They assume that teachers and administrators who use new media are automatically more effective than those who do not. Yet decades of experience with technological innovations based on first-generation thinking have demonstrated that this viewpoint is misguided. Additional concerns about attempts to supply every student with continuous access to high-performance computing and communications technology relate to the likely cost of this massive investment. For several reasons, this is an impractical approach for improving education. First, putting this money into computers and cables is too large an investment in just one part of the infrastructure improvements that many schools desperately need.
Buildings are falling apart, furnishings are dilapidated, playgrounds are in disrepair.
If these needs are ignored, the machines will cease to function, as their surroundings deteriorate. Also, educational researchers and developers need substantial funding for other types of innovations required to make instructional hardware effective, such as standards-based curricular materials for the World Wide Web and alternative kinds of pedagogy that link teachers and tools. Second, without substantial and extended professional development in the innovative models of teaching and learning that instructional technology makes possible, many educators will not use these devices to their full potential. In this view, the computer serves only as a fire hose that sprays information from the Internet into learners' minds. Even without educational technology, classrooms are already drowning in data.