Chengzhi Wang
Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 

Bruce and Levin's taxonomies of educational technologies were generally built upon theories about children's interests and and John Dewey's theory for learning. Just like the educationalists they referred to, they placed emphasis on "impulses" and "interests" of children in the process of learning.

They stated, "we assumed that the ideal learning environment would, as Peter Marin once said, satisfy children's curiosity by presenting them with new things to be curious about." If this assumption is proved to be perfectly true -- maybe this is too self evident to need to prove, I think children's "impulses," "interests" and "curiosity" are not necessarily all leading to the constructive learning in every stage of their cognitive development.

Before I read more literature about theories related to "interests" and "curiosity" of children to better embrace Bruce and Levin's validity and reliability, I may reasonably assume that children's impulses/interests are not identical in contributing to learning. Some classic philosophers and educationalists held that man's impulses ranged from "evil," "low" to "good" and "noble." I think the children also have the impulses, however comparatively less, to be like things ranging from naughty, unruly to evilish and destroying.

No doubt, the modern educational technologies greatly help children's learning through satisfying their impulses, interests and curiosity. The evidences are so overwhelming that we take the recently-developed educational technologies for granted in curriculum and instruction. At the mean time, the dark side of children's interests, curiosity are also cultivated and enhanced through technologies. In addition, new educational technologies sometimes HAMPERED, REPLACED or TERMINATED children's learning in one end while improved their learning in the other. In certain sense, we may say we created for children the MEDIA FOR DE-LEARNING.

Such instances are numerical. Children are taught to use calculator effectively, but they have poor math skills. Children are taught how to write, prepare documents in computer based upon automatic grammar and spelling checking and the like, but they may not write out a readable letter with a pen. From inquiry, construction, communication and expression, every stage in the application of the new media, we may produce unexpected results which we may easily ignore. The balance between the old and new media, unfortunately, is more tilted to either children have little access to educational technologies because of many reasons, or to over emphasis on the educational technologies than balanced.

A typical example is LEARNING CALLIGRAPHY THROUGH THE NEW MEDIA. The calligraphy indicates the art of not only western languages but also eastern languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese languages. Can the new media replace the traditional learning skills? Can the media help the learning of this art as effectively as the traditional methodologies?