Educational debate around technology is, as my father often
says, ‘arse before elbow’, as are shows such as BETT. It’s
obsessed with devices – tablets, mobiles, whiteboards, holes-in-walls, micro:bits, Raspberry Pis, 3D
printers, VR and so on - which is to focus on the wrong end of the problem. Device
fetishism has been a destructive force in research, procurement, projects and
outcomes in education. So here’s some blowback. Note that I’ve been implementing and writing
about the use of tech in learning for 33 years, so I’m speaking, not as a
philistine, but a convert.
Here’s Audrey
This is Audrey Mullen, a US high school student, with an
entrepreneurial flair. She does Kite Reviews, through a consultancy that hires
out fellow students to evaluate Edtech. I like this. She found that faculty, schools and HE tended to think devices first, bandwidth and services second. She's right. I founded and ran a large test
lab, called the ‘Epicentre’ and for years and got to know a lot about testing,
usability and target audience evaluation. One thing I did learn, was to listen
to real users, backed up with methodologies developed by Nielsen, Norman, Krug
and others. It’s so easy to get 50 year-olds entranced by shiny devices, to buy
stuff, implement their ideas, only to find that they are then treated with
contempt by users. Young people always like receiving new shiny toys, then look
on their use in school as if they were watching their dads dance in a
nightclub.
Fail 1: Poor procurement
This is the big one. Devices are identified and purchased
without a detailed plan for the actual improvement of learning outcomes. Teacher
support is left out, actual cost-effectiveness analysis (never ever seen one) is absent, detailed analysis of the device affordances matched to learning tasks
rarely thought about, mainteannce costs underestimated, insurance a problem, change management and internal communications plans usually beyond the skills of the purchaser. They’re so often bought, with external
funds, grants or on the back of the whim of someone who has attended a couple
of conferences and ‘seen the shiny light'. That’s the first problem right there –
piss, poor planning.
I’ve seen some of these documents, where the pedagogic bit does nothing more than list some ‘C’ words. I actually saw one yesterday that had a record of ‘C’
words; Cultural Cognitive Constructive Communicative Confident
Creative Critical Civic. Is the world really that alliterative? Here’s my alliteractive alternative for the
premature purchase of devices. Poor Planning Leads to Piss Poor Performance. For a serious analysis of bad procurement see here.
Fail 2 – iPad is NOT
a computer
Listen to
what Audrey and her mates have to say about iPads. “A Cat Is Not a Dog; An iPad Is NOT A Computer” she starts. “Have you ever typed directly on an iPad? Kill me. Almost every word is a
typo… and don’t get me started on keyboards that
connect to the iPad”. Her advice
to teachers, “On behalf of millions of
students everywhere, I beg: Don’t make us type on an iPad”.
I have few
problems with iPads in primary school but in secondary and Higher Education
it’s totally misguided (see my critiques here). It’s a consumer device and when it comes to more
advanced and almost any serious, productive skill like long-form writing, coding, photoshop,
spreadsheets - it’s a ‘dog’. You can’t write effectively, as touch-screen typing is slow and
produces far too many errors. Cut and paste work, essential to good redrafting
and writing, is difficult (indeed there’s evidence that it cramps writing style).
They’re expensive, difficult to network and encourage the cul-de-sac that is
apps development.
Fail 3: Coding devices
Coding is a
software skill. Sure peripherals matter but the core skills are around
structure, logic, comments etc. Unfortunately, and this is part of our awful, English
hobbyist culture, fed invariably by the ‘Cash in the Attic’ folk at the BBC,
hideous devices are thrown at the problem like confetti. The Raspberry Pi and late and badl branded MicroBit (critique) are not the solution to our problems in computer studies and coding,
they may even exacerbate the problems. If you really want to frighten new entrants,
especially girls, show them one of these circuit boards, that take ages to get
working. They’re largely bought by already nerdy kids and their dads. That’s OK
but it it’s illusory to suggest that they’re a catalyst for change. Focus on
good software not ugly gadgets.
Fail 4: Mobile devices
“Put Away the Phone” says
Audrey, and “Save us from ourselves”. Her advice to teachers, “Don’t go crazy with phone rules and
regulations because we won’t follow them… Instead just stick with the basics – no phones during school hours”. Not what we tend to hear from the mobile
learning lobby. The affordances of a phone are rarely congruent with learning
needs. We use them for everything BUT learning.
Fail 5: Devices over organisation
Audrey hates it when teachers ignore the need for proper software that
allows everything to be accessed and stored in one place. “Be Crazy, Hyper-Organized With Your Technology And We Will Love You For
It” she says. By this she means have a VLE/LMS or system that is universal
for all use of tech and one that works. Forget all this jazz around devices –
most stuff now works on most devices. She pleads with teachers to. “Keep all your information in one place…. Don’t go scattering it around in
different apps”.
That last word is a salutary warning. Apps are apps, they’re cul-de-sacs.
Browser based stuff is the stuff of learning. Focus on mobile devices and you
focus on apps – big mistake.
