"Pencils are bringing down education"

2011 draws to a close and I would like to end with more light-hearted news that attracted my attention. Last weeks and months a highly entertaining ed-tech debate unfolded on Twitter. Topic of the debate was … the use of pencils. Thousands of tweets appeared with the hashtag #pencilchat and the debate moved from the U.S., to Australia and Europe. The tweets are funny, a bit surrealistic, contrasting computers with a very old piece of technology: ‘the pencil’. But exactly this is what makes this #pencilchat so interesting to me. The comparison between computers and pencils works incredibly well for ed-tech and causes a light-hearted and thought-provoking reflection on the use of technology in the classroom and the obstacles teachers and schools face with integrating technology. Replace the word ‘computers’ by ‘pencils’ and think about the pedagogical impact of integrating computers/pencils in the classroom. How will computers/pencils influence education? Think about the difficulties teachers can have with adopting computers/pencils in the classroom. Reflect on the fears over whether or not computers/pencils will replace teachers. And how do we deal with students knowing more about computers/pencils than teachers?

“Real men use slate! You won't catch me with one of those new fangled pencil things #pencilchat”

It started all with some tweets after having read the book Pencil me in, written by John Spencer. The book is kind of a reflection of Spencers’ blog Adventures in Pencil Integration and tells the story of a teacher in the 19^th century, struggling with the integration of pencils into the classroom.

I started exploring the #pencilchat after a friend have sent me the ‘Ode to #pencilchat’, a video compilation of the most memorable tweets in the edu-tech debate, earlier this week.

Ode to #Pencilchat: Technology Integration in the Classroom

by: MiddleLevelEd

This video highlights some of the controversies and concerns about integrating new tools (no matter if they are pencils or computers) into education. Teachers and schools are often concerned about the lack of professional development, the accessibility, the costs, … The analogy with the pencils also opens your eyes for some clichés and sometimes school-made problems: “pencils are too dangerous to use for students without supervision”, “impossible to teach students about appropriate pencil use, because the curriculum is so full already”, “students use pencils at home all the time, so they are probably experts already”, … Astonishing is that Dr. Seymour Papert already mentioned this in an article, published in the Washington Post in 1996. There he gives some examples of the fallacies schools manufacture to persuade themselves that the integration of technology is impossible. Even today schools sometimes use some organisational problems as “powerful objective reasons” to ban technology. In my school for example we have only since two years two good-working computer classrooms of 30 computers each plus a Smartboard in each of them for 300 people in total. Reason for this late adaption of infrastructure is that there was no money for it. Before that we had one classroom with 25 very old computers (and you were lucky when they were all working). And some teachers never use any technology in their courses because “pupils aren’t concentrated enough when they have to use a computer” or because “it doesn’t fit in their subject”.

And these fears sometimes lead to strange school policies: “In order to protect our children, we must ban pen and pencils”, says one of the tweets. Katie Stansberry also points out the absurdity of the policies banning technology (or … pencils) in here MindShift post 10 Reasons to Ban Pens and Pencils in the Class.

The metaphor of pencils to talk about technology in education is not a new one. Back in the eighties Dr. Seymour Papert already used the parable as a standard part of his speeches and testimony.

Imagine that writing has just been invented in Foobar, a country that has managed to develop a highly sophisticated culture of poetry, philosophy and science using entirely oral means of expression. It occurs to imaginative educators that the new technology of pencils, paper and printing could have a beneficial effect on the schools of the country. Many suggestions are made. The most radical is to provide all teachers and children with pencils, paper and books and suspend regular classes for six months while everyone learns the new art of reading and writing. The more cautious plans propose starting slowly and seeing how "pencil-learning" works on a small scale before doing anything really drastic. In the end, Foobarian politicians being what they are, a cautious plan is announced with radical fanfare: Within four years a pencil and a pad of paper will be placed in every single classroom of the country so that every child, rich or poor, will have access to the new knowledge technology. Meantime the educational psychologists stand by to measure the impact of pencils on learning.

Though the articles of Papert are quite old, his ideas still seem fresh and some of the issues he mentions are still present today. However, as we take this journey towards integrating technology in the classroom, could one day digital technology become as normal as pencils?

You can also check the whole stream of #pencilchat-tweets on Twitter or you can read some on Storify.