Todd Oppenheimer
2003
Oppenheimer is a journalist, not an education scholar, which accounts for both the good and the bad in this new book on schools' uses of computers in the classroom. Fortunately, the good outweighs the bad, and this work may contribute productively to an important debate. In writing that is often persuasive and always engaging, Oppenheimer details numerous failures of computers in schools: they dull kids' imaginations, stymie real thinking, supplant effective instructional methods, substitute for worthier expenditures, allow kids to goof off, and, perhaps most obviously, too often simply don't work. Schools would do better to stick to the basics and use computers more judiciously, for there is little proof that they help students and tons of evidence that they detract from schools' core mission. This is particularly true among younger students, who don't really need to develop multimedia presentations and can wait until high school to learn computer programming. The book goes awry when Oppenheimer intermittently abandons his topic to comment (and gripe) about other aspects of education reform: Bush's "obsession" with the "fad" of standardized testing; the dangers of privatization; the unproven Texas education "miracle" as evidence of teaching to the test; etc., etc. Because of these digressions, the book stretches to more than 400 pages. In between, however, its discussions of how and how not to use computers make it a worthy read. Educators may appreciate his encounters with outstanding teachers who discuss their methods, which often avoid computers or simply use them in interesting ways. And his observations on the organizational benefits of technology--for tracking student progress, facilitating parent-teacher communication, distributing school announcements, etc.--are on target. Most importantly, one hopes this book will succeed where other such efforts have failed: in alerting us to the incredible amount of money, effort, and classroom time that is wasted on computers. The ISBN is 1-4000-6044-3, and the book is available for $19 on Amazon.com.
