Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

I’ve been picking my way through Richard Millwood’s excellent paper on the history of educational computing in the UK entitled, “A short history offline” which, rather ironically went online a couple of days ago. Richard now looks after the National Archive of Educational Computing, a project started in the days of Ultralab. The archive is not about hardware, but as he describes:

“The aim of the National Archive of Educational Computing is to look at these materials and to represent them as an accessible and substantially complete collection of one nation’s pioneering and world-renowned innovation. No existing archive, library or museum has an adequate representation of this material and more importantly, very little in the way of narrative, interpretation or analysis is available to the interested public, the education professional or the policymaker. The fear is that in the headlong rush of technological development, the UK has forgotten earlier lessons that may inform its future decisions.”

and therefore:

“The story that needs to be told is of human creative endeavour, educational practice and government policy. It is these which have formed a social and cultural context for the use of computers in education and which shape the design and developments to come.”

So what are perhaps the first things that come to my attention in this excellent paper?

The resurgence of the innovator
Richard points out that over the last thirty years it has been interesting to observe the focus for leadership, “at times from isolated innovative practitioners, later from curriculum development and research projects alongside local authority advisors and private consultants in small firms, and latterly, from the large firms which have arisen as government investment has increased. As the Web 2.0 phenomenon has arisen in the last five years, innovative practitioners are again able to share, but now at low cost and ever greater reach, and critically reflect with others on the approaches taken.” In the period before the National Curriculum, there was considerable individual autonomy, but in the last twenty years the curriculum has restricted teachers’ creativity and led to the computer being used to support traditional teaching. This is best illustrated by the way in which interactive whiteboards have become the focus for investment in the last decade. “Now that one-to-one (computers to pupils) has become a real possibility, it is surprising to see such emphasis on the teacher as ‘sage on the stage’, but shows how we regress in the face of the unknown to our simplest ideas of teaching and learning.”

I wonder if, given the likely funding restrictions that are bound to be applied in the next few years to education, coupled with the growth of global teacher networking whether leadership will cede to the innovators once again? What other factors need to be present for this to happen?

The three failures
Richard postulates three failures that need to be overcome if we are to learn from the past.

1. The Industry / Education divide, or more precisely the anti-industry prejudice in our society and its knock-on effect in education, and its parallel, the anti-education prejudice that limits the opportunities to exercise their professional creativity as a response to technology innovation. No better is this illustrated in the past by the establishment of a top-down curriculum, national league tables and internet filtering.
2. Misunderstanding the human–tool symbiosis, in which technology is regarded as “just another tool”. Something I’ve blogged on before. This restricts us to the notion that technology can best be applied to problems we have already encountered. eg. to write, and make it more efficient. This does not help us recognise that new skills are being adopted by learners in using such technology to solve problems we have not met. As Richard puts it, “New developments may well change human performance and then our learning environments, curriculum and assessments are all called into question.”
3. Productivity without transformation, in which we build teaching factories and not learning communities. “Throughout the history of computers in education we see outbreaks of productivity solutions for mass-teaching. They will fail us unless we appreciate the need for transformation.”

The article is well worth a read, and gives us significant insight into both the past and how it might inform the future.

Image credit: Paul Downey

Tags: Millwood, UKeducationalcomputing, history