Well fluff.


As of the eleventh hour, I was ahead of normal production for Penumbric—layout done, everything proofed, web coding complete. Even my editorial was nearly ready, and it was about something I’m passionate about—learning and school. I’d read about Jared Cooney Horvath and his self-published book The Digital Delusion, in which he suggests downward trends in standardized test scores are tied to giving children laptops and tablets for use at school and the use of apps known collectively as Educational Technology (EdTech). This sounded like poppycock, and it touched upon my dislike of many anti-something movements going around these days, many of them based on debunked “scientific” papers and the false truth machine that is social media. “Here we go again,” I thought, with correlation being confused with causation, and once again we’ll be headed back to the medical equivalent of leeches being the star medical treatment. But while I believe in science and vaccines and medicine being (on the whole) Good Things, after reading a bit of Horvath’s actual book (and not just the reviews of it), I find myself … well, at a crossroads EdTech-wise. On the one hand, I disagree with Horvath that much tech is bad, and that all educational technology is “… fundamentally incompatible with how human beings actually learn.” Given my own experience, I can tell you that my learning and writing improved drastically the more tech was introduced. My handwriting, for instance, was atrocious, and the more I labored to make it legible, the less I focused on actually writing good essays. My first computer was a godsend, freeing me to actually work on my ideas, or my schoolwork, rather than the physical act of writing itself.

I’m also perfectly happy to read on computer. I do this as part of my work, yes, but it also creates a much more interactive environment for me. If I want to find a passage somewhere in a book, I can just use a search function. I can still make notes in the text, I still retain the ideas just as I would if it were in a textbook. And I’m not even part of the generation born with computers.

If EdTech were only these things (computers and tablets for children to use to supplement their learning), I’d be happy to endorse it as an alternative form of teaching. As I was taught in my education courses, different students have different ideal learning strategies, and it is possible that a teacher can use EdTech to access more of these strategies in order to better reach a larger number of students.

But Horvath exposes the flip side of EdTech as well—that part of it where the apps and so forth are being developed by for-profit companies, and following the example set by social media, some of them apparently use similar methods to basically get students “addicted” to their software. I’m not sure how well this works, and if schools vet the software properly, without being induced in some way to favor one company over another except on merit, then EdTech should be a good thing. However, I know how the world works, and I also know that there’s loads of rubbish software out there being used by millions. So …

I still feel that connecting technology use in education directly to lowered test and IQ scores has a correlation/causation problem; there are too many factors involved to single out technology, and I’m against going back to using only paper textbooks and pencils and paper. Incidentally, I’m for mitigating the distractions caused by phone and social media use in school—but in that case we’re talking about distractions from learning, not the learning itself. We ultimately need a nuanced solution to EdTech, even though seeing everything as either/or is easier.

Jeff Georgeson,
Managing Editor
Penumbric