Cathy Davidson, a passionate advocate of electronic media, in her article “Project Classroom” attempts to explain the many flaws within the current education system. She broadens this claim by delving into several examples where technology has enhanced the learning experience for students. She frequently emphasized the theme of moving away from standardization, and how the traditional educational methods are obsolete. When observing current trends in young students today, Davidson states. “It was as if schools were based on a kind of ‘hunt and peck’ literacy. Whereas kids were learning through searching, surfing and browsing the web.” (49) She provides this excerpt to demonstrate how times have changed from the way schools operated in 2003 as she stated before this. Davidson’s ultimate goal in her article is to make it clear to the reader that it is evident that there is stagnation within the classroom setting today, and a key reason is due to the designation of the term elite when it comes to classifying schools and students. By highlighting how lack of attention to students affects their perception of the relevance of education, how modern technology can be incorporated to achieving crowdsourcing, and lastly how the exclusiveness of elite schools contribute to the stagnation in the educational culture she supports her contention. Although Davidson may seem like she is continually deriding the concept of traditional (current) classrooms, she efficiently utilizes the term elite to exhibit how it has stalled advancement in educational techniques.
Davidson initially introduced the term “elite” when she mentions the top-down nature of the existing societal hierarchy. She states “At least since the GI bill that followed World War 2 and the rapid expansion at the time of the public university system, a college degree has been the entry card to a middle class, white collar achievement. Not graduating from high school and lacking a college degree has constituted failure, and education has constructed its objectives backward from that (negative) goal, in some cities all the way down to competition for the right private nursery school.” (50) Davidson highlights that exclusiveness of these elite schools limits the ability of many disenfranchised people to eventually gaining lucrative white collar jobs. The designation of "elite" has a negative connotation as she feels that the current hierarchy is greatly flawed and she explicitly states the goal as “negative.”(50) Davidson then goes onto state how there are two primary ways that one can get into these elite schools, “One way is to test into the best preschools so you can go to the best private grammar schools so you can be admitted to the most elite boarding schools so you can be competitive at the Ivies or an elite school outside the Ivies like Stanford or Duke, another way is through public schools, a lifetime of determined and focused study, getting A’s and A+ grades in every class, always taking the most difficult courses, earning perfect scores on tests and doing lots of extracurricular work too.” ( 51) These specific paths are only available to only a few people; as she states, one way is to get into an elite private school, which would require someone to be financially well off. In a similar vein, few have the innate work ethic to teach themselves and achieve that level of eliteness which society has made so enticing; as Davidson puts it a "lifetime of determined and focused study.”(51) She illustrates this top-down societal hierarchy by demonstrating how elite implies exclusiveness, which in turn narrows the scope of what is viewed as intelligence. However, for those many that do not possess these resources, such as money or academic achievement to get into these elite institutions, they often become unmotivated to do so and eventually, fail to go to college and don’t achieve white-collar professions.
Diversity is an integral element in what characterizes the modern educational climate and Davidson acknowledges this concept when discussing the crowdsourcing. Being a member of the faculty chair at Duke University, she advocates for implementing technology in the classroom setting; she wants teachers to take advantage of the existing diversity, and culminate a collection of ideas to find solutions to problems rather than have one brilliant individual have the spotlight. A significant example she utilizes to support her contention is the experiment/project done with iPods and how they were implemented in the classroom setting. “We simply asked students to dream up learning application for this cool little white device with the adorable earbuds, and we invited them to pitch their ideas to the faculty. If one of them decides to use the iPods in a course, the prof too would receive free Duke-branded iPod and so would all the students in the class (Whether they were first years or not) We would not control the result. This was an educational experiment without a syllabus.”(52) Although the initial predictions didn't seem to promise much about the outcome of the experiment, the reality was far from that, when the project proved to be extremely informational. Davidson then transitions to her overarching contention regarding “crowdsourcing”; She highlights that diversity plays a key role in the current student climate. With several different groups and ideas out there a collection of knowledge will allow for better decisions to be made. Davidson uses several examples from modern day to solidify her contention. “It was coined by Jeff Howe of Wind magazine in 2006 to refer to the widespread internet practice of posting an open call requesting help in completing some task, ranging from writing code (That's how the open source code that powers the Mozilla browser was written) to creating a winning logo (such as a birdie design of Twitter, which cost a total of six bucks).” (55) Here, she discusses how not only cost-efficient but innovative it is to use this method of crowdsourcing she utilizes She constructs the passage meticulously by starting out demonstrating the use of iPods(technology) in a classroom at an elite school and then shifts into discussing the progression of its use. She brings in these examples to show that the program was a success and this further supports her contention that this system should be implemented to make progress nationwide.
Similarly, Davidson incorporates a central theme of relevance by continually providing examples of how technologies have proven to be extremely useful in developing the appeal of education towards a student. She consistently emphasizes her stance that there must be importance given to attending directly to students and making the class student-centered rather than teacher centered. Towards the end of the article, Davidson brings up a personal anecdote in which she describes an experience reminiscent of the girl with the green hair which profoundly affected her in her youth. “I identified with this girl. When I was in school, my talents had been math and writing and there was a teacher, Miss Schmidt, who saw those gifts despite my abysmal test scores, even though we had to memorize the preamble to the constitution and Gettysburg address to graduate from eighth grade and I just couldn't… Then during one of our painful after class sessions, she had a hunch. She offered me the opportunity to write an essay instead, one essay about each brief text I was failing to memorize. I stayed up all night working on this and return the next day with my project. My scrawl filled every page in a small spiral binder – two hundred pages. After a moment she got out a special state certification and, besides my name, put the check mark I needed to graduate from middle school. I’d passed.”(Davidson 63) This personal anecdote further deepens and conveys the message of the author as she was once unable to recite the preamble (which she indirectly implies is a useless task.) However, she was talented in writing, and because her teacher was able to provide her that attention, he wrote her paper and succeeded in passing the 8th grade.
Going back to the term elite, she states that the survey itself was indeed costly, and only elite universities have the privileges of being given an offer such as this, but she doesn't believe that technology is only restricted to the elite. She states “ This iPod experiment was started at finding a new learning paradigm of formal education for the digital era. As we have learned, infants neural pathways are being sheared and shaped along with his values and his behavior in constant interaction with the people around him who exert influence over his life. The iPod experiment was an acknowledgment that the brain is, above all, interactive, that it selects, repeats and mirrors, always constantly in complex interactions with the world. The experiment was also an acknowledgment that the World Wide Web had changed the chief mode of informal learning for a new generation of students. It was an attempt to put the new science of attention together with the new digital technology that both demanded and in some ways helped produce it.”(Davidson 55) Here she talks about the final analysis of the experiment and implies that this similar type of operation can occur in many other classroom settings using different technologies.
Being designated as elite does have its privileges. In the article, we see that Duke was one of the six universities to be given a choice by Apple to implement one of their technologies. And Davidson uses this iPod experiment to prove that technology is not exclusive and will allow for progress to be made in the educational setting. However, she makes it clear throughout the rest of her writing that this designation of being elite does not imply that those experiments are restricted only to those institutions. Rather she disproves this notion by utilizing several examples primarily by juxtaposing traditional classroom settings to more student-driven classrooms and analyzing the benefits they have towards the youth.