Back in 2011, I attended an education conference where one of the keynote speakers celebrated the many new, exciting EdTech tools available to teachers in the 21st Century. I don’t remember a single one that she featured, and I suspect many of them are obsolete or defunct by now anyway (ten years being seventy in tech years), but I vividly recall the refrain that ran through her address: “Paper is dead.”
Her point, that teachers needn’t stay shackled to old ways of doing things amidst a proliferation of new technologies was fair enough; it was the way she opposed old (“paper”) to new (apps, screens, etc.) that rankled. On the one hand, much of the daily work of schools has gone paperless, often for the better--I appreciate easy electronic collection, review, and return of student work, shorter lines at the copier, and on-the-fly posting of readings and resources in response to students’ interests or needs. On the other hand, paper remains alive and well alongside our screens. In fact, I would go so far as to say that not only has paper survived, but that it has proven a vital 21st century educational technology.
Here are five notable strengths of paper in the digital age:
1. Paper Is Low-Friction
I don’t mean the silky-smooth texture of a fresh sheet of premium white bond. I’m referring to what is known in UX design as “user friction,” or that which “slows the user” of technology and “makes it difficult or unpleasant for them to achieve their goal.”1 However easy the EdTech sales rep promises the new app or gizmo to be, I have yet to encounter one that’s lower friction than paper and pencil. Whatever friction generations of teenagers have found with the old technologies (broken pencil, missing pencil, no pencil, leaky pen, dry pen, missing notebook, messy notebook, lost paper, etc.) persists with the new (dead computer, crashed computer, 100 open tabs slowing the computer, unnamed documents, mistyped passwords, forgotten passwords, pop-up notifications, error messages, app crashes, updates, too many steps, too many clicks, non-intuitive design, etc.). This is the dirty little secret of the digital revolution: for all their power and efficiency, digital tools often cost their users more friction (and frustration) than their analog counterparts. Who hasn’t sometimes experienced the frustration of a new piece of technology and decided they preferred the old?
2. Paper Is Distraction Free
It says something that classroom management software exists to monitor and control activity on student devices during class: it says that there are distractions built into the devices. In my experience, such software has not been especially easy to use (see “user friction”), nor does it really stop all that many distractions, tending to become a distraction itself. Witness the ninth grader impishly engaged in a harmless digital shenanigan just to see if the teacher is watching his screen, and you’ll be reminded that one of the great teenage virtues is a natural ability to mock authoritarianism. Honestly, and I mean this as no joke, it’s easier to just have the students turn their desks around so you can see their screens panopticon style. Admittedly, that’s also a little weird and does nothing to keep the classroom from becoming a surveillance state. Easier still is closing the laptop and working on paper.
Ed Tech will always say, at this point in the discussion, that students have to learn how to manage their attention around their devices, that it’s part of growing up and functioning as an adult in our digital world. To that, I say two things: (1) I agree, and (2), paper is a great way to teach them to manage their digital distractions. Not only is it well established that people don’t multitask well with technology, but managing distractions around our devices is a losing proposition when the attention-hungry technology is so well designed that drivers routinely risk death and vehicular manslaughter for their phone screens. Chances are you’ll click out of this article at least once to check on something else if you haven’t already. What chance does a teenager stand? The best and perhaps only way to manage focus around attention-seeking, dopamine-supplying technology is to put it away.
Paper invites focus. It is quiet. It has no pop-up notifications. It offers no temptation to alt-tab over to something else. It whispers no lies about the productivity of multitasking. It doesn’t have Tetris or Fantasy Football. If you want to message a friend, you have to write it down, fold it up, and pass it over to them.
Which is to say that of course a student working on paper can still get distracted! Distraction is a part of the human condition. But I’d rather have a distracted student doodle on paper (a dying art) or gaze out the window at trees and sunlight than consume content on a 13.3-inch LED-backlit Retina display. There’s healthy, natural distraction, and there’s digital stimulation. One is as old as humanity, the other is a dehumanizing product of the digital age.
3. Paper Is Collaborative
I know, I know, Ed Tech has been telling us for years that (screen-based) technology opens up new avenues for student collaboration, from Google Docs to Flipgrid, and it does… sometimes. For the most mature and capable students, it’s a breeze. But for all the more typical teenage captives in my class—whom, I might add, it is also my responsibility to teach—those screens tend to interfere with collaboration, sometimes quite literally in the form of the physical walls created by the open laptops, if not simply in the computer’s myriad distractions. Ask a group of three or four students to work on a task together on their laptops, and they’ll sit in a row looking at their computers without talking. No joke, I often have to physically move their desks together myself to show them how they should sit in a group. (Lest you’re tempted to chalk it up to a couple of years sitting in socially distanced rows, I should add that this problem predates the pandemic).
Give the same group of students a piece of paper, though, and the battle is half-won. If you want to talk about it in terms of technological design, it’s the architecture inherent in the paper: to look at it together, they must draw physically closer; the space between them is open and devoid of pixels; the collaboration is tangible, physically manifest in the sheet between them. It need not be only the one sheet, either. Give everyone a copy of the handout, or jigsaw the activity so everyone has a different handout. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down these laptop walls! Look at each other, kids—have a conversation. Learn with and from each other. No screen necessary for that ancient practice of dialogue. In a world of digital isolation, paper is a meeting place.
4. Paper is Honest
No auto-correct, no auto-complete, no spell-check, no grammar-check, no copy-and-paste from the web, no Google, no ChatGPT. Just a human being and a blank space to fill with what they know and think. If you want to know what students can do—really do, all on their own—give them paper.
5. Paper Is Humane
Contrary to popular notions, technology is never neutral, and digital technology in the 21st century has ulterior motives. Data collection. AI and algorithm training. The attention economy. Planned obsolescence, shortened replacement cycles, and the profitability of Moore’s Law. Our screens need us more than we need them. Their designers are hungry for the value we create when we log onto their devices and apps. Sometimes what they offer in exchange is worth the price; sometimes it is not.
Paper wants nothing from you. It offers space to create with no strings attached. It does not appropriate human nature for its own ends but invites it to flourish. I often find, when students are wired, stressed, exhausted, or zombified at the end of a long day of screen-driven learning, that simple paper—a notebook page or a novel—is a welcome refreshment, like a drink of cool water.
Going Less Paperless
I’m reminded of the self-produced tv ad made by the hapless minions of Dunder-Mifflin’s Scranton branch on a 2007 episode of The Office. The surprisingly inspirational commercial, which Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott has obviously based on the kinds of ads Silicon Valley puts out, ends with an unintentionally ironic slogan for the failing paper company: “Dunder-Mifflin… Unlimited paper in a paperless world.”
Fifteen years later, isn’t there kind of a hopeful ring to that? While the peddlers of screens insist the world is going paperless, paper endures, a critical technology, a haven from the digital.
User Experience in the High Tech Era - School of Design and Creative Technologies - The University of Texas at Austin (utexas.edu)