Have we got the relationship between technological innovation and education back to front?

Yesterday I attended the final dissemination event of the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) research project, held at the Royal Society in London. The evening followed a fairly standard pattern for such events: key-note speeches, opportunity for debate and discussion, and an exhibition with demonstrations of various examples of whizzy educational hardware and software.

My friend and colleague Alastair Clark also attended and has blogged about his reaction to the event here. I agree with Alastair's reservations about whether the project will help to shift inertia in the implementaton of educational technology, but for me the event triggered a slightly different chain of thought. It made me wonder if we have got the relationship between technological innovation and education back to front.

The project seemed to be concerned with the following question, and this is how we seem to usually frame our thinking about technology and learning :

Q1. How should we use technological innovation to improve how we might achieve existing educational purposes?

But I wonder if we should really turn this question around and ask:

Q2. How should we change our existing educational purposes to improve how we might live in an age of disruptive technological innovation?

I have spent much of the last nine years of my professional life trying to help people to address Q1, how to use technology effectively for teaching and learning. But I now feel there is a great need to move on to Q2, to examine how we must change our assumptions about what education is for in the light of the hugely disruptive effect that technology (and other aspects of the 21st century) are having on the way we live. Keri Facer addresses this issue with both passion and clarity in this Learning without Frontiers video:

The picture of the Royal Society is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence

Comments

[Alastair clark]

Hmmmmm. Half agree Terry! ( well would you expect or even seek total agreement?) I am not so sure that the need for educational change comes so much from the forces of technological change as from climate change and economic change! I do agree however that ther is lot of need for new thinking and digital ones and noughts can be a part of that new thinking.

[Terry Loane]

I agree, Alastair, that climate change and socio-economic change are key issues that should be having an impact on the debate about educational purpose. Do you know the work of Keri Facer (whose video I embedded in this blog post)? I am currently reading her excellent book 'Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change'. In it she identifies nine key factors that she believes we must address in order to 'future-proof' education against what she calls 'socio-technical change'. Four of her nine factors relate to technology but they also include:

'Energy, mineral resources and climate warming will remain significant issues.'

'We are starting from a base of radical national and global inequalities.'

So she is definitely on your side regarding the importance of climate and economic issues.

(Of course it is deeply depressing that whilst educators should be wrestling with these enormous and challenging issues all we hear from the Secretary of State for Education are calls for 'traditional blazer and ties uniform' and - yesterday - a declaration that exams make children happy. Charles Dickens' Mr Gradgrind rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic while Rome burns - to collide several metaphors!)