The Laptop Revolution
'The Internet has created the first significant technological development in the history of education, since Guttenburg told the monks to put their quills away'. The article below was orginally published by John Simkin at Spartacus Education (the pioneer of history teaching websites) and on the European Schoolnet. It was also translated and published in Spanish and French. The film opposite was made in the spirit of 20 years of reflection on that original article. |
|
The Laptop Revolution: A History Teacher’s Experience
(European Schoolnet June 2001)
Introduction
John Simkin's excellent article 'The Internet Revolution' (European Schoolnet Virtual School, History Department) is right in all aspects but one. In a nutshell, he argues that the Internet has created the first significant technological development in the history of education, since Guttenburg told the monks to put their quills away. Whilst I accept that the Internet is a critically important development, it will not cause a revolution on its own. As long as we continue to educate our children in classrooms without computers, the effects of the Internet will be limited. For what will really cause a computer driven revolution in the nature of teaching and learning, is student ownership of their own (portable) computer. Until students can access and process their learning anytime, anywhere and in a variety of different formats, then that learning will suffer unnecessary restrictions. Without laptop computers, our classrooms, our teaching and most importantly, the children's learning, will continue to be recognizable to the acquaintances of John Simkin's time travelling teacher from any period of the last two hundred years.
2001 but no longer science fiction
Let's begin by recognising that giving children laptop computers to use in school is no longer in the realms of science fiction. Australian schools began the laptop revolution more than ten years ago (David Loader, quoted in John Simkin's article, led Methodist Ladies' College down the laptop road in 1989). Now, more than 50 000 Australian students have their own laptop. My school, The International School of Toulouse, claims to be Europe's first fully laptop school with all students from Primary to IB Diploma Level owning their own machine. However, according to the news at the recent BETT 2001 show, there are currently 2700 schools in Europe that have integrated laptops in at least some of their classrooms. Furthermore, laptops have now been in schools long enough for serious research to be done on how portable computers impact on teaching and learning. In 1996, laptops introduced into 29 'pioneer schools' in the United States produced results that will have delighted even the most ardent of educational traditionalists. Children are apparently more motivated; they spend longer on their homework, have higher literacy levels and enjoy significantly improved ICT skills. Whilst this is interesting and might in itself justify the capital outlay necessary to equip children with laptops, researchers have tended to focus on the educational aspects of laptop learning that students used to be able to do before the introduction of laptops:
Laptops lead to more student writing and to writing of higher quality. In response to an open ended question, more than one-third of the surveyed teachers named writing as the academic outcome or skill that has been most directly affected by use of the laptops. Some teachers said simply that writing had generally improved; others said that students were doing more writing more often. (Rockman et al, 1998)
It is a similar story in schools that have spent large sums of money furnishing ICT suites. Computers are generally still being used to do the sorts of things that could have been done before computers. I imagine that this is particularly true of history lessons, where word processing and perhaps desktop publishing are the norm. Even the Internet, something that is new and dependent on students having access to computers, tends to be used in very traditional ways. Students use it to find out things that they could have found out more reliably using an encyclopaedia. I can't help feeling that at the moment, the use of computers in education resembles the arrival of the first motorcars in the days of the horse drawn carriage. Not only did cars initially resemble what they were soon to replace; most people perceived them as an unreliable novelty and very few predicted the massive socio-cultural transformation that eventually ensued. It took a while for people in general to appreciate that motorcars would change the world, and as John Simkin has argued, it is only very recently that people have become persuaded that computers might transform education.
So how do laptops make a difference?
How laptops make a difference becomes obvious when we consider what laptops replace. When I began teaching nearly ten years ago, my mother gave me her history exercise books from the early 1950s. At the time, I was struck by how much had changed in 40 years. My mother's work reflected the 'chalk and talk' didacticism prevalent at the time; analytical concepts like reliability and interpretation were absent and the historical content was overwhelmingly political. I recently visited colleagues at my previous (non-laptop) school and had an opportunity to glance through a pile of exercise books waiting to be marked. In complete contrast to my earlier 'student teacher' experience, what now stood out were the similarities with my mother's exercise book of 50 years earlier.
