Poet Ponders the Digital

If I have to think of what things have changed my life, the answer is simple: computers. I have owned quite a few. If I had kept them, I would have an interesting museum of old technologies. Commodore VIC-20 My first computer at home was a Commodore VIC-20. It was an odd computer, soon replaced by Commodore with the C64 — the best selling computer model of all time. (More than 3 million of the original C64 were sold!) I have a real fondness for the early years of the home computer: Atari, Commodore, Apple, Tandy, Texas Instruments, and many others were competing to get technology into the home. They were all more interesting than the modern Apple Mac and IBM PC to me. Magazines like BYTE, PC World, PC Magazine, Compute, InCider, A+, and dozens of others included program code. You could enter BASIC, machine code, Pascal, or C programs and then change them to see how things worked. Today? The complexity of software no longer makes it possible to include code in a book. Games take do...

I am a skeptic when it comes to technology in the classroom. From accounts like those found in The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology , by Todd Oppenheimer, to the works of Larry Cuban, one finds a series of issues with technology that keep repeating every generation — as if technology and the excitement that always follows it will translate into better-educated students. Oppenheimer is an award-winning San Francisco journalist who toured the country to study how computers were used in the classroom. He began as an optimistic believer in technology and ended the work on a skeptical note, almost a "back-to-basics" philosophy based on everything from the price of technology to the lack of technical support and training teachers generally receive. Gene I Maeroff's work, A Classroom of One: How Online Learning Is Changing Our Schools and Colleges , is authored by one of the leading experts on education. Maeroff has written 11 books in 3...