Vivienne Collinson

About the author: Vivienne Collinson is a professor at Michigan State University and the author of Reaching Students: Teachers' Ways of Knowing.

Computers can be effective tools for helping students learn academic subjects, but young people will always need human teachers to provide moral guidance and foster intellectual growth and social development. Computers provide students with information, but only teachers can teach children to think critically, discriminate among sources of information, and be creative. Computers certainly cannot help students with the difficult social and moral problems they face.

Information technology is changing people's thinking as profoundly as the printing press changed the course of history more than five centuries ago. The advent of information technology, particularly the computer and the World Wide Web, was hailed as having "the potential to revolutionize education and improve learning." Futurists quickly envisioned...