Despite the 50 years of technological advance, the exercise book full of hand written words and the occasional pencil drawn diagram, is still the most important expression of student learning. Perhaps more importantly, from a student perspective, the exercise book peppered by red-penned teacher comments and grades is also still the predominant source of assessment. Doing 'well' in history, whether in 1950 or in the year 2000, is still largely calculated by how well the student performs within the artificial constraints of the lines of the traditional exercise book.
The problem with artificial constraints in education is that students are increasingly aware of this artificiality. As John Simkin points out, for students the educational context is becoming increasingly 'unreal' and therefore irrelevant. History students have for quite some time been learning through a range of different media. In contrast to my mother's generation, students now have access to well designed (no longer just textual) 'textbooks' and they learn about the past through television and video, sometimes even in the classroom. With the advent of CDRoms and, in particular, the Internet, students can now interact with a multimedia-learning environment that starkly contrasts with the exercise book based classroom. For me, no-where is this mismatch better exemplified, than in the few hypertext history 'lessons' that are available online. A student may experience a 'shockwave' and video-clipped, (scanned-in) original source based historical adventure, but the activity sheet must still be printed out, filled in by hand and stuck in the exercise book at the end of the lesson.
In contrast to exercise books, laptop computers have at least two distinct advantages. Firstly, when equipped with good software, laptops become educational 'toolboxes' that can help the student to learn. Secondly, although it may resemble a typewriter, a laptop will allow students to store evidence of their learning and achievements that might not easily be expressed through the written word.
Laptops as multi-media learning 'toolboxes'
The laptop can help to 'scaffold' student learning in a variety of ways. Take for example an activity based around a traditional skill like writing a history essay. As teachers, we know that many students find it difficult to put their ideas together before putting pen to paper. We also recognise that not all students have the patience to draft and redraft their work before they do so. A laptop with a word processor and a student with an electronic writing frame, eradicates these difficulties and allows the student to concentrate on what has always been important: the argument, the analysis and the evidence. As a bonus, the essay produced on a laptop also allows the teacher to make interventions in the 'work in progress' without the soul-destroying red ink of exercise book 'corrections'.
But a laptop computer is not a glorified word-processor. What is really exciting about laptop education is that the 'toolbox' helps a student to express their learning in a format that suits their own learning style. I have lost count of the number of different types of intelligences that Howard Gardner has added to his theory of 'multiple intelligences' in recent years, but I know that a history classroom, restrained by exercise book learning, is a classroom over-dependent on narrow linguistic abilities.
After only a few weeks with a laptop computer, a 12-year-old student (and much younger) is capable of producing multimedia presentations that express sophisticated conceptual understanding without the need for written words. Some students will continue to produce presentations that look and read like essays. They might have used different 'slides' of the presentation as writing frames for different paragraphs and they might incorporate illustrative pictures scanned from books or downloaded from the Internet. But other students will have incorporated self-composed music, complex programmed animation sequences and video of themselves and friends acting out an historical role-play. These students may have dispensed with written text altogether, choosing instead to narrate their presentation. Back in 1984, Howard Gardner writing about the possible impact of computers in education, identified this prospect:
… the potential utility of computers in the process of matching individuals to modes of instruction is substantial…the computer can be a vital facilitator in the actual process of instruction, helping individuals to negotiate sequences at their preferred pace by using a variety of educational techniques… (Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind)
Gardner's vision has been made possible by the laptop computer because it offers scaffolding for students' personal learning styles. It is as Gardner puts it, 'a vital facilitator of instruction' because it allows the student to learn and express that learning in a format that is appropriate to the individual student's intelligence profile.
