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Revolutionizing education with digital ink : the impact of pen and touch technology on education
Hammond T., Valentine S., Adler A., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2016. 385 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319311-91-3)
Date Reviewed: Oct 12 2016

This volume of conference proceedings from the 2015 Workshop on the Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education (WIPTTE) consists of papers by some of the leading educators in the field. I am fascinated by educational technology and its promises, and I was very excited to receive this text. However, I was ultimately disappointed: there seems to be little truly innovative pedagogy that uses digital ink as its basis, and the papers seem to concentrate more on the tools themselves than on the pedagogy.

The introduction by the editors does make the good points, borne out by research, that writing by hand is more conducive to thinking and exploring than typing, and writing by stylus on a digital tablet encourages students to write more or to draw more diagrams. Surely this is a very good thing and should be encouraged.

One truly powerful aspect of digital tools is networking, both synchronous and asynchronous. Students can collaborate in real time on the same document, and a teacher can display any student’s work or all the work in the class, at any time, from a central computer from which all student work can be seen. It is this level of collaboration, so powerful in learning, that really makes digital tools so revolutionary. But there is unfortunately very little of that in this book, and what there is tends to be glossed over.

I was also disappointed in the applications being used: most of them seem very simplistic and offer little more than (nondigital) pen and paper. For example, a mathematics application for teaching algebra seems to revolve around the computer turning handwritten mathematics into nice typeset equations. The problem with this is that such recognition still requires fairly precise notation to start with: sloppy figures and characters (such as those we all write naturally) are unlikely to be properly recognized. Although mathematics optical character recognition (OCR) seems to me to be a step in the right direction, I don’t think the authors made a very convincing case as to its pedagogical advantages.

I was interested in a paper about the use of tablet PCs in a college STEM class. Although the retention statistics seem impressive, I don’t know how much was due to the hardware and how much to the no doubt careful pedagogy put in place to support it. It may be that the pedagogy alone (without the tablets, or with a cheaper alternative) accounts for the increased retention.

There are also papers where the use of tablets seems to offer little over a standard mouse-based interface, for example, an engineering application teaching students about trusses and forces. An application with a “snap to grid” mode, where a line will automatically join to the nearest grid point, simplifies much of the necessary precision of mouse-work, and seems to me to be a paradigm that is simpler, cheaper, and just as effective as a tablet application.

Possibly the best example was one teaching the learner how to write symbols in character-based languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Such an application could also be used for helping learners write other alphabetic scripts such as Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic. I think an application like this could be a huge help in language learning.

One issue not mentioned is cost. At the time of writing, digitizing tablets, or tablet PCs, are expensive, and fitting out a classroom with appropriate hardware is at the moment only within the reach of well-funded schools. How such hardware, and the pedagogy that one hopes will flow from it, can be used in poorer schools is not discussed. The one paper discussing the use of tablet PCs “in sub-Saharan Africa” described an experiment funded in part by the Kenyan government, and in part by the US National Science Foundation and a US university. Clearly this funding model cannot be widely applied.

There is also no discussion about the use of technology for students with disabilities, learning or otherwise. Students, for example, with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome can often benefit greatly from technology tailored to their needs, and I would expect that tablet-based software, suitably designed and deployed, may be of great use here.

My feeling is that many of the authors are very excited about the hardware, and rightly so, but as yet I think any exciting pedagogy that is fully linked to this hardware is yet to be realized. This volume, while providing a snapshot of the current uses of digital ink in schools (and universities and colleges), I don’t think justifies its title about “revolutionizing education.” Education may be enhanced by the use of digital ink (for those who can afford it), but I think a revolution is some way off.

If you are expecting revolutionary pedagogy, you may be disappointed (as I was), but if you are interested in the current uses of this technology, then this volume contains many examples.

Reviewer:  Alasdair McAndrew Review #: CR144838 (1701-0040)
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