COMMENTARY


Given the wealth of information available at a touch of a


button online, why are we not all getting much more clever, more quickly? Kester Brewin discusses this question after being inspired by a new book on how the internet is changing the way we think


T


HE INTERNET has been the most important educational invention since the development of the printing press. There is more information available more easily and more quickly than there ever has been before. At the click of a mouse, a student


can find detailed, accurate and up-to-date information about the political situation in the Middle East, explore the debate around the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and discover the Arabic roots of algebra, all without coming out from under their duvet. Given that this is the case, why are we not all getting


much more clever, more quickly? This is one of the questions that Nicolas Carr


explores in his book The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember.


Union address: NAHT The web of lies


Social networking sites are increasingly being used to target and abuse teachers and leaders. Russell Hobby offers his union’s advice


COULD FACEBOOK one day rival Ofsted as the scourge of headteachers? Perhaps not, but one of the fastest growing categories of calls to our union’s helpline concerns campaigns and bullying conducted online against school leaders through social networking sites. We are familiar with tragic cases of students being


bullied online, and of personal lives revealed to the world by staff, but campaigns against management decisions or members of staff have not received the attention they deserve. We are trying to rectify this by raising awareness and equipping members to defend themselves. Now, all schools need feedback, all should be


responsive to the concerns of parents and all should have a credible complaints process. But online campaigns are pernicious – the sense of anonymity fuels unreasonable behaviour, the speed of response builds momentum, the lack of accountability means that evidence is irrelevant and there is no real right of reply. Anyone with a grudge or an agenda can set something going. And, because many of these sites are hosted in the US, there are often no legal sanctions in terms of libel or slander. The results are tension, distraction, disharmony


and personal hurt; sometimes careers are ruined. Frequently, non-participating parents and families are equally upset at the vitriol. Where the comments cross the line into


threatening behaviour, abuse or bigotry, action can be taken. It is usually possible to get the service provider to remove the offending pages, or get the police involved. In other instances, there is a delicate judgement to make: will confrontation inflame the situation? Often, however, making contact with the


instigator and inviting them to share their concerns through a meeting can resolve the situation. Where the instigator is anonymous or unreasonable, this may not be possible. In extreme cases, trade unions and professional associations are there to back you up.


To repeat, we cannot be seen to be stifling


parents’ legitimate concerns or preventing freedom of expression, but these campaigns are more often


• Russell Hobby is general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. Visit www.naht.org.uk


about revenge than about constructive criticism. They do nothing to move the school forward or improve standards. This casts an interesting light on the agenda


around choice and transparency in education. First, it highlights the role that new technologies may play in public service. They can make rich data available to everyone; they speed up communications; but they don’t call it the “web of lies” for no reason. Quality control, due process, verification and accountability are low. Second, it suggests that the transition from “hard”


vertical accountability to government, to “soft|” horizontal accountability to the community, although attractive in many ways, is not without its risks. There is no sense being a Luddite and resisting


the change – and many schools are making use of Web 2.0 technologies and social media to engage students and improve learning. It’s not the technology, but the standards of


behaviour associated with it. In the modern age, public services should be accountable and responsive to the people who use them and fund them. But we will also need to think about what data is appropriate, and what protection is available. If a government agency makes a mistake, there is often a process which can be followed to rectify it. This rarely exists in the world of social media. So, when we talk about publishing staff salaries


and sickness, for example, we should think about the uses that information will be put to, how it will be aggregated, slanted and commented upon. The ultimate test for transparency is whether the


information answers parents’ genuine and urgent questions about the school. Usually: will my child be happy and safe and will they fulfill their full potential academically? The answers to these questions lie in rich, qualitative information about local schools, not in narrow, statistical data on thousands of schools nationally. If web technologies can help us with this, and build in full accountability for those analysing, then it starts to get interesting.