Laptops as multi-intelligence 'portfolios'
The second advantage of the laptop over the exercise book centres on the laptop's flexibility as a portfolio for a wide-range of different types of student work. The laptop allows students to store and present evidence of their learning in a way that genuinely represents what has gone on, in and outside of the classroom. Let me give you two examples of what I mean.
Recently, I did a cross-curricular project with the Music and Drama teacher, taking as our theme Shakespeare's London. During the course of three weeks of lessons in our subjects, we (students and teachers) made extensive use of digital photo and video to record the students at work: writing and performing music, taking part in role-plays and debates etc. This photographic and video diary was stored along with all the students' other work in a folder on the school server. After three weeks, the students were asked to produce a history of their three weeks of learning, based on the electronic 'evidence', in a ten-minute multimedia presentation.
The results of the project illustrated the power of a laptop to allow the students to create a much more 'reliable' record of their learning and achievements. Amongst much else, they were able to use the digital photos to show themselves dressed in the Elizabethan costume that they had made for the role-play, or they showed their empathetic accounts as the coffee-stained and oven baked 'parchment' that had been temporarily displayed on the classroom wall. The students were able to use the video footage to show themselves performing music that they had composed to accompany the contemporary print of a London street scene c1600. Or they used video to show interviews they had conducted with each other at the end of the project to find out exactly what everyone had learnt. The size of the students' 10-minute presentations ranged from about 20Mb to 300Mb, not easily portable unless the students are carrying their own 6Gb laptop computer. When a project of this sort is finished, the student can burn their completed work onto a CDRom and clear the workspace on their hard drive. Just like a completed exercise book they can file it away. But unlike an exercise book, a CDRom of a student's work is a multimedia record of a much wider range of learning and achievement that would otherwise be ephemeral and quickly forgotten. As history teachers many of us are reluctant to invest classroom time in activities that students may not take seriously and for which there is no easily stored record. With laptops and a digital video camera, all the students can have a permanent portable record of their work before the end of the lesson. In this situation, students tend to prepare as seriously for a performance-based lesson, as they would for any traditional test.
The second example of how laptops allow students to store and present their learning in new and powerful ways occurs when students are encouraged to design their learning as web pages. When a student is first given a laptop they tend to treat them as exercise books. They create folders for different subjects and store their 'exercises' in chronological order, lesson by lesson. The logic of this system of organisation is tested almost immediately by the very nature of lessons in a laptop school, which do not always begin and end at the sound of a bell but continue wherever the student has their laptop with them. The system is further undermined when they are introduced to the concept of hyperlinking their different assignments in different subject areas. Finally, exercise book logic becomes completely redundant when they start completing assignments as web pages and multimedia presentations, rather than as word-processed and desktop published paper documents.
Learning to work in web formats might begin quite simply by expecting students to build a hyperlinked 'glossary' for all the new words they encounter. For example, my Y9 students (13-14 years old) began their glossary around the topic of the Industrial Revolution. A technical development like the 'spinning jenny' in an activity on industrial development might be hyper-linked to a brief description in the student's glossary. Before long, the brief description in the glossary is itself hyperlinked to a specially created page containing pictures and further details about the new inventions. Next, the name James Hargreaves is hyperlinked to a picture and some simple biographical details about the man behind the spinning jenny and so on. It soon becomes apparent to the student that word-processed documents limit their ability to hyperlink their work and that they are better off using web publishing software. Eventually, the student's history exercise book is replaced by a history 'homepage' which is just one part of their self constructed learning website. Their folders still exist, but now they use a browser to surf around their work. This can be stored on the students' laptops but for ease of assessment it might also be stored on the school server or indeed in cyberspace. The occasional visit to a student's website is an attractive alternative to the shopping bags full of exercise books which accompany most teachers home for the weekend.