Fail 6: Content matters
Educational
professionals can be very sniffy about content and when it comes to Wikipedia,
Khan Academy (my analysis), YouTube, Duolingo and MOOCs (my view on), they turn into illiberal
prohibitionists. Get real, hundreds of millions use this stuff. It’s free
content. It works. Audrey’s advice “More
Please”. To be specific, “Khan Academy has science, language, arts and
much more… I like to think of it as my partner in school. If a teacher is hard
to understand, I pop onto Khan… often I
only need 30 seconds. I visit the website maybe 20 times a week”. Enough
said.
Fail 7: Pavlovian gamification
Don’t play Pavlov with learners…. That doesn’t mean don’t use games or
gamification. It does mean that you shouldn’t be making folk chase down rubies
while being chased by a pacman, when they need to focus on learning something
useful. Gamfication, led by apps, and an obsession with devices, has led to a
flood of ‘edu-games’ that usually (not always) distract, disappoint and even
put learners off learning.
Many young people look upon these games with
contempt. Games are difficult to make, good games are fiendishly difficult to
make. University departments, JISC, the BBC, C4 are NOT the places where good
games are made. Many simply result in cognitive overload, as the learner has to
learn the rules and implement the mechanics of the game, as well as learn.
Oh,.. and to do them well cost real money. Ignore devices and apps and focus on
some core virtues from games that are based in good learning theory; progress
through levels, failure (even catastrophic), repeated practice until skill
acquired, time constraints and congruence between the game and the learning
competences.
Fail 8: Don’t dump devices in developing world
Sugata
Mitra and Negroponte have both made a career out of dumping devices into the
developing world and teachers lap it up as if they’re some sort of saints. Listen carefully
– they don’t like teachers and schools. Researchers, like Arora, from Erasmus University
Rotterdam, visited hole-in-the wall sites and reported “little real independent
evidence, other than that provided by HiWEL“, accusing Mitra of “not comparing amount of time spent on
hole-in-wall material with same time
in school… making the comparison
meaningless”. It
was, she concluded,“self-defeating… ‘hole-in-the-wall’ has become
the ‘computer-in-the-school”. This was confirmed by Mark Warschauer, Professor
of Education at the University of California, who also visited
sites, only to find that “parents thought the paucity of relevant content rendered it irrelevant“
and that “most of the time they were
playing games…. with low level learning and not challenging”.
The “internet rarely functioned” and “overall
the project was not very effective”. I also visited a site, in Africa, and
confirmed all of this and more. Read Mitra’s comment on my blog, “it
took me 30 minutes to think about and write this response. I would have spent the
time on planning a new project for very
poor children. Would someone, perhaps Donald, like to take the responsibility for this wastage and the
resultant loss to them.” Sugata Mitra. This is what happens when devices trump reason.
Fail 9: 3D printers
OK, if you have a spare grand or so for a 3D printer. But are
they the ‘next big thing’ or merely an expensive way to produce lots of ‘small,
useless, plastic things’? Apart from adding considerably to planetary waste,
what impact will 3D printers have in learning? Every educational institution could have a 3D printer
that can create objects across the curriculum, on demand. STEM subjects are
often the first port of call, but many other subjects can benefit, especially
art and design. While it is true that the potential of a technology is often
realised once people start to use it in anger, 3D printers are in danger of
being the ‘next big thing’ when they are, in fact, just expensive machines that
churn out ‘lots of useless small things’, more gimmick than game changer. I’m
not against the use of 3D printers in learning just against buying them and
hoping that they’ll be useful in learning. It’s way too early to invest in
these things.
Fail 10: Whiteboards
That most expensive of devices, whiteboards, were hailed as the technology saviour in schools, but many saw them as reinforcing an old preachy, teacher-centric, classroom model. And so it came to pass. The UK has led the way here with more whiteboards in schools than European and US schools. But has it worked? Studies in the UK show NO significant improvement in attainment through whiteboards. Professor Frank Coffield warned us for years that this was a misguided policy. A critical review of the literature by Heather J. Smith, Steve Higgins, Kate Wall & Jen Miller, Centre for Learning and Teaching, School of Education Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University. showed that there is "insufficient evidence to identify the actual impact of such technologies upon learning either in terms of classroom interaction or upon attainment and achievement.”
Mosquito v Turtle projects
All of this
focus on devices leads, year after year, to a swarm of ‘mosquito’ projects. Let
me explain. Most EdTech projects are mosquito projects; lots of buzz,
tricky to spot & short-lived. They are funded but rarely sustainable. Innovation is not innovation if it is not sustainable. We need long-life 'turtle' projects.
Turtle projects are infrastructure projects that improve
bandwidth in schools, the Open University, Janet & SuperJanet, Wikipedia,
Khan Academy, YouTube, MOOCs. Moodle… I could go on all day. None of these
initiatives are device-focused. They focus on cognitive ergonomics not consumer
electronics. Lesson here – stop the largely wasted research on device-based
projects, the endless stream of apps and do not keep on taking (and buying) the
tablets. Think about learning and learners not devices.
