Do smart-phones make for dumb students? A March 21 US News & World Report article suggested that the use of smart-phones in the classroom “concerns some professors.” Despite citing NYU business professor Aria Finger’s support for smart-phones as an “instant fact check,” the article goes on to express that some professors see smart-phones as instruments of distraction with little upside. Yet, smart-phones appear to be culturally ubiquitous, and does this mean that their use in education should be accommodated, or restricted?
Frankly, I don’t see why technology that results in increased communication and speedy access to information should be seen as threatening to teachers. I do, however, see why smart-phone use would be threatening to dominant methods of education in America—methods that will get little defense from me. The use of smart-phones (or really, any open Internet access) in the classroom could be used to challenge the idea that education is about the consumption of pre-packaged “facts,” and could help advance more engaging and empowering classroom experiences.
However, it’s true that information technology like smart-phones do not in themselves result in productive classroom communication. As Dan Dooghan, a UT professor of English, says, “All technology can have a potentially constructive use in the classroom”—even smart-phones. The challenge lies in how the technology is integrated in class. Likewise, in the US News article, Vassilis Dalakas, a marketing professor at California State—San Marcos, says, “My guess is that a professor would have to be very creative in a way that [he or she] integrates the technology in the classroom.” The professor is absolutely right that the usage of technology is key, though I don’t think that integrating smart-phones in the classroom is completely an issue of creativity, but rather a question of what questions are being asked in class discussion and testing.
For example, take a piece of technology that UT students will be accustomed to, Blackboard. Blackboard can be used to facilitate direct communication between students and professors through its Discussion Board feature.
However, such use of the Discussion Board often goes spurned, and instead Blackboard becomes a database for lecture notes, which reinforces the idea that education is about consuming facts, not applying them. Which it’s not.
The biggest push back against the open use of smart-phones in the classroom, and the reason why I think information technology should be embraced, probably results from the fact that it would render the dominant model of education moot: that “mastery” of a subject is about consuming, memorizing and regurgitating facts—what educational theorist Paulo Freire has called “the banking concept of education.” And then tests are structured accordingly:
What year was the French Revolution? What is the atomic no. of Helium? What phrase did Holden Caulfield find etched into the wall at his sister’s school? 2+2=? But what is the use of holding up these kinds of questions as the epitome of mastering a subject when these answers, if not known, are so readily available, and are often hiding outlawed in a student’s backpack via smart-phone?
To be clear: professors and teachers are not the reason for the dominance of “banking concept” of education, but rather the modern focus on running education like a business, in which students curriculums are standardized from on high to produce predictable “outcomes.” And which is why, I think, embracing smart-phones could be a step toward a liberation of the task of teaching. Students can move past the imposition of “facts” and begin getting truly engaged with their area of study. Smart-phones can help make useless the easy questions, and lead classroom discussion past the who, what and where, to the why and, most importantly, so what?
And a “so what?” approach to education would be especially dangerous in high schools, too, which are often regimented, prison-like and suffocatingly authoritarian. The culture of standardized testing—in which the acquisition of a few limited skills are rewarded and taught to—is partly to blame. Indeed, in high schools cellphones are often banned and confiscated if used during school hours. In essence, this amounts to restricting certain pathways of information during “official” school hours. This is the opposite of empowering education.
And if empowering education is the goal, then smart-phones, though obviously not a silver bullet, can be in service of that goal. Smart-phones represent a cultural change that no amount of restriction in class will do away with, and it’s a restriction that ignores the potential for smart-phones to help revitalize the act of teaching for both its practitioners and students.
Mikey Angelo Rumore can be reached at michealangelorumore@gmail.com.