25. June 2008 by The Advisor.

Change is a word we hear a lot of lately. Some of this is due to the current election cycle where the word change is thrown around as if it is a value in and of itself. It doesn’t seem to matter what the change is, or whether it’s good change or bad change.

The same is true in the educational technology world. There is a lot of talk about technology changing everything, and the need to change and embrace new technology. But, is technology really changing everything? More to the point, is the kind of educational technology being offered by vendors and pursued by schools really profoundly changing education or how our schools work?

Probably not.

For when it comes to change, even good necessary change, most people are very uncomfortable with it. It doesn’t matter if the change will make their lives easier, educate their students better, govern their country better, change is just plain scary to most people. This is not to say that people who freely embrace change are superior in some way; it is simply to point out that the status quo is a safer, more comfortable place than the great unknown.

So what you see in most schools is the adoption of technology that reinforces the status quo rather then revolutionizing education. Word processing software is adopted for its ability to produce cleaner, better formatted book reports. Throwing out the book report in an era when Google can tell you everything you need to know about a book and its author in seconds in favor of something new is not.

For educational technology to be truly innovative it must be disruptive. It must revolutionize the way students learn. Putting textbooks online is not revolutionary. Memorizing facts and regurgitating them on the test is nothing new regardless of whether the data is displayed and collected online. Going post-textbook and teaching students to be researchers and analyzers of all of the digital data available to them would be something new, but it would require changing how we teach and, fundamentally, what our definition of education is.

Change is a constant, both in terms of it being inevitable and being strongly resisted at every turn.

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30. May 2008 by The Advisor.

Most schools were somewhat late to jump on the technology bandwagon. Most corporations, with their constant focus on cost-savings, implemented digital records systems, computers for all employees, email, etc. early on to try to reduce costs with technology. Other sectors such as health-care and government, while later than the private sector, have embraced technology heavily as well. Now the push is on in schools to digitize everything.

With any big change, there can be a tendency, however, for the pendulum to swing from one extreme to the other. So it’s worthwhile to ask the question, is today’s focus in schools on technology the right amount or too much? In other words, are ed tech products and services being purchased from a cost/benefit framework, or as part of a frenzy to “catch up?”

Moreover, this question can be asked on both a macro and micro level. How much of a districts budget should be devoted to technology vs. other needs (macro)? Is a given system under consideration by a school the right amount of technology to accomplish the objectives of the project, or is it layered with lots of extra features that raise the price but will go unused (micro)?

There are no easy answers to any of these questions. However, when school budgets and the education of children are at stake, its imperative to seek answers to the tough questions.

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