The students went to work on the brand-new laptops provided to each one by the forward-thinking school district. They all logged on and started their research. They worked independently at times, and at other times discussed things with the other members of the group. Meanwhile their teacher helped troubleshoot some technical issues, moved around the room answering questions, and dealt with some instances of inattention and rowdiness. As the period ended and lunch hour approached, the teacher asked each group for a report of their progress.

Group One showed several maps of pre-war and post-war Europe that they had found. Group Three had developed a table of the population and GNP of the countries that made up the Allied Powers. Groups four and five had made similar strides toward their goal. But Group Two presented a treatise on air-conditioning, with a diagram of a typical unit and a page full of tips on keeping air-conditioning costs low.

What?

This is a true story. Evidently Group Two started their work by connecting to and entering central power into the search engine. This led them to the web site of the Central Power Electric Cooperative in Minot, North Dakota, on which the most prominent link led to Touchstone Energy Savers, which this month featured a free guide to lowering your air-conditioning costs. To them the tips sounded practical, useful, and in keeping with what they have been learning about the energy crisis.

What went wrong here? Was this an example of a poor assignment? Inattentive students? Distracting technology?

Probably a little of each. It's like the time Commander Solo reported to Captain Kirk, "The good news, sir, is that we are moving at warp speed plus seven. The bad news is that we don't know where we are going." The students in Group Two searched with great speed and efficiency but in the wrong direction. Digital technology allowed them to travel farther and faster toward the wrong goal, so that by the time the teacher became aware of their progress, they was quite far gone. Without a clear direction and a visible goal, the students did not realize how far off track they were.

Digital technologies are good at moving quickly through information, finding things fast, and collecting factual material. They are not so good at setting goals, providing direction, or relating means to ends.

Marsupials

In the same district, the kindergarten class was involved in the same computer curriculum program. The teacher began with a group discussion. The computers, except for hers, remained in the cart. She showed a picture of a kangaroo on the screen, next to a picture of a giraffe. "Are these animals the same, or are they different?" she began. "And exactly how are they different? And why do you think the kangaroo has grey hair, while the giraffe is brown?" After a few moments of this, she introduced the assignment: each group would take one animal, and answer the questions, How is the __________ different from other animals? Why?

Though these five-year olds possessed neither the keyboard craft nor the search speed of their fifth grade counterparts, they stayed on topic, found many interesting and relevant resources. When it came time to present their work, an image of an Australian mammal filled the big screen. "That's a marsupial, " announced a diminutive young lady with a distinct voice. "What's a marsupial?" asked the teacher. At least six students knew the answer. And the teacher had never taught this concept or this word.

Computers and the Internet in many ways have made it much easier to find the answers. What they haven't done much about is helping us to ask the right questions. And it turns out that the asking the right questions, rather than finding the right answers, may be more important to good education. This week's article suggests some ideas for posing the right questions in a technology-rich classroom environment.

Igneous Fusion

In 1956 Benjamin Bloom (the father of Educational Objectives) related a story about John Dewey (the father of American Philosophy) and a visit to a classroom:

John Dewey ...asked a class, "What would you find if you dug a hole in the earth?" Getting no response, he repeated the question; again he obtained nothing but silence. The teacher chided Dr. Dewey, "You're asking the wrong question." Turning to the class, she asked, "What is the state of the center of the earth?" The class replied in unison, "Igneous fusion."

The class knew one right answer to one particular question. But they had no idea whatsoever of the underlying concept, or of the context in which the question (or its answer) were relevant. The easy access to answers provided by the web and its powerful search engines, make it even easier for our students to fall into the trap of finding the answer quickly without having a clue of why the answer is important or why it was asked in the first place.

(In fact, a search on the teacher's question leads you to a 19th-century science-fiction book by Jules Verne, and to several esoteric research centers on earth science, none of which is directly relevant to the kinds of understandings called for in the national and state earth science standards. Though Verne is a master of the style and his books remain worth reading for their own sake, neither his novel nor the rest of the references take us in the right direction.)

