I think digital technology is changing how we learn,
but I also think it's like wildly overestimated.
It's a tool, it's like a pencil.
It can do amazing things,
but really it's the humans who do amazing things.
I would say on the whole, not very much.
You can still go into most high school math classrooms,
which I spend lots of time in,
and you would feel like you stepped back
into the Victorian age in a lot of cases.
Still, the teachers at the front lecturing
and kids copying down methods.
Sometimes, I get asked to write programming books,
and I think: why would I make a book
about programming when I could teach it online.
It's definitely changing the way that we teach.
I think it's an open question whether
we will learn differently.
Digital technology changes the way I lecture.
And I think a big change also is just the accessibility,
so somebody who's sitting at home
has the ability to go online and learn.
Digital technology is changing the access
we have to things from which we can learn.
But fundamentally, I don't think it's necessarily
changing the way we learn.
I think we live with our bodies as well as our minds,
and we have to experience things in order to learn them.
We have to have experiences
from which learning comes.
I know the teachers who were most important to me,
I kind of had little student crushes on all of them.
Whether they were male or female,
whether I was in high school or college,
I think we remember things intensely when
we're having an emotion associated with the moment,
and the computer can't do that.
I also outlaw computers and phones in my class.
That distraction keeps us from
being connected with each other.
We all think that we can multitask, but we can't.
What I'd like to see is for us to focus more on
the coolest parts of technology
and what kids actually do with technology.
My parents were both computer scientists,
so you might think that
they're going to teach me computer science.
No, what they taught me was that I could go online
and that's something that now people can do all over
is that once they've realized
that they can go online to learn,
and they start really challenging themselves
to do that and take advantage of everything,
there's so much that they can learn.
Let's get them all addicted to math!