Google's View - Follow-up

or...
What makes research of timely topics hard.

Just over one month ago, I searched Google Scholar for a particular set of search terms hoping to gauge the research community's interest in "computer technology access 'k-12' classroom school" over time. The one clear conclusion was that interest was on the rise. One oddity was that research, or research publishing, seemed to have dropped off over the past two years. I hypothesized, at the time, that this wasn't a true drop-off, but rather an artifact of the Google Scholar search-bot and of document indexing in general. After having repeated the exact same query only one month later, I see that I was correct. In fact, the number of research articles found in 2007 seems to be spiking dramatically and it'll be interesting to see just how many articles Google continues to find as time goes on.

This phenomenon highlights a particular difficulty for researching a topic like Technology Access in a field like Educational Technology where one needs to rely on current and timely research because the field itself is changing on a monthly, not yearly, basis.

Imagine the time-line challenges. Technologies are developed, then adopted at a grassroots level. At some point, an educational technologist comes along and decides to research some aspect of that technology's application towards education. She or he designs a study, gets the adequate permissions, conducts the study, analyzes the findings, then publishes the results. This is probably, at least, a year or two into the process. Then, if one is lucky, the results are published in a often-read, popular journal such that the findings can have a practical affect on the field of practice quickly. More likely, the results will be cataloged by a search-service like Google Scholar months to years after publishing. By this time, the technology, or more discouragingly the entire genre, has become antiquated and uninteresting because developers have developed new technologies and teachers have adopted new, more exciting, tools.

(This of course, is the gloomy way to view it. Many times, genres of technologies, if not technologies themselves, stay around for sometime and become worthy and possible research targets. However, innovation is speeding up, not slowing down, and this will become less true.)

HELP

Technology coordinator, Barbara McLaughlin, wants help deciding how to allocate computers to her district’s 40+ elementary schools and she’s turning to the community at Steve Hargadon’s Classroom 2.0 for help.

She starts by telling the community that her recent experience is that most schools would be happy to have their labs updated but that individual teacher’s are increasingly pushing back on classroom mini-labs because they find it hard to integrate them into the daily routine. Notice that “schools” want computers in labs, but teachers don’t want them in their room. This is not surprising given that shiny new computer labs look impressive to visiting parents and are easier to maintain and secure whereas in-class mini-labs are an additional responsibility on the teacher who may already be leery of her technology skills.

Let’s see what the group had to say…

Six separate posters replied to her request. Of those six, three enthusiastically supported laptop carts and provided their own testimonials as support. One suggested that he preferred his 9 computer mini-labs to bringing in laptops on a cart because it helped to get them to “blend into the everyday situations of learning.” One poster suggested that any of these scenarios could work because it’s more about the purpose of the computer than its position. Finally, one poster was trying to see Barbara computer furniture. There’s always one furniture salesman in the bunch, isn’t there. ;)

While these responses are exactly the opposite from what Barbara is hearing from her teachers, it’s not surprising given the audience of Classroom 2.0. However, the takeaway from all this is that despite the obvious convenience and potential cost savings associated with collecting all the computers in one room, not a single practicing teacher suggested that Barbara do that.
I suspect that teachers who prefer not have mini-labs in classrooms are exactly the ones that wouldn’t bother to take their class to the labs, anyway. Not having them in the classroom becomes a way to avoid them, altogether. Where teachers who actually attempt to teach 21ST Century skills are trying to get their students closer to technology in any way they can. They understand that the closer students are to tech, the more likely they are to incorporate it into their own learning process.

My solution is more drastic than anything we’ve heard yet. I’d take all the instructional computers in the building, and for one year, divide them amongst the teachers that have shown a propensity to use them as frequently and productively as possible. Let those teachers and students shine. Let them learn and love learning in the process and then sit back and watch just how many of the late-adopters start peeking into these interactive, energetic, exciting classrooms asking, “What’s going on in here?” We’ll Twitter our reply.

Eureka!

After much searching, I’ve finally found a piece of research, unfortunately unpublished, that directly addresses my question of technology allocation in K-12 schools.

A professor a Cal State, East Bay wanted to know how to better prepare his pre-service teachers for life in the classroom so he went searching for specific information about computer use in classrooms. He found none that satisfied his needs. So, he developed his own survey of 88 classrooms in 38 schools in the surrounding county of Alameda, CA detailing the number and type of computers available, as well as the actual time children spent on those computers.

This is exactly the data for which I’ve been looking and had not been able to find. Unfortunately, he only details computers actually in the classroom because he says, without corresponding data, that they are the ones with “greater potential to distribute [their] potential effectively.” (Razo, 2006) (The effective impact of classroom vs. other located computers would, of course, be valuable related research.)

In general, the author finds that despite these schools touting instructional computer to pupil ratios of about 1:4, each classroom has only about 3 functional computers that are used for approximately 1 of 30 instructional hours per week.

Is it any wonder why researchers haven’t found conclusive evidence of the positive effects of classroom technology?


Razo, Felipe H (2006). A Survey of Computer Utilization in Elementary Classrooms. Educause, Retrieved April 15, 2009, from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/WRC07017A.pdf

Labs vs. In-class: The Debate Continued

This article is by far the most germane to my research question of determining the distribution of student computers within an elementary school. The article admits to a long and unresolved debate over placement of computers often between either a computer lab or distributed among the classrooms of a school. Additionally, it discusses the large pedagogical impact of such a decision.

Jenson and Rose examine, first hand, 32 Canadian elementary schools in six different provinces of Canada. Schools included ranged from old low-income, inner city ones to those designed and built within the last five years. The article comes out of a larger Canadian study of technology use in education but the authors quickly realized that the fundamental and “seemingly basic” question of where to locate computers drives much of both how their thought of and, ultimately, how well they’re integrated into the daily curriculum of the school. In fact, “physical location and access” were cited as the most important factors affecting how well teachers were integrating technology into their teaching.
In addition to reciting the advantages and disadvantages of one location vs. another, the paper strongly suggests that schools not take an all-or-nothing approach and attempt to find solutions that are more flexile such as laptop carts. This same solution was echoed by several readers of the very recent ZDNet Educational Blog written by Christopher Dawson “In-class computers vs. labs.” While laptop carts may be an excellent solution for schools that have control over their own technology budget, some schools are simply allocated technology from a district level and thus may not have an opportunity to choose laptops.
Finally, as helpful as this article was in helping to understand that placement question, it did not give a quantitative account of where computers were located in the 32 visited schools.

Jenson, J., & Rose, C. (2006). Finding space for technology: Pedagogical observations on the organization of computers in school environments. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 32(1).

What makes scary movies scary?

I’d never really considered this question before. I’m a huge fan of cinema and have often marveled at the enormous evocative power of movies. For me movies, and all media to some extent, but movies in particular, are an escape. Stepping into a darkened theater and an engrossing plot is also stepping out of whatever it is in the real world that I might be trying to avoid or simply take brief relief from. And what’s amazing it that, time after time, film after film, it works. I’m taken from my place and time to another world. Even more noteworthy is that the emotions that are evoked carry forth even after the lights go up and life goes on. It seems too obvious to acknowledge that sad movies make us sad and uplifting movies make us feel uplifted but what’s remarkable, upon further review, is that they do. The fact that stories told by other people about people other than ourselves can have such a lasting effect on us is a testament to the power of storytelling and of media.

And as for what makes a scary movie scary? What makes media so powerful? I don’t know for sure, but I’ll tell you this, I’ve got the nightlight on.