Technology in Education
The landscape of education has changed more rapidly in the past decade than in the previous hundred years. New technologies challenge established norms. Emerging practices promise new modes and methods. Cultural, economic, and social changes encourage (and perhaps even demand) a comprehensive review of what education is, and what it’s for. We are — to put it mildly — living through an age of educational destruction and renewal.
As educators, we need to decide how to deal with this turbulence. Opting out is a not a viable option. After all, education is a service profession: we serve the means and ends of learning. If those means and ends are challenged, if they change, if they are re-imagined and reinvented, we must respond accordingly. We must join the conversation, engage with the turbulence, be willing to evolve as circumstances evolve around us.
Most of us are trying hard. We’ve started using digital media and materials; we’ve found ways of engaging students with laptops and handhelds; we’ve spent time researching the trends and considerations that lie before us; we’ve started adapting our curriculum to the new conditions we face in culture and society. We’re making headway.
But we also need some clarity. The landscape is changing so fast, and so often, that it’s hard to know where and how to find a foothold. Should we blog, tweet, check-in? Should we use tools today that will be relics tomorrow? How do we integrate the storied, established traditions of education (traditions that have built formal education into the most successful cultural enterprise in the history of humanity) with the forward-looking, adaptive, spontaneous activities of learners today? What should we do? Where, and how, should we make our stand?
Here’s where I stand: with an emerging set of principles and practices (about which, more here and here) that I’ve derived from my own immersion in new and digital media. These principles and practices can be stated succinctly, as a set of basic axioms:
Diversity over conformity
Educators possess unique temperaments and employ divergent methods. What works for me — creativity, play, student-built content, flexible curriculum — may not be best for you. Perhaps you like quizzes more than essays, or exams more than presentations. That’s fine. You should not be forced into a box — particularly a digital box — that violates your basic ways of working. The new educational landscape offers innumerable tools and strategies. You should be able to choose those that work best for you. This means, of course, that you must also be fully responsible for adopting and adapting the tools you use. As the saying goes: If you break it, you get to keep both pieces. (Another version of this principle is concentration over conformity.)
Applications before infrastructure
Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with many educators who would like newer computer hardware and more contemporary classroom tools. I get it. I’d like those things too. But the cultural and technological landscape is moving away from hardware and infrastructure. Applications — on the web, on handhelds, tablets, and phones — are now the pathways of information currency. The device is secondary, and more or less disposable (and recyclable, hopefully). I believe that educational institutions should purchase hardware, but I do not believe that hardware should be central to the delivery of educational services. To a large extent, it doesn’t matter what hardware you use. More and more, online applications construct the technological experience, not hardware. All you need is a platform to run a browser (or any kind of web-enabled app). If you have that, you’re good to go. Moreover, students and educators already make individual choices about their preferred hardware platforms. I believe we should encourage this trend: let people buy and use their own hardware (and, where feasible, helping subsidize these purchases when the devices will be used professionally), while at the same time providing current, generic platforms in educational settings. We need to de-emphasize locked-in, long-term technology infrastructures (any software that comes in a box is a locked-in and long-term choice). We need open, adaptive, online tools and apps.
Facilitation over handholding
Most contemporary educators need new technological skills. And they ask for help with this professional development. That’s good. But what we use now, in educational technology, is not what we will use in three years, or two, or even sooner. The landscape is changing too fast to make investments in long-term professional development initiatives based on single tools. What educators need is to develop the broader, more adaptive skills that enable them to modify and update their suite of tools on a more or less continuous basis. It’s a skill much like stirring a cream sauce: you can’t let it sit for very long. Educators need a good deal of help in making the shift from institutionally-supported platforms and tools to individually selected and managed methods. This is a hard-sell for educators who want institutions to lead them into the new landscape. That’s not going to happen. Institutions (say, all institutions of more than 200 members) are too large to adapt quickly enough to the technological changes afoot. Sure, we should rely on institutions to be the guardians of legacy, of organizational memory, of group governance, of tradition, of infrastructure — but fast adaptation is not their game. If educators are to respond appropriately to the groundswell of technological change before us, we have to take those steps ourselves: by forming small groups of intentional practice, by creating community-driven collaborations, by conducting research into pedagogical development, and so on. And institutions can help us with these things: by providing many kinds of support for the emergence of a new paradigm of teaching. Many institutions are doing this already (Duke, for example, and Berkeley). Institutional support is crucial to make these projects work; but the rest is up to us.
