stager, the American
educationalist associated with Logo programming language and MicroWorlds
'constructionist' software, convincingly argues that the students
who learn most from educational software are the students who design
their own. This is surely true of students who build their own learning
websites or design their own interactive presentations and games.
Conclusion
There is
a quotation in John Simkin's article, taken from Dale Spender's book
Nattering
on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace,
that highlights what is now the central problem of the traditional
exercise book classroom:
It's a teaching/learning
model that is out of synch with the rest of the world. Many of today's
students can tell you in no uncertain terms just how "unreal"
(and boring, and silly) the educational context is. Traditional educational
theory, practice and organisation are each day becoming more irrelevant
and unworkable: just as the scribal model became obsolete after print
was invented.
In contrast
to the traditional classroom, the 'educational context' of the laptop
classroom is very real. But it is a context in which the role of a
teacher has to change significantly. Putting it simply, teachers have
to 'teach' less and support more. Some might see this as a threat
to their professionalism. But as professionals we have to face up
to the fact that a student with a laptop 'knows' more than a teacher
without. My experience suggests and the American research confirms,
that teachers in a laptop school get more time to do the things that
teachers have always considered important: working with students on
a one-to-one basis, differentiating between the different ability
ranges etc.
However,
as we all recognise, this revolution requires more than just the support
of teachers, it will also need the support of the whole education
industry. At the moment, one of the biggest constraints on relevant
learning in my school is the external examination board. I am currently
in the ridiculous situation of having to tell the older students to
put their laptops away, so that they can practise the speed handwriting
skills necessary for success in external examinations! How more "unreal,
boring and silly" can you get?
But the biggest
commitment to change must come from governments prepared to fund an
education system that keeps abreast of technological developments.
If what I have described above is to work as well as it might, laptop
computers for every student is only the beginning. Teachers also need
classrooms equipped with multimedia projectors, CDRom writers, digital
cameras and videos, fast Internet access and plenty of cyberspace
for students to store their work. Most importantly they require a
relevant digital 'hypertext' curriculum and resources to free them
to do what they have always done best, help children to learn.
In the light
of the accusations of elitism levelled at the University of Warwick
for requiring students to have their own laptops, (The
Guardian 7th February 2001) I'd like to conclude with
the argument made 30 years ago by the early pioneers of computer in
schools:
...Only inertia
and prejudice, not economics or lack of good educational ideas stand
in the way of providing every child in the world with the kinds of
experience of which we have tried to give you some glimpses. If every
child were to be given access to a computer, computers would be cheap
enough for every child to be given access to a computer - Seymour
Papert and Cynthia Solomon 1971 (quoted in Stager.org)
In 2001 it
may still seem like a lot to expect students to have their own laptop
computer. But we must accept that our failure to deliver an alternative
'real' educational context might result in schools suffering the same
fate as the horse-drawn carriage of the last century.
Richard
Jones-Nerzic
Jones_r@intst.net
