Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

In a brief period in early 1990s, just after the introduction of the National Curriculum one examination board for their Schools History Project Syllabus gave teachers the option to develop their own Study in Development*. The Study in Development involves an outline study of change and cause over a long period of time and the analysis of different features of historical situations.

At that time I had the idea of developing and piloting a study in development on Information Technology, and developed an outline syllabus which I circulated to a number of local secondary school History Departments. A number were interested and were prepared to pilot the idea, but in the end it came to nothing.

Central to the scheme of work I devised was the idea that there were three main ‘Information Technology Revolutions’:

1) Information Technology Revolution 1.0

Writing caused a great social, economic and political change. For the first time, human history, thoughts, actions and laws could be codified. It enabled knowledge to be expanded beyond living memory or oral tradition and to be accumulated instead of lost. It enabled elites to form and create more complex hierarchical societies. Power no longer remained in the hands of perhaps the physically strong, but was shared with intellectuals - ‘knowledge became power’. Examples of these elites can be found in the development of law, accountancy, and of course education dominated by the Church;

2) Information Technology Revolution 2.0

The invention of printing ‘democratised’ ideas and education. It enabled knowledge to be spread and over time eroded the elites that had formed and been able to keep both knowledge and access to knowledge to themselves. One simple skill was needed, that of reading, and knowledge could be mastered. It ushered in the nation state through nationalism (as it was not language alone, but its ubiquitous written form, that unites a group of people). A new elitism emerged around the concept of the ‘expert’, characterised by the growth and development of science and the arts. Knowledge expanded at a prodigious rate, and the concept of “The Renaissance Man” (in Bacon’s words, ‘a person who took all knowledge to be his province’) died. National economic advantage came through education and states took on the role of educating their populous;

3) Information Technology Revolution 3.0

The birth of the computing, the internet and the world wide web is the third information revolution. In the early stages it mimicked the effects of ITR 2.0, creating experts and ‘elites’ - those that could take advantage of the technology succeeded in those early days. But soon it began to make changes of its own, challenging the notion of the ‘expert’ enabling everyone and anyone access to each other, and giving them the ability to collaborate and share. It began to question the hierarchies and structures of ITR 2.0 and begin to change things on a global scale.

If we are to understand today’s world, studying historical change and its cause is a worthwhile pursuit.

* In the mid 80s there were two study options for schools doing this syllabus - the History of Medicine and the History of Energy and a third being developed on Crime and Punishment. Despite, the History of Medicine being used as an example by ‘conservative critics of the New History movement as soft and ‘history without facts’ during the debate over the format of National Curriculum, it remained and is still dominant.

Image credit: Phil Balchin

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