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  3. Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of

Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of

admin2014-10-24  50
问题     Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of last week’s coverage of Apple’s new iBooks platform, which the company promises will radically change how students use and experience textbooks. Under Apple’s plan, companies and individuals will be able to self-publish textbooks, ideally creating a wider array of content. Students will be able to download and use these books on their iPad much like they would use a regular textbook.
    Let’s slow down. Textbooks or tools that look a lot like textbooks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And since high quality educational material isn’t cheap to generate, simply tearing down distribution barriers will only go so far in reducing the costs of producing good content. Lost in the heated claims, however, is a more fundamental question: what have educational technology efforts accomplished to date and what should we expect?
    As a field, education is easily seduced by technological promises. Textbooks? Thomas Edison saw movies as way to replace them. These days, conservatives are in love with the idea that technology will not only shrink the number of in-classroom teachers but render the teachers’ unions obsolete.
    The experience to date is less grandiose and more worrisome considering the billions that have been spent on technology in schools in the past few decades. Interactive whiteboards have been around since the early 1990s and done little to transform how teachers teach, and computers are often unaligned with classroom instruction, even though 90% of classrooms around the country have them.
    The reasons for the slow pace of change are as obvious as they are stubborn. Altering classroom and school practice in our wildly decentralized education system is always a slow process. Many teachers are not familiar with technology or how to use it in the classroom, and high-quality training programs—either in schools of education or as part of a teachers’ professional development—are rare.
    Besides, even a top-shelf product can only augment live teaching. Likewise, technology is bringing back in vogue the idea of the "flipped classroom" with the teacher acting as a "guide on the side" rather than the primary source of instruction. I say back in vogue because, ironically, talk of devaluing the teacher as content provider has been a fixture of progressive education thought for a century. Another variation of the flipped-classroom idea is to use technology to explain concepts at home and use classroom time differently. But much of the online content available today merely replicates the lame instruction already available in too many of our nation’s schools.
    American education desperately needs an overhaul that goes far beyond upgrading computers in the classroom. Jobs was right: technology by itself won’t fix what ails our schools. He saw teachers’ unions and archaic practices as the big barriers. Perhaps, but I’d argue they are symptoms of our larger inattention to instructional quality. The bells and whistles of technology, for all its promise, are distracting us from this mundane but essential reality.
In this article, the author mainly criticizes______.
选项 A、the slow progress made by American school in upgrading teaching equipment and technology
B、the failure of American school to effectively integrate technology with teaching
C、the attempt to substitute technology for teachers to play the central role in teaching
D、little endeavor American schools have made to facilitate the professional development of teachers
答案C
解析 作者在第二段最后一句话中，就点明了文章想要讨论的核心内容：“what have educationaltechnology efforts accomplished to date and what should we expect?”教育技术到底取得了哪些成果?我们应该抱有怎样的期待?在第四段中，作者运用实例告诉读者，尽管美国学校在教育方面投入巨资，却没有取得理想效果。第五段作者批判了企图用远程教育技术代替教师在教学中扮演的核心指导地位的“反向理论”，并且在最后一段中呼吁教育界重新定位，将注意力从教育技术转移到教育质量上。[A]、[B]和[D]这三个选项的内容文中都有提及，也都是作者批判的内容。但是这些批判都是为作者最终的观点服务的，“目前来看，技术还没有能够为教育界带来实质性改变，既然收效甚微，那么想用技术替代教师的核心地位就是天方夜谭。”正确答案应该选[C]。
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