Extra Credit #3: Benefits of Technology with regards to Education

I think that it is going to be very difficult to quantify the benefits of utilizing advanced technology in the classroom. As was stated by the moderator, we can surely say that there is improvement in certain areas (such as proficiency with an IPod), but it is hard to determine what kind of net benefit we as a society will notice. There are definitely some areas of education, which can lead to an improvement that society will notice. For example, if everybody learns to about the physics of driving, the road will be a much safer place and there would be fewer accidents. This could potentially be quantified in terms of the number of lives saved, however, it’s very difficult to create an accurate experiment with control groups etc. Even if we could create a base unit, such as money itself, as a means of measuring success (Example: students who use technology make $15 thousand dollars more in their annual salary as compared to students who don’t), it is still tough to quantify the benefits because of the different ways students choose to use technology. For example, some students may utilize the Internet as a research database such that they can sift through loads of information much quicker than they would if they were limited to a library. In this sense we can consider the Internet to be a form of a cognitive enhancement, it allows humans to process and access information more efficiently, more specifically it is a kind of collaborative intelligence (bits and pieces of information uploaded by individuals that creates a consortium of information). I can personally say that this particular technology has made my life much easier and more productive when it comes to scholarly research. Tools such as Google Scholar have made academic searches on the web possible, and as a result I don’t need to manually sift through a bunch of hard-copy textbooks. Instead, search engines make this process much quicker. I would not have been able to access the same kinds of information, let alone in a similar time frame, if I had been limited to strictly libraries. Thus: to me technology has added a lot to the quality of education. However, the Internet doesn’t necessarily guarantee success for a student. They could choose to utilize the Internet as a means to plagiarizing, in which case there would be very little educational benefit. Also, it has been suggested that the advent of the television and the internet has induced a learning disorder, ADD/ADHD, among many young children. I personally think that this is true because commercials and TV shows are designed to communicate a lot of information in a very short period of time in order to hold viewer's attention. A lot of children expect to have their attention captivated by very fast paced, flashy, interesting images displayed on a screen. When they come into the classroom where it takes time to read an entire novel and then learn about its significance, their minds are unable to adapt to the different learning pace. In this sense, technology would also act as a learning inhibitor and make existing institutions less efficient than they are today. It definitely appears that different students can utilize different technologies in a variety of different ways, and it makes it very difficult to make a generalization such as, “technology does add a lot to the quality of most education”. I think that the ways in which a student views technology is kind of subjective: it could be a potentially useful tool under the right circumstances.