For the student's learning the advantages are obvious. The student website grows with the student's learning. At the beginning the student will ask 'should I add this word to my glossary?' within a few lessons it becomes an almost natural reflex. The student continually revisits work 'completed' earlier and also links across subject boundaries. Perhaps most importantly, the website becomes much more a reflection of the individual student's learning style than any production-line exercise book can ever be. For it to work, the students must be able to pursue their interests and answer their questions as they arise, which is why constant laptop connection to the Internet is essential.
Even the youngest of my students now talk in terms of 'linear' style and 'web' style learning. In making this distinction they are becoming aware of the different types of audiences available for their work. By 'linear' learning they mean traditional, exercise book style presentation. In a 'linear' presentation the audience (usually only the teacher) is passive and has no control over the content of the presentation. This might be a film, an essay or an automated multimedia presentation; it starts at the beginning and runs through to the end. In contrast, 'web' style learning allocates an active role to the audience of the student's work. The audience is presented with choices and in order to progress the user (no longer simply a reader) has to make selections. If this form of presentation is to be successful, then not only does the student need to 'know' the subject she is presenting, she also needs to be able to teach it. And this, of course, requires a much greater depth of understanding.
I recently invited my students to make a multimedia guide on 'how to use historical documents'. Although some students chose to make a 'linear' presentation, after viewing all the presentations the class agreed that the most effective 'teaching' presentations were in a 'web' format that allowed varying amounts of interactivity between the user and the programme. At a basic level this interactivity might simply involve giving the user a choice of routes through the presentation; at a more complex level, students are able to incorporate relatively sophisticated interactive games. Gary Stager, the American educationalist associated with Logo programming language and MicroWorlds 'constructionist' software, convincingly argues that the students who learn most from educational software are the students who design their own. This is surely true of students who build their own learning websites or design their own interactive presentations and games.
Conclusion
There is a quotation in John Simkin's article, taken from Dale Spender's book Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace, that highlights what is now the central problem of the traditional exercise book classroom:
It's a teaching/learning model that is out of synch with the rest of the world. Many of today's students can tell you in no uncertain terms just how 'unreal' (and boring, and silly) the educational context is. Traditional educational theory, practice and organisation are each day becoming more irrelevant and unworkable: just as the scribal model became obsolete after print was invented.
In contrast to the traditional classroom, the 'educational context' of the laptop classroom is very real. But it is a context in which the role of a teacher has to change significantly. Putting it simply, teachers have to 'teach' less and support more. Some might see this as a threat to their professionalism. But as professionals we have to face up to the fact that a student with a laptop 'knows' more than a teacher without. My experience suggests and the American research confirms, that teachers in a laptop school get more time to do the things that teachers have always considered important: working with students on a one-to-one basis, differentiating between the different ability ranges etc.
However, as we all recognise, this revolution requires more than just the support of teachers, it will also need the support of the whole education industry. At the moment, one of the biggest constraints on relevant learning in my school is the external examination board. I am currently in the ridiculous situation of having to tell the older students to put their laptops away, so that they can practise the speed handwriting skills necessary for success in external examinations! How more 'unreal, boring and silly' can you get?
But the biggest commitment to change must come from governments prepared to fund an education system that keeps abreast of technological developments. If what I have described above is to work as well as it might, laptop computers for every student is only the beginning. Teachers also need classrooms equipped with multimedia projectors, CDRom writers, digital cameras and videos, fast Internet access and plenty of cyberspace for students to store their work. Most importantly they require a relevant digital 'hypertext' curriculum and resources to free them to do what they have always done best, help children to learn.
In the light of the accusations of elitism levelled at the University of Warwick for requiring students to have their own laptops, (The Guardian 7th February 2001) I'd like to conclude with the argument made 30 years ago by the early pioneers of computer in schools:
...Only inertia and prejudice, not economics or lack of good educational ideas stand in the way of providing every child in the world with the kinds of experience of which we have tried to give you some glimpses. If every child were to be given access to a computer, computers would be cheap enough for every child to be given access to a computer - Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon 1971 (quoted in Stager.org)
In 2001 it may still seem like a lot to expect students to have their own laptop computer. But we must accept that our failure to deliver an alternative 'real' educational context might result in schools suffering the same fate as the horse-drawn carriage of the last century.
