Technology Can Make a Better World: But Not Technology Alone

NYTimes recently had a series of op-ed articles about the role of technology in our world, specifically, “Is Silicon Valley Saving the World, or Just Making Money?” The piece by Melinda Gates (quoted below) caught my attention because she’s invoking the desire to meet students’ “different learning styles” (see blog post on this theme, and why it leads to worse learning).

There’s an important issue here (beyond me critiquing Melinda Gates, who does important work that I admire). It’s not all technology. We need other disciplines as well. Educational psychologists should be informing these developers at Facebook to tell them, “Stop. That’s a bad idea.”

I was at a workshop last year at Stanford about how to grow more CS Education Research in the United States. Andrew Ng spoke to us about the research going on at Coursera. He was clearly not previously informed about the focus of the workshop. When asked, “Would you want to hire more PhD’s in CS Education?” he answered (my paraphrase), “Sure, but we just hire CS PhD’s, and they’re smart enough to pick up anything on-the-fly.” No, that’s wrong. CS is not a superset of all other disciplines.  That belief is exactly the problem I see in the below quoted piece. Scholars in other areas do know things that CS PhD’s don’t, and they bring something unique to the table. Believing that it’s all technology is exactly why Silicon Valley gets accused of being more interested in money than having actual positive impact.

One of the biggest problems in American education is that teachers have to teach 30 students with different learning styles at the same time. Developers at Facebook, however, have built an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons. The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they’re best at: inspiring kids.

via Technology Can Make a Better World, If We Want It To – NYTimes.com.