The Internet belongs in the classroom because it is part of the personal world experienced by children.

The Internet belongs in the classroom because it is part of the personal world 
experienced by children.

How often have you heard this? It sounds so logical, doesn’t it? At the same time, many teachers have discovered, at their expense, that using information and communications technology in their lesson “randomly,” in an unstructured way, does not always have lasting success. The problem is that most research studies have been evaluations of relatively short-term projects. Some research, for instance, focuses on the extent to which participants liked the medium being used during the actual test, which for a student actually lasted for about 12 minutes.15

Also note that in this research, being motivated because of the medium did not help learning as much as the chosen pedagogical approach. But when we discuss implementing technology and the Internet in the classroom, people argue not for using it once or only for a short period, but for long-term implementation. Therefore, it is the impact over a longer period that really needs to be determined.

A study by the Canadian Higher Education Strategy Associates described how students had a preference for “ordinary, real life” lessons rather than e-learning or the use of some other technology.16 It was a result that surprised the researchers. “It is not the portrait we expected, whereby students would embrace anything that happens on a more highly technological level. On the contrary—they really seem to like access to human interaction, a smart person at the front of the classroom.”

The findings also revealed that the more technology was used to teach a particular course, the fewer the students who felt they were able to get something out of that course. While the 1,380 students from 60 Canadian universities questioned for this survey were generally satisfied with the courses they took, the level of satisfaction fell significantly when more digital forums, online interactions, or other technological elements were involved. Yet, at the same time, more than half the respondents said that they would skip a lesson if there was more information or a comparable video lesson online.

Although these results at first glance seem to be fairly negative for e-learning, the responses to some additional questions were more positive. The majority of students (59.6 percent) said that they would like more electronic content in their courses. When asked what they would specifically like to see online, 53.6 percent answered that they would like more online course notes, with 46.4 percent advocating more recordings of lessons on the web.

These findings are broadly in keeping with the results of a 2011 literature study that investigated the expectations of young people with regard to new forms of education and information and communications technology.17

The study reached the following conclusions: First, the technological gap between the students and their teachers is not enormous, and certainly not so large that it cannot be bridged. In fact, the relationship is determined by the requirements teachers place on their students to make use of new technologies. There is little evidence that students expect the use of these new technologies. Second, in all the studies consulted, the students persistently report that they prefer moderate use of information and communications technology in their courses. (“Moderate” is, of course, an imprecise term that is difficult to quantify.) Third, students do not naturally make extensive use of many of the newest technologies, such as blogs, wikis, and virtual worlds. Students who need or are required to use these technologies in their courses are unlikely to object to them, but there is not a natural demand among students for any such use.

Maybe this will change as technology becomes more and more ingrained. However, a study of students in Glasgow, Scotland, found little change; these students appeared to conform to fairly traditional pedagogies, albeit with minor uses of technology tools that deliver content. Research comparing traditional books with e-readers shows that students prefer paper.18

The sad thing is that even if students did prefer to use technology in school, this would not mean that they would learn more. In 2005, Clark and Feldon wrote, “The best conclusion at this point is that, overall, multimedia courses may be more attractive to students and so they tend to choose them when offered options, but student interest does not result in more learning and overall it appears to actually result in significantly less learning than would have occurred in ‘instructor led’ courses.”19 A decade later, based on 10 years of additional research, Clark and Feldon stand by this conclusion.20

In her book, danah boyd describes the main reasons young people use technology. These reasons are mainly social, such as sharing information with each other, and meeting each other online and in real life. They do discuss schoolwork with each other, but this is very different from using Facebook as a learning tool or their phone as a learning machine.2