"It works." Is a low bar. We should strive for higher. Especially at some of the best schools in the country and the world.
Also, didn't the typewriter work? Didn't the flip phone "work"? Lots of products and processes work. But people still strive to make them better, easier and more delightful. But, for some reason, not in education.
But what exactly is "better and more delightful" that's possible now, relevant to education and wasn't 12 years ago? You're moaning about the fact that pen and paper has been around for a few millenia without actually suggesting why it's bad, still less what would be better.
A decade ago I did a liberal arts degree and managed to get through first year without entering the library because the online papers were more than enough, and had a professor who once cancelled a lecture because the projector was broken and she believed chalk was a health hazard. On the whole, I'd have preferred it if she'd carried on with her examples using the technology of the generation earlier. And you know what, sometimes dragging oneself away from a backlit screen to read an actual book, complete with the previous owner's annotations, was a good thing in later years too.
My parents went a generation earlier without the repository of information that exceeded the size of the library sitting on my desk in my study bedroom, which I also used to run statistical tests that would probably have been beyond the capabilities of the university's then computer, had the econometric tests being run been invented at that point. So things were actually pretty different then.
We didn't watch much video for the same reason my parents didn't watch much video: it's a way of glossing over the analytical concepts we were supposed to be studying. We didn't play around on interactive apps even though we all had laptop computers with Flash downloaded, for the same reason, no amount of touch-screen tabletry changes that.
I am moaning about pen and paper. And perhaps the biggest problem with my post is that I have no constructive suggestion.
But I am most certainly not saying that the current technology is better: far from it. I agree that writing on black boards is better than powerpoint. I agree that books are better than ebooks. I agree that video isn't necessarily the answer, and that it won't necessarily help the younger generations learn more efficiently.
I'm purely commenting on the fact that nothing is better than pen and paper and a chalkboard (and Microsoft word for writing long peppers). I am saying that I've tried tons of new technologies in education and they all suck. And I'm asking why this is the case. Can we truly not do any better?
Writing on paper does have problems: writing by hand isn't fast. Paper is not backed up. Paper is not easy to share or edit. Paper is not searchable. Notebooks require physical space. Some cannot read others handwriting. These aren't major problems. But they are problems.
"It works." Is a low bar. We should strive for higher. Especially at some of the best schools in the country and the world.
Also, didn't the typewriter work? Didn't the flip phone "work"? Lots of products and processes work. But people still strive to make them better, easier and more delightful. But, for some reason, not in education.