Is technology going to transform education?
Using a pen and paper seems foreign now in educational settings. The last time I was asked to write on paper was in an intermediate writing course that I took during my freshman year of college. On the first day of class, my professor asked us to pull out a piece of paper and write down our thoughts about a topic that I can’t remember at this moment. Everyone looked at this professor like he did something wrong due to everyone having their laptops out on their desks ready to be used as mini TVs. Only four students (excluding myself) had paper and most of the class had writing utensils to use. Reflecting on this moment led me to question whether technological developments in education will succeed. So far, I am not convinced that bringing technology into educational settings will be beneficial as time goes on.
Revisiting the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and universities were trying their best to adjust to this issue. They had to figure out how to keep educating their students safely. It didn’t take long for Zoom to become an option for classes to take place and soon that became the norm for a while. These virtual classrooms weren't the best due to most students not taking class seriously by turning off their cameras and doing some other task that wasn’t related to class. I know this because I was one of them at one point. Not only that, but I noticed how most of my classmates weren’t motivated to complete their work. This led me to believe that this was one effect of having technology infused into education and learning.
On the other hand, another significant impact of integrating technology into education is enhanced accessibility. Technology facilitates remote learning, online courses, and assistive tools that improve educational access for students with disabilities, those living in rural areas, and individuals who learn differently. Overall, this is good because that means that anyone around the world can receive access to education without sitting in a classroom from Monday through Friday. This is one way to look at how technology transforms education but I still stand on how it does more harm than good.
In an article on StandfordReport called “How technology is reinventing education”, Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and other education scholars try to figure out what's next for technology trends in classrooms and what will change. For instance, Dan Schwartz stated how “Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching, but there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI, in particular, is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.” Confirming my thoughts on how letting technology take over education isn’t the best strategy due to how it may mislead students and teachers to approach new ways of learning and absorbing information as a whole
