Computers in Education, page 3

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Computers in Education / 3

    A significant, and widely-contested study at Carnegie-Mellon University revealed that people spending even a few hours a week on line experience far more depression and loneliness than if they used the computer network less frequently. No less interesting than the results of the study - the first concentrated study of the social and psychological effects of Internet use - was the surprise evinced by the researchers, who expected that Web surfing would provide a rich social experience. "We were shocked by the findings," acknowledged a social scientist involved with the study, which led to conclusions such as the following:
    Based on these data, the researchers hypothesize that relationships maintained over long distances without face-to-face contact ultimately do not provide the kind of support and reciprocity that typically contribute to a sense of psychological security and happiness, like being available to baby-sit in a pinch for a friend, or to grab a cup of coffee.
    "Our hypothesis is there are more cases where you're building shallow relationships, leading to an overall decline in feeling of connection to other people," Professor Kraut said.
The CCNY psychologist William Crain cites a study by Gary Nabhan and Sara St. Antoine, who in 1992 interviewed 52 eight-to-fourteen year-olds living in the Sonaoran desert in the US/Mexico borderlands:

The children were from two Indian tribes (the Yaqui and O'odham) as well as Latino and Anglo children; they lived in mixtures of urban and rural settings, but all had access to the desert. The desert had once been very rich in animal and plant life, with many lizards, turtles, hares, porcupines, and so on, but the variety had diminished in recent years due to development and overgrazing.

Nabhan was surprised to find that most of the children reported that they had seen more wild animals on television and in the movies than in the wild. This was even true of the children in one Indian tribe (the Yaqui). Only a minority in each group had ever spent a half hour alone in a wild place, and most of the children had never collected natural treasures such as feathers, bones, insects, or rocks from their surroundings. When one boy was asked whether he had learned more about animals from books or from his family, he said, "Neither. Discovery Channel." The children were missing out on first-hand experience with nature. Nabhan notes that it nature experience is impoverished in this relatively wild area of the country, we can imagine what it is like in most of today's urban and suburban centers.
Given the prevalence of such separation from direct experience of nature among today's elementary school children, their widespread passivity in the face of environmental problems should not be a surprise. Yet the most recent efforts made to rectify this distressing situation may only serve to exacerbate it. An article in the September, 1996, Internet World, relates the following:

Fourth- and fifth-grade students and teachers at Murphy Elementary in Haslett, Mich., are not in the classroom today. They are tiptoeing around in rubber boots in a bog near the school. Their aim is to investigate the fragile wetlands that abound in Meridian Township but that are increasingly at risk because of the rapid commercial development in their area.
It sounds promising - here are students who are being given the chance to encounter the nature world in an unmediated way. But read on...
The students are laden with notebooks, pens, pencils, a tape recorder, video recorder, and a pocket camera. They are "multimedia detectives," part of an ongoing program in Okemos, Haslett and East Lansing schools.
The program, now almost two years old, enables teachers in the three school districts to explore ways in which multimedia and telecommunications technology can help their students learn how to engage in publishing.

Only two paragraphs before, the students' aim was to "investigate the fragile wetlands," but now we learn that behind this charade is a more important goal - getting the children engaged in desktop publishing, for which they will certainly need to purchase more hardware and software than for their innocent jaunts in the bogs! One paragraph later, and the children's separation from their immediate natural surroundings is made clearer still:

To help the students become more competent as Web explorers, we use two-way cable TV as a control and viewing mechanism...
TCI Cable and Michigan State University have installed a high-speed ChannelWorks cable modem at the Multi-Media Classrooms site. The modem, made by Digital Equipment Corp., is the size of a small VCR. The ChannelWorks box is attached to and IBM PC via an internal LANtastic Ethernet card and a standard Ethernet cable. A second connection on the back of the box is attached to a normal coaxial cable just like the kind on the back of a TV or VCR.

The pretense that all of this had anything to do with exploring nature is dropped; it is clear that the hidden agenda here is "exploring the Web," pulling children away from the immediacy of their experience of nature and into a forest of corporate logos and high tech wiring. Where, in all of this, is anything asked of the imaginative capacities of the young person as she apprehends nature? Where is the possibility for a meaningful encounter between the growing sensibility of the child and the wonders of life and growth? It is not surprising that such an insensitive replacement of active life experience with passive transmission of information leads even computer specialists to urge educators to exercise some caution. As Sherry Turkle, a professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a longtime observer of children's use of computers, told Todd Oppenheimer, "The possibilities of using this thing poorly so outweigh the chance of using it well, it makes people like us, who are fundamentally optimistic about computers, very reticent."

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