Author Nicholas Carr in conversation with Google’s Peter Norvig.

Around the country and throughout the world, politicians and education activists have sought to eliminate the “digital divide,” by guaranteeing universal access to home computers, and in some cases to high-speed Internet service.

According to a new study by scholars at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, these efforts would actually widen the achievement gap in math and reading scores. Students in grades 5 through 8, particularly those from disadvantaged families, tend to post lower scores once one of these technologies arrives in their home.

Professors Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd analyzed responses to computer-use questions included on North Carolina’s mandated End-of-Grade tests (EOGs). Students reported how frequently they use a home computer for schoolwork, watch TV, or read for pleasure. The study covers 2000 to 2005, a period when home computers and high-speed Internet access expanded dramatically. By 2005, broadband access was available in almost every zip code in North Carolina, Vigdor said.

The study had several advantages over previous research that suggested similar results, Vigdor said. The sample size was large — numbering more than 150,000 individual students. The data allowed researchers to compare the same children’s reading and math scores before and after they acquired a home computer, and to compare those scores to those of peers who had a home computer by fifth grade and to test scores of students who never acquire a home computer. The negative effects on reading and math scores were “modest but significant,” they found.

“We cut off the study in 2005, so we weren’t getting into the Facebook and Twitter generation,” Vigdor said. “The technology was much more primitive than that. IM (instant messaging) software was popular then, and it’s been one thing after the other since then.

“Adults may think of computer technology as a productivity tool first and foremost, but the average kid doesn’t share that perception.”  Kids in the middle grades are mostly using computers to socialize and play games, Vigdor added, with clear gender divisions between those activities.

Vigdor and Ladd concluded that home computers are put to more productive use in households where parental monitoring is more effective. In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children’s computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes.

The research suggests that programs to expand home computer access would lead to even wider gaps between test scores of advantaged and disadvantaged students, Vigdor said. Several states have pursued programs to distribute computers to students.  For example, Maine funded laptops for every sixth grader, and Michigan approved a program but then did not fund it.

“Scaling the Digital Divide: Home Computer Technology and Student Achievement” was published online by the National Bureau for Economic Research. The research was funded in part by the William T. Grant Foundation.

(Courtesy: Sanford’s Press Release )

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Anya Kamenetz on Fastcompany writes about how smartphones and handheld computers sparked an educational revolution and how your kid will start their ABCs with A for app.

As smartphones and handheld computers move into classrooms worldwide, we may be witnessing the start of an educational revolution. How technology could unleash childhood creativity — and transform the role of the teacher.

Gemma and Eliana Singer are big iPhone fans. They love to explore the latest games, flip through photos, and watch YouTube videos while waiting at a restaurant, having their hair done, or between ballet and French lessons. But the Manhattan twins don’t yet have their own phones, which is good, since they probably wouldn’t be able to manage the monthly data plan: In November, they turned 3.

When the Singer sisters were just 6 months old, they already preferred cell phones to almost any other toy, recalls their mom, Fiona Aboud Singer: “They loved to push the buttons and see it light up.” The girls knew most of the alphabet by 18 months and are now starting to read, partly thanks to an iPhone app called First Words, which lets them move tiles along the screen to spell c-o-w and d-o-g. They sing along with the Old MacDonald app too, where they can move a bug-eyed cartoon sheep or rooster inside a corral, and they borrow Mom’s tablet computer and photo-editing software for a 21st-century version of finger painting. “They just don’t have that barrier that technology is hard or that they can’t figure it out,” Singer says.

Some people will criticize such early exposures to tech and gadgets, but it’s really part of our standard environment. My 1 and half year old can’t be fooled with a toy phone and she’s always after our mobile phones. Even though we don’t allow her to carry phone, she still manages to speak to our remote and says “Hello & Bye”. Kids learn by mimicing, experimenting and exploring and these devices allow it so easily.

Image Credit : Karen Horton on Flickr

Sara Scribner on LATimes talks about Saving the Google students where she says that not teaching kids how to sift through sources is like sending them into the world without knowing how to read. Thus, for the google generation, closing school libraries could be disastrous.

The current generation of kindergartners to 12th graders — those born between 1991 and 2004 — has no memory of a time before Google. But although these students are far more tech savvy than their parents and are perpetually connected to the Internet, they know a lot less than they think. And worse, they don’t know what they don’t know.

As a librarian in the Pasadena Unified School District, I teach students research skills. But I’ve just been pink-slipped, along with five other middle school and high school librarians, and only a parcel tax on the city’s May ballot can save the district’s libraries. Closing libraries is always a bad idea, but for the Google generation, it could be disastrous. In a time when information literacy is increasingly crucial to life and work, not teaching kids how to search for information is like sending them out into the world without knowing how to read.

While she is not suggesting us that Google is making us stupid, it does talk impact of it on abilities and thinking