Chat Room: Rage Against the Machine

But, unfortunately, educators are often part of the problem. Oppenheimer has seen many teachers praise their students—and give them high grades—for creating polished PowerPoint presentations that simply regurgitate text and display pictures copied from the Web. Projects like these, he says, show no evidence of any personal thought or understanding of the subject. The way technology has been implemented in the majority of American schools has caused students to think less, not more, he wrote in a 1997 cover story for the Atlantic Monthly. And in the No-Child-Left-Behind era, he also thinks there's too much emphasis on using technology to cram kids' heads with facts they'll need to pass tests. (He depicts Accelerated Reader as one such use of technology.)

Oppenheimer began covering multimedia technology for Newsweek during the mid-1990s, and he says that he was a "big fan" of it. But the more he saw how technology was being used in K–12 schools, the less convinced he became that it was doing students much good. Now a freelance journalist, Oppenheimer believes that school technology is best in small, carefully measured doses, and he documents his case in his book.

When I asked him, in a phone interview, if he'd like schools to shut down their computer networks, he said no. Oppenheimer wants educators to offer kids more guidance in how to think about what they find online. "Kids need to learn the principles of depth and breadth," he says. "They need to find the intersection between their imaginations and the information that's already out there." It's your imagination that makes your work special, he says, not what you can copy from Google.

So how can librarians use technology in a way that encourages students to think more imaginatively and critically? It's essential to teach information literacy skills across the curriculum, says Oppenheimer. As part of that effort, educators should require students to look first at print materials—which are edited and fact checked—rather than relying on Internet materials, which are more likely to be inaccurate and contain misspellings. "Reading and studying books and magazine articles [teaches] kids how to write a lead paragraph, and how to use transitions to bring people into their story," he says. Oppenheimer also believes that manipulating physical objects—whether blocks and paint or books and magazines—focuses students' attention on the task at hand, and helps them learn better than a computer screen.

He hopes that teachers and librarians will guide kids to ask essential questions and encourage them to tackle real-world problems that can't be solved by simply looking on the Net. For example, instead of simply listing the clothes that the ancient Egyptians wore, let's ask students: "What would the ancient Egyptians have worn if the temperature in the Nile valley had been 15 degrees cooler? How might their culture have been different?" Researching questions like these requires more than Google, and librarians should guide students to the best available tools.

Although high-tech vendors claim that children exposed to cutting-edge hardware and software will have an easier time getting jobs later on, Oppenheimer disagrees. No technology is cutting edge for very long, and what employers really want, says Oppenheimer, are graduates who can think creatively, solve problems, and be able to write a readable and meaningful English sentence.