Some years ago I attended a major ed tech conference at which a speaker, described in the programme as a leading international “innovationist”, talked at length about how vital it was for educators to innovate. It’s interesting isn’t it, how often teachers are told by non-teachers how important it is that they do something other than teach. I listened respectfully and at the end asked him if he thought innovation was always good. He looked visibly puzzled, perturbed even, before answering, “I guess so. I’ve never really thought about it.” Innovationists it seems are like creationists: all faith and no fact, healers with a touchscreen.

Just when I thought we were hearing some sense talked about what technology can and cannot do for teachers and schools, there’s a resurgence in techno-zealotry and news stories about how technology is going to revolutionize education have been popping up all over the place. I feel like I’m playing non-stop whack-a-mole.

I’d got my hopes up because the Department for International Development is currently planning to create something that schools all over the world, really would benefit from. They are currently procuring the world’s first research centre aimed at evaluating educational technology intelligently, with the goal of generating a robust body of evidence on “what works, in which contexts, why, how and for whom”. Now that’s a flag I’ll happily fight under.

The focus is not on funding technology projects or developments, but on credible, high-quality research and evaluation of existing and future educational technologies, specifically in their local contexts, in the developing world. I imagine the hope is that the Monopoly money previous governments were so keen to lavish on ed tech in the UK, that did nothing whatsoever to improve teaching and learning outcomes, isn’t going to be wasted all over again, elsewhere on the planet. We can and should do better.

Transformative technology

However, some of those especially sticky, techno-zealot fingers seem to have found their way even into this admirable effort and yet again I hear talk of technology “transforming” education. I really thought this one had finally rolled over and died. I thought we’d seen the last of it during the Building Schools for the Future feeding frenzy, when schools were told technology would “transform” everything: then were sold everything that didn’t. The country is full of schools still crippled by the debt from that foolishness.

Talk about technology’s potential to “transform” education is, as it has been for the past 25 years nothing more substantial than vacuous, marketing rhetoric. The sparkly language of a slick sales rep.

You’re never too old to learn and recently I was talking to an undergraduate who tutors maths and physics online - at GCSE and A level - mostly to kids whose parents realise what their school offers them in these two subjects is not up to scratch. It quickly became clear that she was really very good at this online tutoring business, not least because of 77 customers who’d bothered to provide an online rating, 77 had rated her five stars. But more significantly, it was what she said about how she worked and how much she enjoyed it, that teaches anyone who thinks technology can “transform” education a much-needed lesson.

She told me, with visible fascination and delight, how as she was tutoring, she found herself connecting one bit of knowledge with another. Even working online, via a screen, she was listening acutely to what her students were saying and was constantly using her deep levels of subject knowledge to make those vital, live connections for them. She found herself spontaneously formulating analogies, creating examples as she went, all the time in response to what she was getting back from the student. Every good subject specialist teacher will know exactly what she was describing. 

A bit more balance

I’m OK with someone designing a tractor that trundles unmanned, up and down a vast expanse of wheat with millimeter precision, at the beck and call of beeps from some distant satellite. I can even scrape my head around the idea that maybe, one day, a driverless car will get round the M25, safely avoiding every other driverless vehicle and the occasional, suicidal badger.

However, I don’t care how intelligent you think the Artificial Intelligence you have designed is: a slimline box of silicon chips and burnished aluminium can’t begin to approach the subtlety and intelligence needed for a flesh and blood teacher to teach. Anyone who has ever done the job competently will be able to tell you this.

So what I would like to see more of - instead of techno-zealots and gurus scanning the horizon for more fantasy - is a bit more balance between innovation and experience.

If experienced voices had been around to balance some of the internet boom’s most innovative individuals, they might have been able to point out that when you publish something, you bear a social responsibility.

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author. To read more columns by Joe, view his back catalogue

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