Straw Men

I just posted a comment to a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education Review website. Mark Bauerlein, author of the recent controversial book “The Dumbest Generation,” argues (in a post titled “Web Reactionaries”) that:

Game Scientist David Williamson Shaffer believes that computers alter ‘the way people think in the digital age,’ and he rates their advent with ‘the development of language itself.’

<-snip->

If Web 2.0 marks something fundamentally, radically different in the nature of knowledge and the means of intelligence, and if the young are the lead carriers of the revolution, then the ‘kids-are-alright, everything’s-okay, stop-the-handwringing’ response doesn’t apply. If a revolution is in play, one that reaches down into the hard wiring of thought, it’s not a version of the same old thing. And if the critical reaction to it addresses aspects specific to Web 2.0 and teens’ standard use of it, let’s not pooh-pooh it with easy comparisons to Socrates and the fear of writing.

And my reply:

I confess to being a little confused by this posting. I am one of the “techno-cognoscenti” who is quoted as arguing that the digital age represents a significant cognitive break with the past. That is a correct characterization of my work and my writings.

What is I don’t get is how one could conclude that I think everything is fine and we shouldn’t worry.

In “How Computer Games Help Children Learn” I do write that “The computer is a truly transformative technology, one that changes nearly everything around it’”a change on the order of the invention of the printing press, the development of writing, even the creation of language itself.”

But I go on to say on the very same page that “what parents, teachers, and policy makers really need to know about education in the digital age, though, is’ how new technologies make new kinds of learning possible. So this is not primarily a book about how computer and video games can help kids do better in school–although they can, and we’ll talk about how. This is a book about how computer and video games can help adults rebuild education for the postindustrial, high-tech world by thinking about learning in a new way.”

Similarly, it is true that in our paper “Before Every Child is Left Behind,” Jim Gee and I argue that “a number of people, in both the popular press and in academia, have argued that children’s popular culture today is more complex than ever before (Gee, 2003, 2004; Johnson, 2005). It demands complex thinking, technical language, and sophisticated problem-solving skills.”

However, our conclusion is anything but “the kids are alright” and that we shouldn’t worry. Rather, we argue:

‘If our body politic will not invest the energy, resources, and creativity in rebuilding our educational system to prepare students to be innovators, then well-off parents will surely make up the difference for their kids, and the withering of public education–on which democratic citizenship rests–will be all but complete. The alternative is to mobilize the power of new technologies to change the way we think about education. The same technologies that outsource commodity jobs create a rich and innovative popular culture. The same technologies that place a premium on innovative practices make those practices accessible to students as never before. The same technologies that make the industrial practices of industrial schools largely irrelevant in preparing students for productive and satisfying economic and cultural lives make it possible to invent a new way of organizing our educational system.’

My approach–and the point of others cited–is anything *but* ‘ho hum’ towards computers. I think we need to use them to think about learning in radically new ways.

There is an honest debate to be had between those who suggest that so-called ‘screen time’ can never be more than a waste of time and those who think that digital tools can and should play a meaningful role in preparing young people for life in the digital age. However, the argument for computers is that we need to use computers in much more sophisticated ways than we do today–not that ‘computers change everything so don’t worry’.

But an argument against straw men–or worse, misrepresented men–will justifiably get ‘negative responses.’