Don’t believe the hypertext


His conclusion is one that has forced me to appreciate that we need to be far more careful about how we use screen-based learning. Why? Because, as he outlines in a very considered piece of research, it may be that my Smartphone is actually making me stupid. I am sure every teacher has the difficult topic that


never quite seems to get through to the class. For me, as a teacher of maths, it is negative numbers. No matter


how many times I teach this, the learning does not seem to stick. They manage to get it right as soon as I have explained it, but throw them a question in the middle of another topic a few weeks later and it is clear that the learning has come unstuck. The question of how to improve knowledge


retention is key for us as teachers, and I am always trying to create exciting and rich experiences to aid the formation of significant memories. Even if we affirm that good learning is not simply the regurgitation of facts, it is clear that we would all like our students to be able recall information more efficiently. But what is it that makes knowledge “stick”? And what is it about some topics that appear to stick very easily, and others – like negative numbers – that remain very slippery? Surely anything we could do to help students remember better would be a boon. So much of what we do in schools is about different


sorts of memory – assimilating techniques and skills and facts through practice, rote learning and hard graft – and it would appear that improving the memory of weaker students would be one of the fundamental things that would improve their ability to succeed in the education system that we have. This is how I now approach the problem of


getting negative numbers to stick. I explain to my “weaker” students that many of them have just as good an understanding of the concepts that we cover in mathematics as those in higher groups, but lack the ability to retain this knowledge effectively. I make it explicit: some students just seem to have


naturally sticky brains where you can go through something once, and it stays. In many schools they are labelled “gifted and talented”. In my classes we affectionately call them “annoying buggers”. This allows us to move the discussion on from a short-term understanding of the next negative numbers problem to attentiveness to how to make that understanding stay for longer. This is where technology comes in. Education


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is about creating a bridge between a student’s mind and the knowledge out there in the world, and it is technology that forms much of this structure. Books are a technology. Paper, pens, chalk, writing, pictures – all of these are human inventions aimed at improving the traffic of knowledge between the world “out there” and our minds “in here”, and the storage and easy retrieval of that information once we have it. I can talk about negative numbers, and write things down. I can show videos of their use in practical


The question of how to improve knowledge retention is key for us as


teachers, and I am always trying to create exciting and rich experiences


to aid the formation of significant memories


’


contexts, and get students to use websites to revise questions on them. Education is dependent on technology, and Mr


Carr’s key assertion is that the sorts of technologies we use radically alter the extent to which we receive and properly digest information. This is why he is highly critical of web-based


learning. “Whenever we turn on a computer,” he writes, “we are plunged into an ecosystem of interruption technologies.” I am sure we are all familiar with this. We sit to


read an article online, and quickly check our email first. Then a pop-up tells us that someone has tweeted. We read it and then get back to the article, pausing for a moment in the second paragraph to look at the advertisement which is animatedly looping on the right of the page. An interesting link appears in the text, so we click that and have a quick scan of the page, before deciding to return to the article – just having a peek at Facebook while the page loads again. “How do users read on the web?” one of Mr Carr’s


interlocutors asks rhetorically. “They don’t,” is his cutting conclusion. Part of the reason for this is the huge “cognitive load” that flashy webpages demand. When concentrating on a plain old book our brains


simply have to deal with a steady trickle of textual information, coming at a reading speed which allows us to sort and store tidy memories. With the extra sensory information coming from


graphics and the temptation of links, our brains have more work to do and can give less attention to the text. Studies have shown very clearly that those who studied for a controlled test using paper documents outperformed those who studied with the same information online. The reason? Plain text increases our levels of attentiveness, and increased attentiveness leads to more significant memory formation. This has to call into question the wisdom of relying


too heavily on virtual learning environments. While these are certainly very useful tools for administering certain types of course, and a good repository for resources, the warning from The Shallows is that depending on them for communicating text-based information is going to lead to poor outcomes in two ways. First, students will not gain a rich understanding


of the content and be less able to assimilate this new knowledge into a stable memory structure that will allow it to be applied to new situations. Second, students will gradually lose their ability to be attentive, which will have a wider impact on their learning and job prospects. Rolling out digital technology into all parts of the


curriculum may seem like a move towards the bright future of education, but I strongly believe that we need to proceed with caution. Mr Carr uses the example of a hammer to illustrate


his point: a hand holding a hammer has become a powerful tool for knocking in nails, but it has also become unable to do anything else. This is the price we pay for adopting any technology: it gives us immense power in one area (the ability to find out information anywhere, any time) but also prevents us functioning in other ways – being attentive, being fully present to one another, and forming rich memories. We have a new role as teachers: we must teach


children discipline, the discipline of being discerning in their use of digital technology. Perhaps I should create a PowerPoint to get the ball rolling…


SecEd


• Kester Brewin is deputy head of maths at Sydenham High School for Girls in London.


SecEd • January 20 2011


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