Condemned to Repeat It
- Login to post comments
George Santayana once noted that, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Whether you agree or not, it's not a bad place to begin a contrary take on future thinking.
One of the trends expected to transform education that repeatedly rears its head in our discussions is that of technological change. I want to query this from three perspectives.
First, as Larry Cuban's work points out, technology has been expected to transform education for at least a hundred years. The gramophone, radio, cinema, TV have all been expected to have dramatic impact on traditional classrooms. They haven't. The explosion of ICTs and massively accessible networks over the past decade may be different in quantity and kind from the technological changes that preceded them, but we can neither take that for granted nor can we assume that the impact will be benign.
Second, this contrarian view reflects my own experience with networked technologies in the far north of Canada in the 1990s. We implemented an easily accessible, territory-wide BBS system to support, among other things, tiny high school programs in very isolated communities. It seemed like a natural fit, but possibly because we weren't thinking critically enough about the "information ecology" (see Bonnie Nardi's 2000 book from MIT Press) into which this innovation would fit, it never achieved its potential. No wonder I'm skeptical about the hyperbole surrounding Web 2.0, et al.
Third, I think there are some things about the nature of technology (in its widest sense, not just ICT) that we can learn from and need to keep in mind. Any technology comes with built-in assumptions and values that may not be evident, even to its designers. What seems obvious when a technology is implemented, may be completely overwhelmed by the "lethal mutations" (cognitive psychologist Ann Brown's term) that accrue to it in practice. Moreover, the pace of technological change is such that by the time you've figured out how to address some of these "mutations", the technology itself has evolved and your response is obsolete.
We need to ground our thinking about educational futures with a constant, critical eye both to what has come before and to the human values and beliefs that we'd like, expect, and to underlie whatever future emerges.
The Director General of the Information Highway Branch of Industry Canada at the end of the last millennium was known as an innovative and creative bureaucrat. He received a lot of recognition for his ground-breaking work in supporting the rollout of Canada's network infrastructure. Yet, just as the words "highway" and "industry" imply in his title, every time I heard him speak, his message for the future of networked ICT and the knowledge economy was couched in metaphors of the industrial past. Now, it may be that he chose those metaphors because they were the kind of things that his bosses at Industry Canada could relate to, but it's also an example of the fracture between the reified system in which we find ourselves and the possibilities for networked futures that are unfolding.
I don't think I disagree with you about the nature of that fracture, but perhaps about the extent of its significance and what it means for the futures of education.
All technologies I referred to previously (radio, TV, telephone, etc.), including computer technologies, are the products of an industrial society and therefore are rooted at the same nexus of production/consumption as any other product. Your recent writing on branding and blogging (however playful) illustrates exactly how pervasive this framework is and how far it has penetrated into and threatens to undermine what you argue is the "radical possibility" of the web and social media.
As you say, the school system is incredibly complex, large, and decentralized. It has the resilience that goes along with that and can absorb a huge amount of pressure without significant change as a system. It's also very effective at colonizing minds, whether as the legacy of a colonial system as Viplav points out in his Cmap of educational futures for India or as a more general means to perpetuate dominant ideologies of power and privilege. Barring a black swan, which by definition is unpredictable in both timing and impact, the school system, and by extension any educational futures which give it a central role, is impervious to the impact of the web and social media in any significant sense. Moreover, it's also contributing to a larger trend which is seeing the radical potential of those media being subverted and co-opted into the hegemony.
That is, however, unless a sufficient mass of those making use of the web and social media can resist the dominant trend and create a collective pedagogy of hope (to draw on Freire's phrase)...
Perhaps a point to consider is the impact of those technologies in areas other than education. I would like to believe that the impacts in industrial activity were revolutionary and continue to be with these round of changes. But perhaps in some areas, such as education, they failed to generate a commensurate impact.
We also perhaps look at the future with a rearview mirror. As Einstein remarked, we cannot solve problems from the same perspective that we had when we created them. Maybe there is a pattern here which leaves us with a paradox, scepticism and immense frustration. As bonstewart says "colonized so many minds into supporting the status quo of what it should be that the uphill battle to actually see any of that radical possibility enacted will either take a long time or a dramatic "black swan"type shift."
