I have been remiss in my inten­tion to blog my school’s path to 1:1. Our plan­ning pro­ceeds apace and we have passed impor­tant mile­stones with our school fac­ulty and board that I plan to describe in future posts. As of now, we are at the point of bring­ing the pro­posal before par­ents to intro­duce them to the idea, raise aware­ness, and com­mu­ni­cate the benefits.

As we pre­pare to talk to par­ents about our pro­posed move to 1:1 stu­dent com­put­ing, I have been strug­gling with shap­ing the mes­sage we want to deliver. We need to be able to clearly artic­u­late the edu­ca­tional ben­e­fit of pro­vid­ing each stu­dent with his/her own mobile com­puter. Ide­ally, even the name of our 1:1 pro­gram would aid in con­vey­ing its edu­ca­tional mis­sion and ben­e­fit. While “One-to-One Com­put­ing” is an accepted and under­stood term in schools, it refers to a ratio of stu­dents to com­put­ers and empha­sizes the machine, not its con­tri­bu­tion to teach­ing and learning.

“Any­time, Any­where Learn­ing” is another com­mon name for 1:1 pro­grams that has the advan­tage of empha­siz­ing the expan­sion in the tem­po­ral and spa­tial con­texts for learn­ing that 1:1 enables, but it misses the class­room ben­e­fits of 1:1 entirely. “Lap­tops for Learn­ing” and “Com­put­ers for Kids” are amus­ingly allit­er­a­tive but again stress the machine too much. My per­sonal pref­er­ence, “21st Cen­tury 1:1/Ubiquitous Stu­dent Com­put­ing Dig­i­tal Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive” may be highly descrip­tive, but does not really roll trip­pingly off the tongue!

I think we need bet­ter brand­ing for 1:1, either in a pithy name or a sticky slo­gan that imme­di­ately con­veys its edu­ca­tional ben­e­fits. After all, the pro­gram name is likely the first intro­duc­tion to the con­cept and is what gets reit­er­ated every time the pro­gram is ref­er­enced, so it sets an ini­tial frame and con­tin­u­ally rein­forces cer­tain asso­ci­a­tions at every rep­e­ti­tion. Should not those asso­ci­a­tions empha­size edu­ca­tion, not hard­ware ratios?

What do you think? If you have sug­ges­tions for names or slo­gans that con­vey the teach­ing and learn­ing advan­tages of 1:1, sub­mit them in the comments!

A num­ber of recent media pieces, includ­ing two arti­cles in
the Wash­ing­ton Post (March
9 and April
25) describ­ing col­lege pro­fes­sor back­lash against stu­dent note­book PCs in
class, give me pause as I con­tinue to move my mid­dle school toward a 1:1
stu­dent com­put­ing program. (Last Mon­day, our Upper School Divi­sion Head
and I [Direc­tor of IT] pre­sented an update on our draft 1:1 stu­dent com­put­ing
pro­posal to the full school Board, bring­ing us one step closer to
implementation.)

Uni­ver­si­ties have been bell­wethers in the use of infor­ma­tion
tech­nol­ogy in edu­ca­tion, hav­ing led the adop­tion of com­put­ers, com­puter
net­works, the Inter­net, wire­less net­works, and wide­spread stu­dent lap­top
pro­grams, but these arti­cles describe a rebuff of com­put­ing technology’s
grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity. Has the pen­e­tra­tion of IT in edu­ca­tion out­stripped its
effec­tive use? Are we see­ing the early warn­ing signs of an insti­tu­tional
rejec­tion of mobile com­put­ing in education?

Nor­mally, I would dis­miss the Post arti­cles as mere
news-mongering, ped­dling iso­lated if sen­sa­tional inci­dents such as the physics
pro­fes­sor who shat­tered a liq­uid nitro­gen frozen lap­top to announce his ban.
How­ever, hav­ing also expe­ri­enced uni­ver­sity hos­til­ity toward stu­dent note­book
PCs first-hand, I am inclined to refrain from dis­miss­ing these arti­cles
out-of-hand. A few of pro­fes­sors in my own Mas­ters pro­gram at the Uni­ver­sity of
Chicago have dis­al­lowed stu­dent com­put­ers in their classes for the same rea­sons
cited in the Post arti­cles. One included an entire read­ing
in the course packet to explain his stance. Thank­fully, in my pro­gram, unlike
the U of C law school, where Inter­net access
has been banned, such restric­tions have been the excep­tion. (Nick Sauers
has pro­vided com­men­tary on more recent law school lap­top bans on this blog already.)

Hav­ing seen the mas­sive invest­ment
in cam­pus com­puter net­works and the rise of note­book com­puter pro­grams at many
schools, and hav­ing per­son­ally used a note­book PC in class as a stu­dent for the
past 20 years—since I was a senior in high school—I have been some­what
dumb­founded by this turn.

