At about the same time the article, "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" appeared in Saturday's New York Times, I delivered a presentation on Internet-enabled communication at a Sonic Foundry's Rich Media Users’ Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.
The New York Times article discusses how schools systems are not finding any benefit to student test scores from their adoption of laptop computers. Some school districts, such as Liverpool, NY, are abandoning their laptop programs entirely, citing high maintenance costs and students' use of the laptop to surf the web, hack into local businesses and access Internet pornography. Educators find that there is no difference in test scores between students given laptops and those who learn the three R's using more traditional media such as textbooks and other written materials.
Sonic Foundry's Mediasite™ recorder, which is in use at my educational institution, is one of several competing products that may be revolutionizing the use of computers and the Internet in the classroom. Mediasite™ combines into one source the video, audio and Powepoint slides presented in a classroom lecture. This combination of several sources is the “rich” in rich media. Recordings are stored permanently on a server and can be viewed via video streaming from anywhere in the world.
So here we have a technological opposition, a battle of the bandwidths as it were. On the one hand we have old school academics who can't figure out how to effectively use the laptop computer in their classrooms. On the other we see pedagogic innovators who embrace the opportunities generated by computer-based technologies. Though the discussion revolves around the effective use of technology, the real conflict may be between a space-binding medium (paper-based books) and a medium that binds both space and time equally (Internet-connected computers).
Harold Innis, a founding father of Media Ecology, argued that the nature of a civilization is determined by the characteristics of its dominant communication medium. Cultures that carved their stories into stones were time-binders and tended to be conservative in terms of change and stable in terms of social hierarchy. Stones were hard to carry any distance, but lasted a long time. This is an example of a time-binding medium.
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