I see also a pattern that links some variables - privatization, better infrastructure, actively sought global links, investment into technology, higher salaries for teachers, huge fees, lower equity of access to education, cutting edge curricula and budgets for pedagogic improvements (whether in Mexico or in India).
As a result, I see many state of the art high cost islands in school and HE in India that even the best of institutions globally would envy from the technology and infrastructure perspectives. I recently saw a campus, not far from where I work, spread over more than 2 sq kilometers with a built in data centre, and all the possible amenities you would want to imagine. Or a state of art residential school with not only cutting edge technology but also a strong emphasis and understanding of social constructivist thought.
This stands directly opposed to models we would like to discuss that promote equity, personalization, autonomy, power etc through the use of technology and new understanding of knowledge and networks themselves. In fact the pattern is accentuated by trends towards closing down of a large number of government led schools in India by the government - sort of a making space for the private players.
An example of "radical potential of those media being subverted and co-opted into the hegemony" is in India with the state taking the initiative in providing a national knowledge network or a university adopting Moodle (just because it is open source) without any thought of the pedagogic dividend that should be mandated alongwith these provisions. That is why, for me, teacher empowerment and capability building using social media is a central concern (perhaps a black swan that I am wishing will happen sooner than later).
So what could a set of change agents be that will move us from one pattern to another one. I am sure one change agent would be the skill to use new frameworks of teaching-learning. Another change agent would be infrastructure. A third will be teacher educators. And many more. It is clear to me that policy's role is to employ appropriate change agents and hope that they will promote emergence and self organization.
Barring perhaps, a black swan :)
Thanks Bonnie and Viplav for your very thoughtful and provocative responses to my curmudgeonly posts.
You've got me thinking that it may be more productive to think of systems of trends rather than a single trend in isolation. So whatever impact technology will have on the future of education will depend on its interrelationship with the other trends of the overall ecology. For example, Bonnie noted the relation/fracture between prior technologies and industrial/post-industrial epistemologies and suggested that shifts in that relationship might change outcomes. Viplav identifies a variety of other possible interrelationships that might contribute significantly different outcomes.
The shift moves from linear, cause-and-effect thinking (or parallel examples of linear, cause-and-effect thinking) to more of a network of interdependent trends in which schooling-technology is not a 1:1 correspondence but linked nodes in a wider network.
I think I wanna go back to my futures map and see if that makes a difference...
Thanks again for your time and input!
- Login to post comments
Sandy...good and interesting points. i remember, form the periphery, the hopes and expectations that flowered in the north in the 90s surrounding BBS and connective technologies, and it doesn't appear that they've realized the potential we generally thought they had at that time.
however, i think our ideas of that potential and its scale, scope, and timeline might've been the problem. i do think there is a shift underway, related to ICTs or (IMO) the web and social media both more specifically and more broadly.
the other technologies that were supposed to transform education were all industrial era technologies, essentially, as is the education system as we currently understand it. the system itself is profoundly powerful at the self-replicating, epistemological level, and it's also unwieldy due to size and decentralization.
my own belief (cough...M.A. thesis...cough...) is that technology isn't inherently transformative but rather, like you say, comes with built-in assumptions and implications that may not even be evident to creators. it's an artifact AND tool of the society that designs it: the technologies of a given time shape and are shaped by what it means to know in that time, and the two are mutually constitutive. in periods of shift, envelopes get pushed and changes take awhile to settle out. so, industrial era technologies would essentially reflect the same epistemological power structures as the education system designed and reified by and for that era, and thus wouldn't be transformative to that system. but if we accept the idea of postmodernity or post-industrial society, which does happen to arise more or less with the digital era, then the likelihood of current technologies having radical implications for education is more likely than it ever really was with tv, radio, film, etc. however, the education system has colonized so many minds into supporting the status quo of what it should be that the uphill battle to actually see any of that radical possibility enacted will either take a long time or a dramatic "black swan"type shift.
this is not to say that i don't believe that the constant critical eye to what has come before is important, but i think in terms of values and beliefs for the future we should be exploring the implications of our current society and interrogating those with vigour.