Dewey's question is a better one. (For a good time, enter it verbatim into and see what you find.) It's better, not because it's easier to , but because, in a good instructional context, it is more likely to lead to fuller understanding. It's also more concrete; it's easier for a child's mind to picture; has no single right answer; it can lead in many (mostly relevant ) directions.

it

But the last thing you'd want your students to do is to enter the question into and click the search button. Instead, you want them to imagine the context, to predict the results, to explore the possibilities, all before they open their computers or go online. A good question, in a good classroom context, leads in those directions.

Essential questions

A popular approach to curriculum development called Understanding by Design focuses on the key questions that should guide lesson planning. Advocates of UBD say that every lesson, every activity in the classroom, should first and foremost be led by an essential question, and that "the answers to these questions cannot be found, they must be invented." These kinds of questions seem to work well in a classroom with ubiquitous access to online information sources, where the answers to lower-order questions can be found quickly and almost without thinking. Good questions make students think, and make them use the online resources in a very different way.

In last week's article, fifth grade students misunderstood the topic the teacher assigned to them for their computer project. She told them to do a report on the Central Powers. They missed the context, as well as the closing s, and ended up finding lots of information on air-conditioning ( led them like a faithful retriever to the web site of the Central Power Cooperative). Had the teacher helped them form an essential question before they started their computer work, things might have gone better. A better question for this assignment might have been:

What did we call the two sides in World War I, and what were they fighting about?

Think of a topic you need to cover in the next few weeks. How might you design a good question to guide your student's online research, and to give some structure to their multimedia presentation? Here are some examples:

• Before: Do a report on the causes of the Civil War.
• After: If you could go back in history and change one event, so as to prevent the Civil War from happening, what would it be? Why?
• Before: Explain the role of cellular secretions in human health.
• After: What is snot, and why do we have it?

The latter questions are more interesting, more concrete, and more likely to promote good uses of online sources.

Beyond the question

It's not enough to pose one of these provocative questions, and then let the students loose on the Internet. A good teacher will outline a procedure for thinking about the question, and structuring the research process. The process might begin like this:

1. Discuss your question in a small group. Make note of what you already know about it.
2. Make a list of what you need to know to get to the bottom of the question.
3. Next to each need, list at least two places to go to seek the information you need.
4. Assign these "needs to know" among the various members of your group.
5. Agree on a time and place to meet and share the information you find.

If reading is in decline, then why is Amazon trying to build a new business around it? As I write this article, riding on a crowded commuter train, I can see 20 people from were I sit. Nine of them are actively reading, three newspapers and six books. Four are sound asleep. One is talking on her mobile phone, one's listening to an iPod, one is doing sudoku puzzles, and two are talking to each other. Thus I conclude that reading is by far the most popular activity among this very unscientific sample. Perhaps I should ask my co-travelers to report their grade-point averages so they can be correlated with their reading behavior.

How many of these readers would buy Amazon's new $400 e-book machine if it were for sale right here on the train? It can hold up to 200 books at once, far more than you could fit in your purse or briefcase. So if the train is running late, and you finish your current book, you've got plenty to choose from. And the books cost less than $10 each -- a few dollars below the paper books I see in the hands of my neighbors.

The e-book is not a computer. It looks like an iPod on steroids, about the size of a trade paperback, with a screen about the size of the palm of your hand. It can download books all by itself, through a mobile wireless network -- it needs neither cable nor computer to recharge its library. Think of the possibilities for education:

• A single device that can hold the content of all your textbooks in a handy ten-ounce box.



