DUBAI // The squeak of chalk on a blackboard in schools has mostly given way to the click of a mouse.But for one educator at least, technology is far from the best teaching tool.
Dr Clifton Chadwick, a senior lecturer in international education management and policy development at the British University in Dubai, said it would “almost be better” not to use computers at schools because they contributed so little to education.
“You have an awful lot of messianic people who swear the computer will solve everything,” he said.
In a paper he will present to an educational conference in Bilbao, Spain in July, Dr Chadwick suggests one-on-one instruction is just one-seventh as effective as computers. Dr Chadwick said he is not against the use of technology in schools. However, he believes the way computers are used in classrooms does not allow students to realise their full potential. “Since the computer is a very powerful device, it tends to take away from real student thinking,” Dr Chadwick said.
“Computers are a very, very rich medium. Rich media do most of the work and students don’t work as much as they should.” In particular, Dr Chadwick said the way in which computers are used do not allow the progress of individual students to be evaluated. As a result, the nuances of classroom teaching – for instance, assisting pupils who need more help with a subject, while challenging those who excel – are lost.
Dr Chadwick said this was partly because computers are designed by IT specialists, and not by educators.“If you take mathematics, the teacher will explain something for 10 minutes and the student spends 30 minutes practising it, while the teacher walks round seeing what they’re doing,” he said.
“With computers, you could have that same 10-minute presentation, but then the student works with a computer program that provides quicker feedback and guides them through the learning process. That would be much more effective than what’s going on now.
“The teacher could look on her screen and know which students were struggling, and go specifically to those students and help them. It might say that Johnny has answered questions one, two, three and four with no problem, but Suzy hasn’t got past question one.
“The teacher could then give individual assistance and manage who’s learning and who’s not. That’s the model, but it doesn’t work like that. Getting it into the classroom is very difficult.”
If computers were used in this way, then their value would approach that of having an individual tutor for each student.
He said personalised learning produced the best results and if a computer could be programmed to fill this role, it would be tremendously effective. Parallel to improvements in software, Dr Chadwick said there has to be a change to student-centred classrooms for IT to be used properly.“Currently, it’s a teacher-centred classroom where the students have a passive role,” he said. “These are things that are not really appropriate for computers.”
Before taking up his post at the British University in Dubai, Dr Chadwick worked as a policy adviser to a number of different governments, such as Chile, Paraguay, Argentina and Venezuela, while his consultancy work was usually on behalf of international institutions such as the World Bank.
In 2003 and 2004, he was the senior project manager for the Qatar Education Reform Project, which introduced similar reforms to those currently being undertaken at government schools in the UAE. In his experience, just a few institutions in Canada, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom are using computers to their full potential.
“They are very rare,” he said. “It’s done on a very piecemeal basis and is not an integral part of the curriculum.”
Older children have the most to gain if computers were used properly in schools, said Dr Chadwick. He said the benefits of computers are so low, it is best not to use computers in the first few years of education. This should help to ensure that children do not become “dehumanised” by our high-technology society.“In the first three or four years, they should probably just work with teachers,” he said.
Daniel Bardsley