Iyorkar, Yohane. (2009). What Technology Does to Education

When companies like Microsoft donate computers and software components to educational institutions, they do this for an obvious reason other than for mere philanthropy and marketing purposes. They make technology available to schools because they want to make learning more efficient and effective in these institutions. These philanthropists want to get schools going in a direction of innovation and advancement. It is clear that these companies realize the profound effect that technology has on education. They realize that computers are needed to facilitate research, study and teaching.

What if we had no BlackBoard technology and had to rely on word of mouth for communication or dissemination of information? What if there was no Internet with search engines like Yahoo, Google or Bing for students to search for information on the Net? What if college students had to go through thousands of books in their local library in order find solutions for assignments they were given at school? These questions shed some light on the big vacuum that an educational system has without technology or without sufficient technology. Pondering on the above questions, it also seems crystal clear that life is better with the presence of all these technology and innovations, especially for students.

These technologies are greatly needed in order to expose college students to real life situations through practice. Such practice is really important because theory clearly cannot do it all. Theory cannot by itself transform a relatively ignorant and uneducated student into an educated and informed one. In simplified terms, what theory (without practice) would do to a computer science major is to teach him or her how to boot a computer on paper and not how physically do it. It would teach a tailor how to sew a cloth in writing and not in real life. These are scary thoughts for students who have labored and worked so hard in school for years.

Despite all the pros and advantages of technology in education, some setbacks still exist. Over the years, there have been incidents where technology has proved to be more of a distraction to learning than an aid. This distraction is clearly manifested when students bring their laptops to class and use them for surfing irrelevant stuff on the Internet or playing games instead of paying attention to the lecture.

It is also very evident that more priority is given to the provision of technology for education than to the helping technology necessary to help users get better acquainted with innovations. Equal priority should be given to both processes because, evidently, the goal we seek to achieve with technology would be unattainable if we had the technology but did not know how to utilize it effectively and vice versa. In an article by Jeffery R. Young, “When technology means bad teaching” he expresses a similar opinion saying that some students usually complained that “some professors wasted class time fumbling with projectors or software.”

I even had a similar firsthand experience when I went to take an examination some few years back. This examination was a computer- based test so we were taking it online. Unfortunately some of the computers as well as the Internet connection were really slow. My computer was one of those that were slow and whenever I finished with answering one question and moved to another, it took too much time for the next question to load. All the while, the time allotted for this examination had been running out. In the end, I did not finish the examination and definitely did not do too well in the examination. After, I came to realize that schools cannot achieve optimum educational advancement until they invest in technology, not just any kind of crude technology, but working technology. My examiners definitely had the intention to facilitate the whole examination process, but failed. A few of us were at a disadvantage because of bad technology, thus the examination was not a true test of my knowledge.