Of course, my pre-WiFi, pre-World
Wide Web, mono­chrome Tandy 1100FD
offered far fewer oppor­tu­ni­ties for dis­trac­tion for me in my high school and
col­lege classes than do even today’s lowli­est net­books or smart­phones. I had
the advan­tage of build­ing my in-class com­put­ing habits on a com­par­a­tively
bor­ing plat­form. Com­puter tech­nol­ogy has changed, how­ever, and given my own first-hand
expe­ri­ence of the dis­trac­tion fac­tor offered by wire­less note­book PCs in
classes, I do under­stand the moti­va­tion behind the bans, even if I do not agree
with the tac­tic. The lure of instant Google grat­i­fi­ca­tion of any stray thought
dur­ing an oth­er­wise unin­ter­est­ing lec­ture is pretty pow­er­ful. While I use my tablet PC in class
for tak­ing notes and ref­er­enc­ing class e-texts, I admit to hav­ing suc­cumbed to
check­ing e-mail dur­ing lec­tures that did not engage my full atten­tion. I have
had the pres­ence of mind to avoid the egre­gious exam­ples of on-line shop­ping,
instant mes­sag­ing, social net­work­ing, and gam­ing that are cited in the back­lash
arti­cles. I am a mid-life adult, how­ever, not a late-adolescent col­lege stu­dent
still devel­op­ing the impulse con­trol sys­tems of my pre-frontal cor­tex. As a
result, I may be slightly bet­ter able to resist the itch to update Face­book when
faced with a dry lec­ture on finance. More impor­tantly, I am not—like the
stu­dents for whom I am plan­ning a 1:1 program—a pre-adolescent even fur­ther
back on that devel­op­men­tal path.

That devel­op­men­tal issue is the
one that gives me the great­est pause. While the premise of 1:1 pro­grams is to
make learn­ing more inter­ac­tive, engag­ing, and effec­tive than tra­di­tional
class­room lec­tures and activ­i­ties, I worry that they may instead train our stu­dents
for the sort computer-enabled dis­trac­tion, inat­ten­tion, and escapism
exem­pli­fied in the back­lash arti­cles. On a broader soci­etal level, such wor­ries
have got­ten press in recent New York
Times arti­cles high­light­ing the distraction-addiction-dark side of Inter­net
tech­nol­ogy. Nicholas Carr sparked the con­ver­sa­tion about the down­side of the
Inter­net with his thought-provoking Atlantic Monthly arti­cle “Is
Google Mak­ing Us Stu­pid?”, which he has now expanded into a book. Of
course, I have not the time to read it (as if to prove his point ;-), so my
under­stand­ing of the brain changes induced by Inter­net use and the
well-documented pro­duc­tiv­ity drops attend­ing mul­ti­task­ing come from the
syn­op­tic Wired arti­cle.

Touch­ing on sim­i­lar ground, Philip
Zombardo’s RSA Animate-enhanced TED Talk on The Secret Pow­ers of
Time at one point argues that the 10,000 hours of video games played by the typ­i­cal Amer­i­can
boy by the time he turns 21 traps him in the mode of instant gratification/present-hedonism and wires his brain for an always engag­ing, con­trol­lable, immer­sive vir­tual exis­tence mal­adapted to
tra­di­tional class­room learn­ing, exac­er­bat­ing our nation’s school drop-out
prob­lem. While I am not con­vinced that heavy expo­sure to infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy
nec­es­sar­ily ends in an inevitable night­mare of self-destructive
present-hedonism, I think the propen­sity for Internet-inattention is real. So is
1:1 com­put­ing the rem­edy for that home/school dis­con­nect, mak­ing school more
engag­ing, allow­ing it to com­pete with richer, more engag­ing expe­ri­ences out­side of school through more
inter­ac­tive tech­nol­ogy? Or is it sim­ply another dose of dis­trac­tion and easy
escapism?

I do not pro­fess to know the answer to those ques­tions, but
sev­eral things occur to me as I reflect on this issue. First, this dis­tract­ing
tech­nol­ogy shows no signs of dimin­ish­ing, only of becom­ing more immer­sive, com­pelling,
and ubiq­ui­tous. To remain rel­e­vant, schools need to deal with that real­ity.
Sec­ond, con­trol of atten­tion is cen­tral to suc­cess. In the short-term, stud­ies
show that multi-tasking is less effi­cient than single-tasking, by up to 40%. In the
long-term, con­trol of atten­tion is linked to the devel­op­ment of exec­u­tive
func­tion­ing and the self-regulation skills so vital to suc­cess in life. Third, in
embrac­ing class­room com­put­ing, schools have the oppor­tu­nity to teach stu­dents how
to develop their self-control to deal with dig­i­tal dis­trac­tions. Pri­mary and
sec­ondary schools have much greater lever­age than do col­leges in guid­ing
stu­dent class­room behav­ior. Nick Sauers has cov­ered class­room man­age­ment in the
con­text of 1:1 pro­grams in his post “Ban Bore­dom
not lap­tops” on this blog. The teacher’s art of effec­tive class­room
man­age­ment will become even more impor­tant as tech­nol­ogy pro­gres­sively moves
into schools. Sim­i­larly, and more sig­nif­i­cantly, this envi­ron­ment requires
increas­ing empha­sis on devel­op­ing stu­dents’ metacog­ni­tive reg­u­la­tion, exec­u­tive
func­tion­ing, and emo­tional self-management.

How can we help stu­dents develop strate­gies for con­trol­ling their
atten­tion given the dig­i­tal dis­trac­tions to which stu­dents are every­where exposed?
What is your school doing?