From Mathematics Teacher 77, September 1984
Coming from an educational technologist, the title of this post is certain to raise eyebrows. I’m not speaking here about the failure of individual ed tech products or applications. There are many that perform wonderfully well. We have quite a few of them here at Purdue. I’m speaking about educational technology in general, specifically the promise of ed tech. The history of this field is littered with the carcasses of whiz-bang inventions that were supposed to transform education, and yet in many ways little has changed. Subtract all the fancy doodads, and college instruction is pretty much unchanged from earlier times (except for tuition to help pay for all that technology – THAT is always and forever increasing). Why hasn’t technology panned out the way they said it would? Where is this new world of educational transformation made possible by technology?
Steve Rappaport discusses some of the reasons for this. “…hardware and software must be reliable, well supported technically, and easy to use, or else the frustrations of using technology will preclude its widespread adoption by teachers. Finally, teachers must be well trained so that they feel comfortable with technology and, more important, understand how to use it effectively in their classrooms.” Technology must be pervasive – available cheaply to everyone in class, integrated into instruction, well supported and faculty must know how to use it. Failure along any of these lines constitutes the standard explanation for the failure of an educational technology. He touches, however, on another, more worrisome reason: “In most classrooms, technology is merely grafted onto existing teaching practices, so what we get is educational practice that is technologically sophisticated but still fundamentally conventional: using PowerPoint instead of a blackboard or overhead projector for a classroom presentation, for example. Thus, in too many cases, technology reinforces rather than transforms educational practice.” What if what is needed is a transformation of educational practice, not merely improvements in how technology is designed and supported?
In his thought-provoking article “Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools,” Paul D. Fernhout advances the idea that educational technology has failed because it is fundamentally misaligned with the educational culture of our times – Compulsory Education. He says there are two types of learning: Learning Just in Case, which is assimilating knowledge in a structured, systematic way to do well on exams and get good grades, and Learning on Demand, which is the unstructured learning that occurs when you search out information to satisfy an immediate need or because you just want to know. Fernhout says that technology is very good at supporting Learning on Demand, but not so good at supporting the Learning Just in Case that is the stock and trade of compulsory education.
“Ultimately, educational technology’s greatest value is in supporting ‘learning on demand’ based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to “learning just in case” based on someone else’s demand. Compulsory schools don’t usually traffic in ‘learning on demand’, for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the ‘real world’. In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. But, history has shown schools [are] extremely resistant to change.” According to Fernhout, how did this situation come to be? “…mass compulsory schooling was invented in the 1800s and designed mainly by the captains of industry and related groups (non-profit and governmental) to ensure most people in society became obedient factory workers, compliant consumers, and unquestioning soldiers, all fitting into a well defined social order or class structure…. this was a bargain eagerly accepted by the populace at the time to gain the supposed benefits of mass industrialization….” This culture remains with us today.
“Technology has been employed to help people work harder in schools, just like in factories, and the most important appearance of technology in schools has been in relation to measuring results and comparing them to defined standards of quality — recording attendance and test scores, crunching the numbers, and producing fancy graphs suggesting where more improvement is needed….assessment is mostly what technology does in schools that ‘matters’, where the other uses of it have been marginalized for various reasons. These “learning on demand” or ‘hands on learning’ activities have been kept in their boxes….”
Fernhout says that when technology doesn’t produce the educational results we want, the typical solution is just to work harder or use more efficient technology. “Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That “work harder” and ‘test harder’ approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit?”
But can’t we just introduce new teaching practices in the classroom such as unstructured learning, case studies, etc., to emphasize Learning on Demand in the traditional school setting? My sense from reading Fernhout is that he might think this is an improvement, but it stops short of real transformation because the end result is still performance based on external standards with the focus of obtaining a good grade. Whenever an external reward system is used as a motivator, Learning on Demand suffers. “And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain…it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if you are not forced to do it — where the work (and success at a challenging task) is its own reward.”
What is Fernhout’s solution? Hold on to your seats and don’t read any further if radicalism unsettles you! His solution is, DO AWAY WITH COMPULSORY EDUCATION! ALL OF IT! “Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child’s time needed in ‘school’? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk…” He then recounts an experiment by Dr. Sugata Mitra that he called The Hole in the Wall: “He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT’s headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company’s grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree. What Dr. Mitra discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.”
Controversial to be sure, but if Fernhout is right then educational technology is DESTINED to fail as long as compulsory education remains alive. Modern information technology is simply a fish out of water in a compulsory environment. It can’t reach its full potential. It isn’t technology’s fault. Rather, it is simply a case, as Steve Rappaport said, of technology reinforcing rather than transforming educational practice. Fernhout: “So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.” How ‘bout them apples!
(Image from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Linux-Mint-Helena.png)
(Image from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Linux_Mint_Logo_oficial.jpg)
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