Changing Technologies, Changing Practice
Over the years, I have listened to the old dialogue about the interplay between technology and teaching practice many times. As I understand it, it runs something like this. Someone says: “Technology changes practice, because it forces people to rethink their whole approach”. Then someone else says: “Ah, but technology is just a set of tools to support practice; a really good teacher can work with a some bluetak and a flipchart”. And so on. This one can go on for a long time, if you have some determined people arguing on both sides. Occasionally, you can hear people arguing both sides at once.
Quite a nice way to avoid discussions like this going around in circles is to role-play. Not necessarily literally, but at least to try out a different perspective on the problem, by thinking yourself into a different role. At yesterday’s ‘Learning in a Digital Wales’ conference, Dougald Hine essentially invited an audience of teachers to think like journalists for 45 minutes, and the effect was highly refreshing.
Once you try this, you may find this is not such a great leap of imagination. Journalists and teachers both learn new things, and then tell others about them. The best people in both professions also allow the learner/reader/listener/ viewer to see how they are thinking about a specific problem. This requires skill, confidence, and ability to think on one’s feet. There is a combination of solid preparation and ‘flying by the seat of one’s pants’ in both professions.
Then along comes technology. Dougald was able to show us stark examples of how technology has impacted on journalism. For example, he described scenarios where demonstrators have died in unclear and controversial circumstances, possibly at the hands of the police. How do we know what happened? Eyewitness reports can be confused. How do we judge the assumptions which reporters are making? Above all, how can we get accuracy? The concept of the ‘citizen journalist’ is perhaps one way forward. Mobile phones are potentially the perfect tool, offering instant recording and rapid dissemination. Broadly speaking, anyone can record, or write, and anyone can publish. This changes things entirely, ideally in a way which can empower people. The ramifications are immense.
Likewise, in education, technology can also spread the power around more equally. It can give learners a stronger voice by enabling them to write their own stuff, make their own images, and construct their own learning in a host of new ways.
But this potentially utopian vision also has a dark side. In education, as in journalism, new technologies have the potential to break open traditional business models in a way which newspapers, broadcaster, and universities find deeply threatening. This, in my view, is where the parallels become really powerful. If content is king, is user-generated content the heir apparent? In the world of the read-write web, how do we know whose output to trust? Do we make our own judgements? If not, who has the authority to do this on our behalf? Moreover, how do newspapers, or for that matter universities, remain economically viable in an era when people have access to so much free digital material? Do they, perhaps, give content away, and then sell added-value services? We can’t be sure what will happen next, but profound change to educational organisations seems inevitable. Dougald’s innovative work with School of Everything shows one possible way ahead. Others are emerging all the time.
There are clearly many more questions than answers, and I would not attempt to address them here. However, I do plan to watch our journalistic colleagues closely to see how they adjust to the changes ahead, and how they exploit the new opportunities. I may just learn something.
July 1st, 2010 at 8:03 pm
If Rupert Murdochs ignorance or Knute like approach is typical of our journalistic friends lets hope that semantics and personal ideas rather than flexible, open and extensible technologies are not closed to future possibilities which may well come along.
the videos worth watching if you have now heard the king trying to stop the tide of tide ….
http://mashable.com/2009/11/09/rupert-murdoch-google/
July 1st, 2010 at 8:32 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Helen H. Helen H said: 'Changing technologies, changing practice' http://nn.nf/568f Great blog post from @paulbrichardson following @dougald keynote at #ldw2010 [...]
July 10th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Hi Paul -
Thanks again for the invitation to speak at Learning in a Digital Wales – and glad you found it refreshing.
It struck me afterwards that part of the value of “role-playing”, or thinking about these questions through the experience of somebody else’s profession, is that it’s less charged than when we talk about them in relation to our own jobs and situations. We can get away from the intensity of the politics of our own workplace and think about similar issues from a more detached perspective.
I’m still thinking about what the educational parallel to the ‘citizen journalist’ is exactly. The difficulty with the concept of the ‘citizen journalist’ was that it projected too much of the way journalists do things into the way citizens do things – so we were looking for citizens scribbling notes in shorthand and, as a result, were slow to notice that people having conversations on internet forums, with none of our professional discipline, were nonetheless collaboratively piecing together stories in a way that would change the news process. Are there similar ways in which educationalists overlook kinds of teaching/learning which don’t sufficiently resemble what happens in school? Or maybe there’s more recognition of informal skill-sharing than of informal news-sharing?
August 20th, 2010 at 11:42 am
[...] It may be useful to look at technology use from different angles (as described in a recent blog post by Paul Richardson), and important to respect differing points of view • Ask teachers [...]
September 20th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Hi Dougald. Thanks very much for your comment, and I am sorry for the delay in responding. Absolutely there are ways in which educationalists overlook kinds of teaching/learning which don’t sufficiently resemble what happens on schools and colleges. It is called ‘informal learning’. But the educational community has a number of problems with this at the moment. One is in terms of definition: it is very hard to say when someone is learning, and with some very loose definitions the answer tends to be ‘all the time’, which really reduces the power of the concept. Alternatively, if you limit the idea to ‘courses’, or the like, you are also losing something. But it would be easy to get bogged down in this. Personally, I think that the ‘citizen journalist’ and the informal learner sit very comfortably together, and may even be the same people. In some of the most creative learning environments, teachers and learners can readily swap roles, and I would expect that the reader/student of journalism could also make that step across to the other side in order to become a journalist. The tools are there, we just need to engage with the culture change.
September 20th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Hi Dougald. Thanks very much for your comment, and I am sorry about the delay in responding…. Absolutely there are ways in which educationalists overlook kinds of teaching/learning which don’t sufficiently resemble what happens on schools and colleges. It is called ‘informal learning’. But the educational community has a number of problems with this at the moment. One is in terms of definition: it is very hard to say when someone is learning, and with some very loose definitions the answer tends to be ‘all the time’, which really reduces the power of the concept. Alternatively, if you limit the idea to ‘courses’, or the like, you are also losing something. But it would be easy to get bogged down in this. Personally, I think that the ‘citizen journalist’ and the informal learner sit very comfortably together, and may even be the same people. In some of the most creative learning environments, teachers and learners can readily swap roles, and I would expect that the reader/student of journalism could also make that step across to the other side in order to become a journalist. The tools are there, we just need to engage with the culture change.