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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  43
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.
The release of Apple’s new iBooks platform is mentioned in the first paragraph to______.
选项 A、point out the contradiction between Steve Job’s words and deeds
B、remind readers of previous attempts to use technology to replace textbooks
C、introduce the topic of what kind of role technology should play in education
D、predict the possible changes that may be brought by this new technology
答案C
解析 第一段中提到了苹果公司最新发布的iBooks平台。苹果公司宣称这一平台能够彻底改变学生使用教科书的体验。作者提到这个例子是为了引出话题，具体话题在第二段中得到陈述。作者认为，苹果公司的这个软件只是人类一直以来尝试使用技术彻底改变教育的野心的一种体现。作者呼吁在人们对技术的一片狂热中，我们应该冷静下来，好好想想，技术究竟能够给教育带来什么?因此，苹果公司的例子只是作者引出自己观点的引子，正确答案应该选[C]。[A]选项错误，第一段中提到了斯蒂夫·乔布斯曾经说过：“美国的教育问题不能单单依靠技术革新来解决”。他的观点与作者不谋而合，作者举苹果的例子并不是为了说明乔布斯言行不一。[B]选项错误，苹果的iBooks系统是技术界的新动向，作者举这个例子，并不是将它作为一个以往的案例印证现在的趋势。[D]选项错误，作者在第一段提到了苹果宣称该款软件可能带来革命性的意义，但是作者并不相信苹果公司的豪言壮语，也无谓去预测这种新技术可能带来的变化。因为在作者看来，技术无论如何发展，都无法代替教育最本质的东西。
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