Filebusters
by James G. Lengel, Hunter College School of Education, 01/28/2008

Vignette #1
The students had completed their slide show tracing the dissemination of Islamic art forms through areas of Spain and France in the 11th - 13th centuries. Replete with animated maps and photographic examples, the slide show supported their well-researched spoken narrative on this topic. Now it was time to post the PowerPoint slide show to the class web site.
With the help of their professor, they uploaded the slide show...but it did not make it. The system told them it would take six hours to upload the file! (And so, of course, it would take anyone wishing to view the file the same six hours to download it.) This was not what they were aiming at.
Vignette #2
The kindergartners' beautifully-published books on animal habitats were a big hit at the PTA Curriculum Fair. Printed in full color on glossy paper in a hardback binding, they told the story, in words and pictures, of adaptation, predation, and protection. The students used iPhoto to create the book, based on extensive online research, original photography, group discussion, and serious composition. Now it was time to provide a copy for each student.
But not every family had the iPhoto application on their computer at home, nor did the school have a .Mac account that would have allowed easy uploading and viewing of the book over the Web.
Vignette #3
The three faculty members had worked long and hard to prepare the grant proposal. They each sent their narratives, supporting research papers, and curriculum vitae to the grants manager, all in the form of Microsoft Word documents. As the grants manager compiled the final copy for submission, he noticed that some of the tables looked a little odd, and he remembered seeing a pop-up window warning of some missing fonts. But he'd learned to ignore all those pop-up windows, and so thought nothing of it.
Their proposal was rejected, on the grounds that two crucial data tables were indecipherable to the grant-review committee. The main ideas on the proposal were quite sound, remarked the committee, but the garbled tables did not allow them to see the results of the previous research.
Who are you going to call?
All three of the educators described in these vignettes have problems with their files: they are either too big, too strange, or too messed up to be useful. What they need is the digital equivalent of Ghostbusters, perhaps called Filebusters, to come in and save the day. Most computer-using teachers and students have at one time or another confronted issues such as these, where the files just don't work for the intended educational purpose. And a few have discovered a solution that applies in many similar situations, called Portable Document Format, or PDF.
The PDF format was pioneered by the Adobe company to make it possible to publish a document that would be eminently readable, and nicely printable, no matter what kind of computer you displayed it on, or printer you printed it on, or software you used to view it. And once published by the author, a PDF document could not be altered by the reader. This format was based in part on on Adobe's patented PostScript technology, which is used in many printers and some computer displays.
Here's how PDF could have helped our three disabled digerati:
Had the students of Islamic art saved their slide show in a properly compressed PDF format, it would have been small enough for posting to and downloading from the school web site. That's because the PDF format saves only the information it needs to display the slides on a computer with standard resolution. PowerPoint, on the other hand, saves the full resolution of each image in the slide show, which can amount to many megabytes of unnecessary pixels. And just about everybody has a PDF reader on their computer -- most are free or built in. But not everyone has the latest version of PowerPoint, which must be purchased. So PDF is concise.
Had the kindergartners exported their iPhoto books in PDF format, they could easily have been distributed over the web or on CD, and displayed on any type of computer, with or without iPhoto. From the PDF file, the books could be printed at home, or read directly from the computer screen. In full color. Or emailed to grandma in Texas. PDF is compatible.
Had the faculty members submitted their grant application in PDF format, it would have been much less likely to become contaminated by subsequent reviewers, and much more likely to display exactly as desired no matter what kind of computer or printer was used by the reader. That's because PDF files are not alterable by most grant mangers or reviewers, as Word files are. PDF is consistent.
How to save in PDF
You may need to save your own publications in the PDF format. Here's how:
• On Apple Macintosh, it's easy and built in. No matter which program you are using, choose from the menubar File --> Print. Then, in the Print dialog box, click the PDF button in the lower left corner. You'll get a choice of dispositions: Save as PDF, Compress PDF, and so forth. For the situations described above, Save or Compress would have been the best choices. This process creates a new file on your computer, in PDF format.
   
• On Windows and Linux, you'll need to install a PDF-saving utility on your computer, and then follow its directions to convert your documents to the Portable Document Format. A search on PDF utilities for Windows will point you to several free and paid programs for this purpose.
Once saved in PDF format, these files can be distributed by all of the means at your digital disposal:
• You can attach the PDF file to on email, and end it to your correspondents with the confidence that it's concise enough to pass the email file size censor, compatible enough to be read by all, in a consistent format.
   
• You can copy the PDF file to a compact disc, or flash memory stick, and let your public copy them from there to their own computers with the same confidence.
You can post the PDF file to a web site, knowing at all web servers know how to send out this format, and all web browsers know how to send it to the PDF reader to display it. Just as you published it.




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