The following are four quotes about technologies that were predicted to revolutionize learning. Try to guess what each is referring* to and when it was said (answers at end of article):
a) …will revolutionize education…can motivate students, guide and sharpen their reading by providing background and demonstrations, encourage responsibility for independent learning, arouse curiosity and develop new insights and the excitement of discovery. A school where these are in use may find itself bursting out of old patterns.
b) To bring the world to the classroom, to make universally available the services of the finest teachers, the inspiration of the greatest leaders…and unfolding world events.”
c) Is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.
d) The inventor or introducer of the system deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of mankind (sic).
While nearly all of these things have had impact on the world, few delivered on their promise for education. Why not?
The models of education didn’t change to reflect the abilities of the technology. Instead of focusing on the major problems in education, the people making these quotes were focused on the technology. Not surprisingly, similar quotes have been made for computer-based training, web-based training, blogging, Second-life, Facebook and Twitter.
Many organizations with which I’ve worked have bought into the hype associated with these technologies (or their own versions of them) to manage learning, knowledge management, or talent management. They are then often surprised when people don’t use them inside the company like the do in their personal lives. But there is a simple reason for this. People may try out a new technology because it’s “cool” but they won’t keep using it unless it solves their problems. For example, people use blogs, Twitter, or Facebook because they want to communicate their thoughts, lives, ideas to a wider audience but have been unable to using other means. However, while a person might want to share the minute by minute details of his or her life or his or her message about saving the planet, he or she might not have that same passion when it comes to work-related information. If your organization does not have a pent up demand from people who are dying to share information but can’t, then even the coolest social networking tool is going to mostly go unused. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the problems that the technology can solve.
That’s not to say that the current Web 2.0 tools won’t have an impact on learning or corporate knowledge sharing. If they do, however, it will because there was also an innovation elsewhere that made the new technology essential.
Often new technologies are simply used as substitutions for old technologies. A colleague of mine, Rheinhart Ziegler, once referred to this as putting old wine into new bottles. Early television shows would have people sitting still talking to each other as they did on the radio. Once people started thinking about how they could leverage the visual aspects of television, things began to change.
We often get distracted by the newness of a technology and lose sight of the real problems that their business faces. If you want to create innovative solutions, focus on the problems and constraints facing your business. Finding ways to overcome those will produce innovative solutions. Sometimes that will require cool new technology. Sometimes not. Use technology to support your goals but don’t get distracted by it or its promise. The real promise comes from what’s inside.
* a) television-1962 b) radio-1917 c) motion pictures-1922 d) chalk board-1841
Hey Chief: Funny that you posted this entry just as I was reading Marshall McLuhan! The medium is the massage, baby! (cough)
Ok: you well-made argument about how (and why) certain technologies may fail to live up to their initial promise absolutely supports your call for us keep our focus on using technology to solve specific and palpable problems. Not to be intoxicated by the scent of the new. As usual, you make a great deal of sense.
I was thinking of a kind of extension to your argument, and I’m not sure if it makes any sense but here goes.
As someone who labors in a higher education, I have observed how this generation of students’ subjectivities have been shaped by the technologies that mediate their daily lives. When McLuhan argued that media become extensions of ourselves, of our human senses, I think he was referring to how our brains adapt to the “scale and pace” of the technologies we interact with daily.
What this means for me (and I’m not the only one) is that my teaching style has adapted to the more visual, more frenetic, more interactive mode of expression that seems to characterize modern life for young people. Doing this is the best way to connect with students (and when I do manage to connect, then I can lead them to Wonderland 😉 ).
So what I’m saying here is that, in a way, those mystery technologies you expose for not living up to their transformative promise on education may have actually done so, but perhaps not in a direct way. The way certain technologies have become integrated into everyday life have actually transformed pedagogy because they have transformed our students (and us, to some extent). Does this make sense?
What this has to do with making dollars by making sense, I have no idea!
Thanks for the thought-inspiring post–SPM.
Thanks for that great comment.
I guess the question is on what has really changed and how much. I would agree that you are probably trying to do things in a sound-byte, you-tubey flashy way to capture their attention. But for a long time we’ve known that to educate someone you must grab their attention. This generation’s attention is grabbed by something new but are they really learning that much differently? They are still sitting in a classroom, listening to a professor (albeit, now a frentic more interactive one), and still having receiving their education through a channel and process that looks a lot like it has for about 100 years.
And, my bigger question is that although you might be doing certain things to capture their attention differently, how much is different once you have it an open the door to Wonderland. That’s what I struggle with. The question isn’t as much about whether there is a difference in their preference for receiving information…my question is whether there is a difference in how they process it. Have their brain structures really changed so that their brains can somehow process and connect small, discrete bits of information whereas our old dinosaur brains required strucrures and schemas upon which to hang those things?
In Proust and Squid Maryann Wolf makes the case that our brains did in fact change physically as a result of us adapting to the use of reading to communicate. But she says that took place over thousands of years of evolution.
So, I wonder, have we fundamentally changed things? Or, are we short changing our students by catering to their desire to get short sound bytes that they graps but then have no where to hang?
I have no idea but, in the grand scheme of things, I think that if the founder of your beloved university showed up in one of your classes, once he got past the shock of a woman teaching and the frenzy, he might not think that it looked all that different.
