chers do in powerful ways. Experienced teachers whom she has studied say they are capable of presenting more complex material to their students, that they are acting more as coaches and less as information providers, and that student work can proceed more independently and in ways that are better tailored to meet individual needs.
Other studies have found a dramatic decrease in teacher-dominated activities and a shift to more engaged students in technology-rich environments.
But such changes will not happen automatically or overnight.
Indeed, Larry Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford University, predicts that unless existing classrooms and schools are “altered substantially . . .most teachers will use computers as an aid, not unlike radio, film, and television.”
“I predict no great breakthrough in teacher use patterns at either level of schooling,” he writes in Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. “The new technology, like its predecessors, will be tailored to fit the teacher's perspective and the tight contours of school and classroom settings.” To the degree that technology is flexible, it will be bent to fit existing practice, he predicts. To the degree that it is not, it will be jettisoned.
Such predictions have led observers to plead for a closer relationship between current efforts to “restructure” the schools and the use of technology.
Indeed, Sheingold maintains that many of the ambitious national goals the country has now set for itself cannot be attained without “widespread, creative, and well-integrated uses of technologies of many kinds.”
Still others suggest scaling back from the grandiose visions of technological applications in schools that ran rampant during the early 1980s to more practical and constrained uses. “Without much evidence to support unrestrained entry of machines into classrooms, reopening policy discussions on both the how and the why seem to be in order,” Cuban argues.
Rather than buying machines and then deciding how to use them, experts suggest, schools should identify their most pressing needs or problems and ask how technology could make a difference.
“The most effective uses of technology are going to be very constrained uses” limited to a particular grade or subject area, Pogrow asserts, but married to sophisticated forms of human interaction. “Everybody wants to put a computer in every classroom; everybody wants to use computers across the board,” he argues. “The minute you say that, you're not going to be effective.”
Ultimately, argues Allan Collins, principal scientist at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., it is society's use of computers as tools that will sustain their penetration of schools. “Schools are in the business of teaching students how to read and write and calculate and think,” he writes in the September 1991 issue of Phi Delta Kappan. “As the computer becomes an essential tool for doing these things in society at large, its use by students is inevitable.”
To speed up that use, advocates are calling for much stronger national leadership in the area of technology in schools. “National leadership is absolutely essential, because it sends a signal,” says Roberts of the OTA. In addition, observers argue, the federal government should invest more money in research-and-development efforts; provide seed money for innovative ideas; and bring together state and local educators at the regional level to share information, pool resources, and think about next steps.
The Council of Chief State School Officers and other groups have also argued that the federal government could help establish a national infrastructure that would enable educational information to move freely and swiftly throughout the nation—via a combination of fiber optics, satellite, telephone lines, cable, and other transmission signals.
For now, notes Mecklenburger, “the real truth is that the power of technology in this society is mostly outside of school buildings, because, for the most part, educators haven't wanted it inside. It's far more developed in living rooms and kids' 