(European Schoolnet June 2001)
Introduction
John Simkin's excellent article 'The Internet Revolution' (European Schoolnet Virtual School, History Department) is right in all aspects but one. In a nutshell, he argues that the Internet has created the first significant technological development in the history of education, since Guttenburg told the monks to put their quills away. Whilst I accept that the Internet is a critically important development, it will not cause a revolution on its own. As long as we continue to educate our children in classrooms without computers, the effects of the Internet will be limited. For what will really cause a computer driven revolution in the nature of teaching and learning, is student ownership of their own (portable) computer. Until students can access and process their learning anytime, anywhere and in a variety of different formats, then that learning will suffer unnecessary restrictions. Without laptop computers, our classrooms, our teaching and most importantly, the children's learning, will continue to be recognizable to the acquaintances of John Simkin's time travelling teacher from any period of the last two hundred years.
2001 but no longer science fiction
Let's begin by recognising that giving children laptop computers to use in school is no longer in the realms of science fiction. Australian schools began the laptop revolution more than ten years ago (David Loader, quoted in John Simkin's article, led Methodist Ladies' College down the laptop road in 1989). Now, more than 50 000 Australian students have their own laptop. My school, The International School of Toulouse, claims to be Europe's first fully laptop school with all students from Primary to IB Diploma Level owning their own machine. However, according to the news at the recent BETT 2001 show, there are currently 2700 schools in Europe that have integrated laptops in at least some of their classrooms. Furthermore, laptops have now been in schools long enough for serious research to be done on how portable computers impact on teaching and learning. In 1996, laptops introduced into 29 'pioneer schools' in the United States produced results that will have delighted even the most ardent of educational traditionalists. Children are apparently more motivated; they spend longer on their homework, have higher literacy levels and enjoy significantly improved ICT skills. Whilst this is interesting and might in itself justify the capital outlay necessary to equip children with laptops, researchers have tended to focus on the educational aspects of laptop learning that students used to be able to do before the introduction of laptops:
Laptops lead to more student writing and to writing of higher quality. In response to an open ended question, more than one-third of the surveyed teachers named writing as the academic outcome or skill that has been most directly affected by use of the laptops. Some teachers said simply that writing had generally improved; others said that students were doing more writing more often. (Rockman et al, 1998)
It is a similar story in schools that have spent large sums of money furnishing ICT suites. Computers are generally still being used to do the sorts of things that could have been done before computers. I imagine that this is particularly true of history lessons, where word processing and perhaps desktop publishing are the norm. Even the Internet, something that is new and dependent on students having access to computers, tends to be used in very traditional ways. Students use it to find out things that they could have found out more reliably using an encyclopaedia. I can't help feeling that at the moment, the use of computers in education resembles the arrival of the first motorcars in the days of the horse drawn carriage. Not only did cars initially resemble what they were soon to replace; most people perceived them as an unreliable novelty and very few predicted the massive socio-cultural transformation that eventually ensued. It took a while for people in general to appreciate that motorcars would change the world, and as John Simkin has argued, it is only very recently that people have become persuaded that computers might transform education.
So how do laptops make a difference?
How laptops make a difference becomes obvious when we consider what laptops replace. When I began teaching nearly ten years ago, my mother gave me her history exercise books from the early 1950s. At the time, I was struck by how much had changed in 40 years. My mother's work reflected the 'chalk and talk' didacticism prevalent at the time; analytical concepts like reliability and interpretation were absent and the historical content was overwhelmingly political. I recently visited colleagues at my previous (non-laptop) school and had an opportunity to glance through a pile of exercise books waiting to be marked. In complete contrast to my earlier 'student teacher' experience, what now stood out were the similarities with my mother's exercise book of 50 years earlier.
