January+2013

January 7, 2013
I was asked to write a bit about the BYOD 1 to1 laptop education experience at [|Dakota Collegiate] for the recent edition of the [|ManACE Journal]. As I sat in front of my computer over the holiday season, I had a bit of time to reminisce and to look back over the two+ years that I have been writing about the changes underway at Dakota. One of the things that struck me as the brief article took shape is that the grade 10 students at Dakota have never known high school without computers in classes. Their __own__ computers in classes. This struck me, because the technology in an environment tends to shape the activities that occur as well. Perhaps that has already been well established by McLuhan: [|the idea is that we shape the tools, and then the tools shape us.]

My alma mater celebrates it's [|50th Anniversary] this August. [|Hammarskjold] High School opened back in the early 60's, and it makes me wonder about what kinds of cutting edge technologies they would have put into that school at the time. In the 60's the educational value of television in classrooms was hotly contested. [|Gestetners] and carbon paper were the copying methods of choice, but [|Xerography] and photocopying were about to interrupt life as usual (as a kid I always loved the smell of those purple and green Gestetner copies, but I digress). The overhead projector was cutting into the dominance of the chalk board, but nobody had yet heard of a whiteboard or a dry-erase marker. Teachers spun records of British actors in the throes of self-loathing as Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1) decided whether or not he ought to be, or not to be.

We all know that by the 70's, Hammarskjold and other High Schools like it had fully embraced television, and by the 80's VHS players, and [|BetaMax], and even the occasional [|Laser Disc] could be found in schools. Threading a 16mm film projector became a bit of a lost art (although threading a projector was still required learning in my Education and Media class in 1993). The business machines in the school allowed students to learn how to use an electric typewriter or an adding machine. Personal electronic calculators started to appear in classrooms, and many prophesied the end of rigorous and meaningful math instruction in high schools.

By the time I arrived at Hammarskjold in the early 80's the business department was having to figure out what to do with personal computers. We had a small room with about eight [|Commodore PET] computers, and many of us learned to code a few lines in basic in that closet. The school carpentry shop was conscripted to build a massive plywood case for one of the machines so that it could be lugged home in the back of a station wagon on a Friday and returned to the school on Monday, much in the same way that the Grade 5 student gets to take the class hamster home for proper care and feeding. That PET computer in the plywood box was the first computer that ever made it into my home. The thing was massive-it filled the entire kitchen table, but it also signaled an important technological change in my young life.

All of this brings me back to that McLuhan idea with a new question; how have I been shaped by the tools that were present in my K-12 education? Have I been damaged by calculator use? Was I enlightened by the PET? Or does it all just turn into some warm fuzzy nostalgia about the smell of the purple words on my Grade 11 science test? Must give us pause. I do think that the technology that I used in high school helped me a bit with what I do today. I mean, I work in a high school, I use computers every day, I give presentations, copy files, and Dakota is similar in size and age to Hammarskjold. All of this also makes me wonder what the next technology to shuffle out of high schools will be. Recently we lost our [|Scantron] machine. Overhead projectors are not being maintained or replaced anymore. New ways of doing the old things emerge, and give us new ways to do new things as well.

The Grade 10's at Dakota have their own computers with them every day in high school. This is normal for them, as normal as vanilla ice-cream. Sometimes I tease them with a bit of a look into the future- a world where the internet can be worn (as in clothing) or internalized (with a chip implant of some sort, or nanotech, or any other Kurzweillian possibility). When I ask if they would allow their children to get some sort of surgery to improve their connectivity to the internet my students are divided. That future seems a bit far off, but I sense that it is closer for them than they realize. Who knows what the future holds, but if it holds steady, then there could easily be more technological discovery in the next 20 years than there has been in the past 100. And won't that change high schools.

Dakota is, to my knowledge, still the only large public high school in Manitoba that requires students to bring their own computers to classes. Others are watching us closely, weighing the benefits and measuring the costs. Can this be done equitably? Are computers easy enough to get to require all students to have them? How many computers will schools need to provide for the families who really cannot afford a student machine? All of the questions are valid and necessary. Yet at the same time I see several private schools moving forward with a greater degree of computer inclusion/infusion all of the time. In centuries past only the rich could afford books. In decades past only the rich could afford computers. Now both are affordable, and maybe even affordable enough to adopt as necessities in public schooling, whether they are owned by the students or by the school. I wonder, what will be affordable and expected in classrooms ten years from now? I expect that Dakota's BYOD program may have the faint and quaint smell of the Gestetner. After all, I bought a calculator at the dollar store the other day...

I think Dakota's grade 10 students will have an advantage because it is completely normal and expected for them to use their own computers every day. I think that somehow (in a way that is very difficult to quantify) that they will benefit from a BYOD high school in something like the way I benefited from the PET in the pine box. I got comfortable with the technology. I wrestled to communicate to it, and with it. I learned that communication technology comes and goes, and goes, and goes. Who knows where that PET is now, or the Laser Disc, or that old Gestetner.

It is true that our tools shape us, but then we use them to shape new tools, and we replace the old ways with the new. I think this is at the heart of why it matters for students use the new tools every day. After all, the new ways will not remain new for very long.