out of the dark

The biggest innovations to effect the way we live today came about as a result of the industrial revolution. Business Week describes the makings of a new serge of innovations to effect the education system in his article "Wired Schools". Business Week is right to call this new approach to teaching a revolution, as it is evident that it has the potential to antiquate traditional teaching methods by introducing a more efficient and effective technological method. Confirmation of this can be seen in the Union City, NJ school district that went from being on the verge of state occupation to have the highest test scores of any New Jersey city. Richard Ohmann disputes this by stating that "Thirty percent of college courses had websites a year ago, and sixty percent used e-mail... but only fourteen percent of the administrators held that 'technology has improved instruction on my campus' ". But as I see it, polls don't tell the whole story and aren't reliable enough to base decisions on. Statistics of improvements, however, like the ones we see in Union City, are reliable. He goes on to say that making computers accessible to students is to expensive and does more harm than good; as students have more opportunity to use computer for frivolous uses. This is a valid point but many schools have prevented this by using firewalls to block out websites that have no academic worth. Obmann claims that students using the internet during class won't be paying attention to the teacher or the lecture. Furthermore Obmann fears that computers will facilitate cheating by making it easy to plagiarize assignments. I don’t think it would be hard for a teacher to stop the students from being online when trying to teach if she makes the students turn off their computers when they are not necessary. And as far as plagiarism goes, technology has made it easy to spot plagiarized work through the use of search engines. I think its high time people like Ohmann step out of the dark ages and, although its scary, step into the light of innovation.