Finding Balance

            As I was reading Pea’s article on distributed intelligence, I identified with the concern referenced by Salomon et. al. (Trade off #1 on p. 74-75), a need to keep in mind and distinguish between “effects with technology” vs. “effects of technology.” Pea discusses the concern that granting students extreme access to resources and technology may result in an increase in accessibility of activity but a deficit in understanding foundational concepts.

My high school did not permit the use of calculators in mathematics until pre-calculus courses with the justification that we needed to learn the concepts behind mathematical processes and formulas to truly understand what we were doing in solving mathematical problems rather than simply “plugging things into” a “magic” calculator. I have tutored many students in mathematics and can see how they may have benefitted from this policy as they often will reach for their calculator with no idea what to compute or why a computation is right for solving a problem. When they encounter a new “style” of problem, they have no starting place of how to navigate it and why they would use one formula over another. I think that, sometimes, since most of us making policies and teaching students were educated the “old fashioned” way of being forced to do things by hand and memorize math facts, we can tend to overlook the ways this has benefitted our understanding of larger math concepts. For example, memorizing addition facts to 10 has deepened our understanding of a base 10 system. Knowing that 3+4=7 fluently allows a 3rd grader to efficiently see how we can use distributive property to break down 3x7 to 3x3+3x4. At a higher-level example, my statistics course in college did not teach us how to use SPSS software. Our professor had us do the analyses by hand, asserting that this was more valuable as it would help us understand what it is each type of analysis was getting at and which analyses would be appropriate for analyzing data sets from different studies. So, during our classes we analyzed the structures of the formulas and why each one gave us the information we wanted about example data sets. I have to say, he was right. The next year, I was working in a research lab. While the lab used SPSS software and I did need some assistance in navigating it, I understood why we were running the tests we were running and how to interpret the information the software gave us.

                 On the other hand, the extreme “no calculator” policy meant that it took students longer to progress through mathematics courses in my high school and likely held many back from reaching their full potential in engaging with the field of mathematics. While it was not difficult for me to be “caught up” on SPSS software, I wasn’t ready to jump right in and use it in the lab. Both articles make a point that we live in a world that is rapidly changing and the information and technology we have available to us is rapidly growing. It would be a disservice to students to ignore this fact. After all, most of us walk around with some form of smart phone or computer in our pocket and can “google” anything we need information on most any time of day (not to mention the calculators, dictionaries, and GPS devices they also can function as). The skills to know how to quickly and efficiently access and use resources and technology that Bransford & Swartz reference in their idea of “preparation for future learning” (p.68) are certainly necessary in the world we are sending our students into. So, the question I am left with is, “how do we find a balance?” How do we prepare our students to build intelligence with technology (p.75) rather than rely on technology to do all the thinking?