Snark Attack: Does UCLA Research Dissing Technology Bomb?

[Update 5 Feb 09: Some great push-back in the comments below state that the Science Daily post to which this is a rebuttal is not a good summary of the original research. I've changed the title of this post to reflect that info. Read comments by Jennifer and D'Arcy for more - and more questions their comments open up.]

Okay, I just read a study that put me on Code Red. All sorts of ed sites are giving totally unquestioning air time to a UCLA psychologist's new study just published in Science - and summarized here on Science Daily. I haven't read the study itself, only the Science Daily summary, so I don't know who should be in the cross-hairs of the following rant-buttal.

The headline and lede are real beauts (emphasis added):

Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And Analysis?

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games.

While I'm still calm - I'm writing this intro last, having already finished the body below - maybe I should invite you to go read the full article yourself, and let me know if you, like me, found no evidence of "critical thinking" in any test cited as evidence in the "research." All I found was memorization, "right answers," factual recall. If there's more "there" there, please point it out in the comments. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Why does this "research" deserve a full aerial assault?

Because it's going to be used by reactionary clock-turn-backers, with no pedagogical experience with laptop learning, to oppose pulling our 19th century classrooms into the 21st century. You want to encourage more drop-outs, figurative or literal, from today's schools? Then deny their students the use of all the technological tools they - and we - use outside of schools. Stay schooly. (What's with those high-tech school buses, anyway? Let's go back to covered wagons for school transport.)

Bombs away:

I will not pull my hair out as I make this point: that thing called a “book” is a product of technology. In all fairness, maybe the article meant to use “electronics” instead of the term "technology." A quibble, I know. Just warming up.

Bomb One:

Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.

Um, people who surf the internet sort of, you know, READ there - presumably for pleasure. Unless they surf at gunpoint.

Bomb Two:

How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as reading and classroom discussion?

Why “versus”? This technology thingy you and I are sharing right this very moment is called a “weblog.” And that thingy you’re doing this here minute is that old-fangled thing called “reading.”

And, you know, if you comment, and others and I reply to your comment, that’s called “discussion.” Sheesh, I'm sorry to be so snarky, but really - am I crazy for saying it's deserved?

Bomb Three:

"No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops."

Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.

That’s great advice - for 1990. How about digital storytelling, student films, re-mixes? And if you’re going to stress presentation skills with Powerpoint, please, please, please do not teach students that text-and-bullet-riddled slides - what all adults who’ve suffered it too much fondly call “Death by PowerPoint” - is the path to career success. Point them to TED, for example, where some of the world’s most interesting thinkers give “presentations” that TED (and I) prefer to call “talks” - without PowerPointlessness - using, above all, good storytelling and public speaking skills. Or show them Larry Lessig, the master of minimalism in Slideshow presentations, by happy coincidence, giving a TED Talk:

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Or marketing guru Seth Godin (also on TED):

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Bomb Four:

"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield, who has been using films in her classes since the 1970s.

"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said. "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.

Arg. Yes, visual input - and aural, by the way, and physically manipulable - help us all process information better. But to say that “most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis, or imagination” is just so wrong. I know this from my own teaching practice, in which I deploy that high-tech gadget called the “pause button” to stop the freaking video or audio every time I or a student want to, to discuss whatever just happened. Or write about it in notes or quick journaling.

Bomb Five:

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

So let me get this straight: Electronic technology, which has been around at its current ubiquitous level for less than a decade, is implicitly responsible for a decline in “read[ing] for pleasure” that has been going on for “decades”? Let’s follow the bad logic here to a better hypothetical cause for this decline: schools frequently kill the joy in books by making reading “schooly." You know: “Fill out the work-sheet. Write an essay on the symbolism. Get ready for your quiz" on whatever random detail teacher decided should have stuck in all students’ memories - while dismissing the facts that a) teacher has memorized every detail, because s/he has probably taught that same book so many years s/he could recite it in his/her sleep, while his/her students don't have that advantage; b) the students had so much other homework that they had to speed-read the pages at home to get to their other assignments, or to c) read that book they want to read, instead of the one teacher forces them to read.

And let me point out, again, that the young are reading up a storm today. They’re just doing it online. That’s problematic in many ways, but so is the book-reading schools so often pervert through their schooliness.

Bomb Six (In which we consider the nuclear option):

Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.

"Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.

Restrain me, quick, before I break something. Because there’s a missing element in this bit of sloppy science that makes me want to throw my beloved laptop through the window. It’s this: the freaking teacher. So let me correct this: “CLUELESSLY wiring classrooms for internet access does not enhance learning.”

I won’t stop to question the implicit endorsement of lecturing as good teaching here, though I’d like to. I will say, though, that if a teacher wants students to listen to a lecture without distraction, I’ll share my brilliant technique for making that happen (I taught in a 1:1 laptop school).  Ready? TELL THE STUDENTS TO CLOSE THEIR FREAKING LAPTOPS UNTIL THE LECTURE IS OVER. (Okay, I’m calm. You can untie me now.)

Bomb Seven:

Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.

These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.

I remember CNN’s coverage of the presidential debates, and how those blasted audience graphs meandered up and down like drunken worms - green worms men, red worms women - throughout the whole thing. So fair enough. BUT. This is still sort of lame. Web video can be replayed to our mind’s content, until we feel like we’ve mastered the content. So if the study above was a one-off showing of CNN, followed by a memorization test, big whoop (and again - this is "critical thinking"?). It’s totally schooly, and divorced from the authentic uses we put this stuff to in that non-school place called the real world.

School Me:

I admit I'm sensitive about all of this. But it's not without reason. I've taken UCLA online courses by esteemed older professors whose use of technology reminded me of geriatrics I've known trying to figure out a DVD player. And they're the ones in charge, in the worst cases, of our schools. I shared an experience along these lines on my other blog, where I gave a report of my experience at the teacher recruitment fair I went to in Bangkok a few weeks ago:

Schools touting themselves as “21st century schools” and banging their laptop program drums - and during interviews with which I expected flower petals to descend from on high - on an occasion or two turned out to instead voice sentiments belonging to, um, people who’d obviously never experienced the literacy magic that happens after a few months writing and conversing behind the wheel of a blog. No rose-petals there - instead, many mental leaves of wet cabbage and other assorted offal fell, probably, in both our imaginations.

So my point: The internet is a revolution in literacy that dwarfs that of Gutenberg 500 years ago. And barring something apocalyptic, electronic media will only continue to eclipse print in years to come. Schools can deny that fact if they want, but they'll have no better luck than the Catholic Church did denying heliocentric theory for 300 years after Galileo (the Church took Galileo's works off their Index of Forbidden Books in the 1990s).

More pointedly still: Creating an opposition between "critical thinking" and "reading and discussing," on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.

So if anybody trots that UCLA study out to oppose modernizing classrooms with the thing that's replacing the book, please feel free to trot this reasoned little rant out as a counter-argument. (You can show them this and this as examples to support the tech-to-teach-critical-thinking argument, too.)

Dr. Strangelove screenshot by Acid Zebra