On another note – your point about being more interactive – I’ve heard many people say that techonlogy is changing learning by making it more interactive and community-based (social). But I wonder, before “technology” change learning by making it more industrialized, didn’t most people learn through interactive and social means – sitting around campfires, serving as apprentices, sharing storeis and legends?
I think that perhaps the real innovation is that we’ve figured out how to use technology to get us back to the way we learned before we had all of this technology.
This is fun! Thanks for the great response. I wish you could visit my class. Say, how do you know I’m a woman in a frenzy? I might be a man in a beard.
Hmmm, a few comments. Just to clarify. I’m not talking about using fancy bells and youtube porn to grab anybody’s attention. I’m referring a deeper level shift in the way we reach students “where they are.” My point is that, at least for me, the mode of learning I implement in the classroom has shifted in part because ideas about how to create knowledge in the classroom have changed.
At the same time learning is always context-based, and students still need to be able to understand the conditions that produced a certain theory, aesthetic, etc, in order to appreciate its significance. It’s how they get there that may be different. In this way, their brains don’t learn things in a fundamentally different way. At least as far as I can tell.
And, I have no idea about how students’ brains actually process anything. That aspect of learning seems to be contingent on a whole lot of factors I have no control over, including basic things like what they had for breakfast. Yet as far as brains themselves go, most neuroscientists would agree that our brains are changing all the time. Every time you learn a new skill, for example–when you learn to drive, learn a new language, gain the courage to try something different– neurotransmitters develop new pathways, new connections that alter the structure of your brain. Chemicals are released that can change your mood as well.
Moreover, I think that part of what makes students brains so much fun is that students understand themselves as “students.” It’s their core identity. And as such they are positively oriented toward learning, so their learning muscle is always nice and warmed up. Some folks, it seems to me, reach a certain point in life when they just want to tell others what they know, and this is when their brains regress toward the paleolithic. Those are the only dinosaurs I know!
ps: For the record, students in my classes aren’t always sitting and they aren’t always listening to me, although sometimes our class does look a lot like a 1980s classroom. So I would hope that if those good old dead white men founders/robber-barons happened to walk into my classroom they would recognize it as a classroom. (fingers crossed)
Oh, I forgot to say that you’re sounding like you ate a big bowl of luddite for dinner, Chief. No wonder you’re so cranky. . . .
Sorry– one more thing then I’ll go away. For me, Wonderland is the place where students learn to think about how they think. From there, they can view their minds and hearts from a third-person perspective, which signals the beginning of yet another ride down the rabbit hole.
Nah, I’m a big fan of technology – I just think that people get too easily engrossed in the hype (not just of techonlogy but of many new things) and loose sight of the big picture.
With the educational technologies, I always laughed that shortly after the big prediction came out that the technology would change the world, there would be an article published on “Best practices for using XYZ to enhance learning”. The funny thing is that that list never changed over the course of the 20 years I watched it. It always just came back to principles of good education.
I guess that’s my real point…we nee to look at and understand what makes things work and what makes them not work – then we can figure out how to apply solutions to them.
Don’t go away – I’d be so sad.
I like your idea of “wonderland” – That is when they will learn the most, when they are being reflective and introspective.
But I’d bet at that point, the main techonlogy they are using is their minds and the minds of the people around them.
Interestingly, I just stumbled across an article from Time magazine (2006)as I’ve been reviewing our book chapter on multi-tasking. It cites research that while many members of the younger generation are experts at navigating the frenetic environment, they might not actually be that much better at performing in it. Here is one quote from the article:
“But the ability to multiprocess has its limits, even among young adults. When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer–often double the time or more–to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: “The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large–amazingly so.” Meyer frequently tests Gen M students in his lab, and he sees no exception for them, despite their “mystique” as master multitaskers. “The bottom line is that you can’t simultaneously be thinking about your tax return and reading an essay, just as you can’t talk to yourself about two things at once,” he says. “If a teenager is trying to have a conversation on an e-mail chat line while doing algebra, she’ll suffer a decrease in efficiency, compared to if she just thought about algebra until she was done. People may think otherwise, but it’s a myth. With such complicated tasks [you] will never, ever be able to overcome the inherent limitations in the brain for processing information during multitasking. It just can’t be, any more than the best of all humans will ever be able to run a one-minute mile.” (cite: The Multitasking Generation, Time Magazine, March 19, 2006. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1174696-1,00.html)
So, I guess it gets back to the question of whether adapting to the conventions coming from new techonlogies will improve or impede learning. I have a feeling that this one won’t be answered for a very long time.
Don’t worry– as you can see I never go away for long. My burrow is small and dark and I rely on the Chief and his provocative commentary to dislodge me.
So, that’s an interesting article. The findings aren’t surprising, especially to a person who can’t walk and think without bruising. But, I guess I’d want to clarify what you mean by your final question before responding. When you write that the question is whether, “adapting to the conventions coming from new techonlogies will improve or impede learning” I’m not sure what you mean by “adapting.” Are you suggesting that those of us who “adapt” are implementing problematic multi-tasking techniques? Because I don’t think that adapting one’s pedagogical practices to better reach young people today needs to do that, nor should it. Okay, my burrow beckons.