Despite the 50 years of technological advance, the exercise book full of hand written words and the occasional pencil drawn diagram, is still the most important expression of student learning. Perhaps more importantly, from a student perspective, the exercise book peppered by red-penned teacher comments and grades is also still the predominant source of assessment. Doing 'well' in history, whether in 1950 or in the year 2000, is still largely calculated by how well the student performs within the artificial constraints of the lines of the traditional exercise book.
The problem with artificial constraints in education is that students are increasingly aware of this artificiality. As John Simkin points out, for students the educational context is becoming increasingly 'unreal' and therefore irrelevant. History students have for quite some time been learning through a range of different media. In contrast to my mother's generation, students now have access to well designed (no longer just textual) 'textbooks' and they learn about the past through television and video, sometimes even in the classroom. With the advent of CDRoms and, in particular, the Internet, students can now interact with a multimedia-learning environment that starkly contrasts with the exercise book based classroom. For me, no-where is this mismatch better exemplified, than in the few hypertext history 'lessons' that are available online. A student may experience a 'shockwave' and video-clipped, (scanned-in) original source based historical adventure, but the activity sheet must still be printed out, filled in by hand and stuck in the exercise book at the end of the lesson.
In contrast to exercise books, laptop computers have at least two distinct advantages. Firstly, when equipped with good software, laptops become educational 'toolboxes' that can help the student to learn. Secondly, although it may resemble a typewriter, a laptop will allow students to store evidence of their learning and achievements that might not easily be expressed through the written word.
Laptops as multi-media learning 'toolboxes'
The laptop can help to 'scaffold' student learning in a variety of ways. Take for example an activity based around a traditional skill like writing a history essay. As teachers, we know that many students find it difficult to put their ideas together before putting pen to paper. We also recognise that not all students have the patience to draft and redraft their work before they do so. A laptop with a word processor and a student with an electronic writing frame, eradicates these difficulties and allows the student to concentrate on what has always been important: the argument, the analysis and the evidence. As a bonus, the essay produced on a laptop also allows the teacher to make interventions in the 'work in progress' without the soul-destroying red ink of exercise book 'corrections'.
But a laptop computer is not a glorified word-processor. What is really exciting about laptop education is that the 'toolbox' helps a student to express their learning in a format that suits their own learning style. I have lost count of the number of different types of intelligences that Howard Gardner has added to his theory of 'multiple intelligences' in recent years, but I know that a history classroom, restrained by exercise book learning, is a classroom over-dependent on narrow linguistic abilities.
After only a few weeks with a laptop computer, a 12-year-old student (and much younger) is capable of producing multimedia presentations that express sophisticated conceptual understanding without the need for written words. Some students will continue to produce presentations that look and read like essays. They might have used different 'slides' of the presentation as writing frames for different paragraphs and they might incorporate illustrative pictures scanned from books or downloaded from the Internet. But other students will have incorporated self-composed music, complex programmed animation sequences and video of themselves and friends acting out an historical role-play. These students may have dispensed with written text altogether, choosing instead to narrate their presentation. Back in 1984, Howard Gardner writing about the possible impact of computers in education, identified this prospect:
… the potential utility of computers in the process of matching individuals to modes of instruction is substantial…the computer can be a vital facilitator in the actual process of instruction, helping individuals to negotiate sequences at their preferred pace by using a variety of educational techniques… (Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind)
Gardner's vision has been made possible by the laptop computer because it offers scaffolding for students' personal learning styles. It is as Gardner puts it, 'a vital facilitator of instruction' because it allows the student to learn and express that learning in a format that is appropriate to the individual student's intelligence profile.
Laptops as multi-intelligence 'portfolios'
The second advantage of the laptop over the exercise book centres on the laptop's flexibility as a portfolio for a wide-range of different types of student work. The laptop allows students to store and present evidence of their learning in a way that genuinely represents what has gone on, in and outside of the classroom. Let me give you two examples of what I mean.
