Education, technology share weak connection

The digital age washes over us daily. You’ve heard everyone from writers to scientists to that strange subscriber who leaves suggestive comments on your blog saying how advanced our technology is or how we’re all going to be dribbling screen-junkies some day. There are friends and enemies for every time period; ours is no exception. And, even though you value their MIT-educated opinions, life before text messaging feels harder to imagine than life before the wheel.
If I had to call the last decade anything, I would call it the age of Apple. The iPod, the iPhone and the Mac are three products that are cultural juggernauts by now. Apple has decided to push the envelope, announcing the new iPad, a digital creation which looks — to all accounts — like a tablet-sized iPhone. Remember those handheld screens from “Star Trek”? You can now have one of your own — without even knowing what a Klingon is.
I neither glorify nor decry the digital age. Technology does change us and how we act, but so does every minute of the day: every handshake, every look skyward, every farewell. That may be the English major in me talking, but the effect of a few products won’t change human behavior any more than day-to-day life.
Bearing that in mind, I read some of the optimistic goals for the iPad and I realized the real problem is that we think we are ahead of our time. Blogs at Wired.com rave that this new tool will “save the publishing industry, reboot education.” Plans run wild, explained with one-part sense, two-parts giddiness. Students will no longer need textbooks; learning will ascend the peak of digital integration. All of these ravings sound just like that — ravings. Perhaps these writers have failed to look away from their Macs in awhile.
What will this iPad do for me, as a student? I have never understood how technology enhances learning. The only digital age staple I see nowadays is PowerPoint, a tool that has become more of a crutch for teachers than a study guide for students. And we all have our experiences with Blackboard (and its pandemic lack of use by professors). From what I see, little has changed in education, given all the technology that has been imposed on it. People — more specifically, students and teachers — are not the cyber-denizens technology writers make us out to be. Not yet, anyway.
Does this make us old-fashioned, behind the times? Far from it. A film historian once asked my high school media class what we thought films were stored on. He answered: old 35mm. DVDs, Blu-rays, even VHS — he wouldn’t touch the stuff, he said. It takes advanced technology to play those. But 35mm takes light, a wheel and something with which to turn it — nothing else.
We aren’t quick to embrace technology in our learning because the old lecture-and-notebook way of doing things works (and has always worked). Most of the time this technology requires experts to work it correctly and the right generation to receive it. We aren’t that generation. I’m not saying that generation isn’t coming. But what these happy bloggers need to realize is that technology doesn’t change things overnight. Humans aren’t programmable; timing and patience is still crucial — even in the Apple Age.