Partnership before service
Neal Stephenson once wrote about the black-hole gravity of academic tech support. The environments of scholarship tend to be focused more on tradition than innovation, more on long-term investment than short-term hunch. Static and secure tend to win out over dynamic and turbulent. Fair enough: almost every university defines itself in terms of traditional norms, established practices, accepted methods. But the society in which we live is now being transformed by non-traditional technologies, new educational practices, and innovative methods. Educators are along for the fastest and most urgent transformations in learning since the invention of the word. We now live in a black swan universe of extreme and rapid change. If educators (and parents, and counsellors, and anyone who works with people) are to respond effectively to these changes, we’ll need to surrender our notions of long-term and locked in technology solutions that are out of date on the first day of use. That’s just not going to work: not for us, not for our students, not for the currency of our contribution. We need to stop asking for the kind of tech support that’s about lost passwords, software upgrades, and browser versions. Every time we call tech support to ask why a web page looks different, or why the formatting of text pasted straight from Word is messed up, or how to upload a large video file without first doing any kind of editing or compression — every time we do these things we take time from people who should be helping us with innovative and useful technology and constrain them to answering the same simple questions over and over again. It boils down to this: we should learn how to use technology. That’s part of our job. Let’s not offload it to people who could otherwise be helping us build great infrastructure. At the moment, they don’t have time. They’re too busy walking us through the steps of how to turn on the projector, how to plug in a USB drive, how to login. We can’t figure this out on our own, or look it up, or fiddle until it makes sense? We’re that stuck? I hope not. Because if educators don’t shift from service models to partnership models, our classrooms and our students will suffer. And we’ll suffer too: gathering irrelevancy, stuck at the blinking cursor, waiting for the tech guy to fix it.
Convention over configuration
In the world of contemporary web programming (Ruby on Rails programming, to be precise), the phrase “convention over configuration” is used to describe a philosophical preference for efficient, streamlined practices. It’s basically another way of saying focus on what matters. CoC practices reduce the number of immediate decisions while at the same time maximizing the flexibility of activity. Contemporary educators could use help with this. I see too many educators tweaking the look and layout of web content but not spending enough time on content development. I hear teachers advocating more assertively for custom-branded websites than they do for adaptive and useful tools. I watch people become exasperated with the defaults and built-in functionality of web tools — because such tools are slightly different from what people are used to — instead of becoming curious about how to learn new skills and develop efficient educational workflow. We worry too much about tweaking and not enough about overall quality. Sometimes conventions are good: they impose focus, and clarity, and consistent ways of doing things. Sometimes configuration is a bugaboo, a time-waster, a black hole of options and settings that leads ever farther from the goal of good, strong, online content. I don’t care (much) if the header image on my course website looks exactly the way I want; I do care if my content is not exactly right.
Open over closed
Transparency is the lubricant of the web and an evolving ethic within academia. Online conversations and crowdsourcing are now standard practices. Open Source tools, practices, and ideas are now fundamental to the digital experience. As educational technology practices evolve, free and open are becoming basic principles. (Of course, free is a term with many nuanced meanings.) Essentially, learners today have access to information in ways that are fundamentally new and dynamic. Text books are obsolete. Research has become an online (and finely-grained) activity. Blogs are now a legitimate form of scholarship. Copyright and information licensing are being transformed. Slowly but irrevocably, we are moving toward an educational system based on the digital. And digital information wants to be free.
Short-term strategies before long-term decisions
Let’s not make any firm plans. What we decide now should be provisional, subject to adaptation and renewal. We need to be nimble. Ferris was right: life moves pretty fast. Accordingly, our plan should be to learn as we go. We no longer live in a steady, predictable world. We live in Extremistan. We should get used to that landscape. It’s quirky, fast-moving, changeable, unpredictable. Fun, too. That’s the best part, for me: the joy in turbulence, the surprising turn, the unexpected opportunity for renewal. We get to make things up as we go.