Recently, I did a cross-curricular project with the Music and Drama teacher, taking as our theme Shakespeare's London. During the course of three weeks of lessons in our subjects, we (students and teachers) made extensive use of digital photo and video to record the students at work: writing and performing music, taking part in role-plays and debates etc. This photographic and video diary was stored along with all the students' other work in a folder on the school server. After three weeks, the students were asked to produce a history of their three weeks of learning, based on the electronic 'evidence', in a ten-minute multimedia presentation.
The results of the project illustrated the power of a laptop to allow the students to create a much more 'reliable' record of their learning and achievements. Amongst much else, they were able to use the digital photos to show themselves dressed in the Elizabethan costume that they had made for the role-play, or they showed their empathetic accounts as the coffee-stained and oven baked 'parchment' that had been temporarily displayed on the classroom wall. The students were able to use the video footage to show themselves performing music that they had composed to accompany the contemporary print of a London street scene c1600. Or they used video to show interviews they had conducted with each other at the end of the project to find out exactly what everyone had learnt. The size of the students' 10-minute presentations ranged from about 20Mb to 300Mb, not easily portable unless the students are carrying their own 6Gb laptop computer. When a project of this sort is finished, the student can burn their completed work onto a CDRom and clear the workspace on their hard drive. Just like a completed exercise book they can file it away. But unlike an exercise book, a CDRom of a student's work is a multimedia record of a much wider range of learning and achievement that would otherwise be ephemeral and quickly forgotten. As history teachers many of us are reluctant to invest classroom time in activities that students may not take seriously and for which there is no easily stored record. With laptops and a digital video camera, all the students can have a permanent portable record of their work before the end of the lesson. In this situation, students tend to prepare as seriously for a performance-based lesson, as they would for any traditional test.
The second example of how laptops allow students to store and present their learning in new and powerful ways occurs when students are encouraged to design their learning as web pages. When a student is first given a laptop they tend to treat them as exercise books. They create folders for different subjects and store their 'exercises' in chronological order, lesson by lesson. The logic of this system of organisation is tested almost immediately by the very nature of lessons in a laptop school, which do not always begin and end at the sound of a bell but continue wherever the student has their laptop with them. The system is further undermined when they are introduced to the concept of hyperlinking their different assignments in different subject areas. Finally, exercise book logic becomes completely redundant when they start completing assignments as web pages and multimedia presentations, rather than as word-processed and desktop published paper documents.
Learning to work in web formats might begin quite simply by expecting students to build a hyperlinked 'glossary' for all the new words they encounter. For example, my Y9 students (13-14 years old) began their glossary around the topic of the Industrial Revolution. A technical development like the 'spinning jenny' in an activity on industrial development might be hyper-linked to a brief description in the student's glossary. Before long, the brief description in the glossary is itself hyperlinked to a specially created page containing pictures and further details about the new inventions. Next, the name James Hargreaves is hyperlinked to a picture and some simple biographical details about the man behind the spinning jenny and so on. It soon becomes apparent to the student that word-processed documents limit their ability to hyperlink their work and that they are better off using web publishing software. Eventually, the student's history exercise book is replaced by a history 'homepage' which is just one part of their self constructed learning website. Their folders still exist, but now they use a browser to surf around their work. This can be stored on the students' laptops but for ease of assessment it might also be stored on the school server or indeed in cyberspace. The occasional visit to a student's website is an attractive alternative to the shopping bags full of exercise books which accompany most teachers home for the weekend.
For the student's learning the advantages are obvious. The student website grows with the student's learning. At the beginning the student will ask 'should I add this word to my glossary?' within a few lessons it becomes an almost natural reflex. The student continually revisits work 'completed' earlier and also links across subject boundaries. Perhaps most importantly, the website becomes much more a reflection of the individual student's learning style than any production-line exercise book can ever be. For it to work, the students must be able to pursue their interests and answer their questions as they arise, which is why constant laptop connection to the Internet is essential.
