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Learning Envision
A new medium appears, the end of the lecture is declared, and something smaller but real happens instead. The interesting question is why the shape of the claim never changes.
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A new medium appears, the end of the lecture is declared, and something smaller but real happens instead. The interesting question is why the shape of the claim never changes.
Read the promotional literature of any wave of educational technology with the identifying details removed and you will struggle to date it. The structure is always the same. A medium arrives that can carry explanation further and more cheaply than a person can. Somebody notices that the best explainer in the country could, in principle, explain to everybody at once. From there the argument runs quickly: teaching will become scalable, instruction will become personal, and the cost of both will fall. The tone is generous rather than cynical. The people making the claim usually believe it, and often they have good reason to, because the capability they are describing is genuinely new and genuinely impressive.
What follows is also stable. There is a period of enthusiasm and procurement. Equipment appears in rooms. Training is offered, sometimes well. Early users report real gains, and their reports are honest. Then the wave meets the ordinary conditions of schooling: timetables, rooms, cohorts, assessment rules, the range of readiness in any group of learners, and the finite hours of the adults responsible. The gains do not vanish, but they stop compounding. Attention moves elsewhere. The equipment stays, is used for narrower purposes than intended, and eventually becomes so unremarkable that nobody counts it as technology at all.
Strip the identifying details from a technology forecast about learning and it becomes almost impossible to place in time.
The forecasts model teaching as transmission, which is the part of it that is easiest to describe and least of what it is.
Look for what genuinely embedded itself and you find record keeping, duplication and reporting rather than a new way to teach.
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The announcement that keeps arriving, and the classroom that keeps absorbing itWhat’s trendingThe Recurring AnnouncementThe claim arrives fully formed and oddly familiarWhy The Transformation Never ArrivesEducation is a relationship before it is a delivery systemWhat Did Change, And HowThe changes that stuck were administrative, not pedagogicalReading The Next PredictionFour questions worth asking of any forecast about learningAbout Learning EnvisionMost read