Even the youngest of my students now talk in terms of 'linear' style and 'web' style learning. In making this distinction they are becoming aware of the different types of audiences available for their work. By 'linear' learning they mean traditional, exercise book style presentation. In a 'linear' presentation the audience (usually only the teacher) is passive and has no control over the content of the presentation. This might be a film, an essay or an automated multimedia presentation; it starts at the beginning and runs through to the end. In contrast, 'web' style learning allocates an active role to the audience of the student's work. The audience is presented with choices and in order to progress the user (no longer simply a reader) has to make selections. If this form of presentation is to be successful, then not only does the student need to 'know' the subject she is presenting, she also needs to be able to teach it. And this, of course, requires a much greater depth of understanding.
I recently invited my students to make a multimedia guide on 'how to use historical documents'. Although some students chose to make a 'linear' presentation, after viewing all the presentations the class agreed that the most effective 'teaching' presentations were in a 'web' format that allowed varying amounts of interactivity between the user and the programme. At a basic level this interactivity might simply involve giving the user a choice of routes through the presentation; at a more complex level, students are able to incorporate relatively sophisticated interactive games. Gary Stager, the American educationalist associated with Logo programming language and MicroWorlds 'constructionist' software, convincingly argues that the students who learn most from educational software are the students who design their own. This is surely true of students who build their own learning websites or design their own interactive presentations and games.
Conclusion
There is a quotation in John Simkin's article, taken from Dale Spender's book Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace, that highlights what is now the central problem of the traditional exercise book classroom:
It's a teaching/learning model that is out of synch with the rest of the world. Many of today's students can tell you in no uncertain terms just how 'unreal' (and boring, and silly) the educational context is. Traditional educational theory, practice and organisation are each day becoming more irrelevant and unworkable: just as the scribal model became obsolete after print was invented.
In contrast to the traditional classroom, the 'educational context' of the laptop classroom is very real. But it is a context in which the role of a teacher has to change significantly. Putting it simply, teachers have to 'teach' less and support more. Some might see this as a threat to their professionalism. But as professionals we have to face up to the fact that a student with a laptop 'knows' more than a teacher without. My experience suggests and the American research confirms, that teachers in a laptop school get more time to do the things that teachers have always considered important: working with students on a one-to-one basis, differentiating between the different ability ranges etc.
However, as we all recognise, this revolution requires more than just the support of teachers, it will also need the support of the whole education industry. At the moment, one of the biggest constraints on relevant learning in my school is the external examination board. I am currently in the ridiculous situation of having to tell the older students to put their laptops away, so that they can practise the speed handwriting skills necessary for success in external examinations! How more 'unreal, boring and silly' can you get?
But the biggest commitment to change must come from governments prepared to fund an education system that keeps abreast of technological developments. If what I have described above is to work as well as it might, laptop computers for every student is only the beginning. Teachers also need classrooms equipped with multimedia projectors, CDRom writers, digital cameras and videos, fast Internet access and plenty of cyberspace for students to store their work. Most importantly they require a relevant digital 'hypertext' curriculum and resources to free them to do what they have always done best, help children to learn.
In the light of the accusations of elitism levelled at the University of Warwick for requiring students to have their own laptops, (The Guardian 7th February 2001) I'd like to conclude with the argument made 30 years ago by the early pioneers of computer in schools:
...Only inertia and prejudice, not economics or lack of good educational ideas stand in the way of providing every child in the world with the kinds of experience of which we have tried to give you some glimpses. If every child were to be given access to a computer, computers would be cheap enough for every child to be given access to a computer - Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon 1971 (quoted in Stager.org)
In 2001 it may still seem like a lot to expect students to have their own laptop computer. But we must accept that our failure to deliver an alternative 'real' educational context might result in schools suffering the same fate as the horse-drawn carriage of the last century.