This week (week 5) I have been re-reading the core and recommended texts for week 2. Interestingly, revisiting the texts has allowed me to gain a clearer understanding of each author and their key points – to recognise their distinctive voice. I shall attempt to summarise my thoughts below as a useful aide memoir, and to help facilitate ideas for future blog posts.

Key themes covered are:

  • philosophers, thinkers, futurologists have been predicting how technology will change the classroom for nearly a century. This is not new.
  • what place for faculty in the future?
  • what are the drivers for increasing technology in the classroom?  can we find any which differ from neoliberal interests (corporate strategists, top university administrators) seeking to make greater efficiencies in the ‘business’ of education?
  • Sian Bayne’s paper is an argument to keep vigilant of these interests, but to not ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’.
  • technology (or more generally mechanisation) will always have a role to play in gaining efficiencies in the workplace. However, what we are really talking about here is AI. What role will AI play in the future of teaching? Can we really call it teaching in the absence of a human teacher?
  • Despite widespread discussion around technology usurping the teacher, is there any evidence for this?

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Watters, Audrey (2015) Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning. 10 August 2015.

Watters challenges the oft quoted Arthur C. Clarke maxim “any teacher that can be replaced by machine should be”. I think she’s right to challenge this, although I think she wilfully ignores what Clarke means here. I have always understood this quote to be a challenge to teachers to provide something more than that which a machine is capable of. It is a challenge to lazy teaching, not teaching per se.

Watters also makes the important point that the essentialist view of technology (“what technology wants”) gives agency to the machine, ignoring the “machinations of investors or entrepreneurs or engineers, an ignorance of ideology”.

We are limited by what we know. And we are limited by what we think is desirable, what we think is smart. I was really interested to read that one of the earliest chat-bots was named ELIZA, after Eliza Doolittle. Watters raises a really interesting point here – Eliza Doolittle is taught so she can pass as a member of the upper classes. The concept of passing should trouble us. It suggests there is only one desirable way to be and for as long as we think that we are limiting our own progress.

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Selwyn, N. (2011) Will technology displace the teacher? Chapter 6 of Education and Technology: key issues and debates. London: Continuum. pp.116-138

Selwyn’s metaphor for teacher as symphony conductor (p.117) is a nice one. And it reminded me of this Guardian Audio Long Read I was listening to the other week. In it, Ian Leslie describes watching a video of a teacher at an elementary School in New Jersey, Ashley Hinton, orchestrating her class. The video was played to a group of teachers in London, England by Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion.

Selwyn is a refreshing read. I particularly liked the fact that he reminds us to consider not just the potential affect technology can have on teaching, but the reality of how faculty mostly employ technology in their teaching (p.117).

Main takeaways:

  • digital technologies can help staff in the procedural elements of their job
  • digital technologies can help teachers enhance their own learning – not least by giving them access (via the internet) to teaching resources and support on a global scale
  • digital technologies can provide pedagogical support inside the classroom
  • however, digital technologies can also pose a threat to the role of the teacher
  • will the future of the teacher be teacher-as-facilitator? Does this mean reducing teaching to ‘scientific’ concerns? Does it mean the end to the ‘art’ of teaching?
  • how do academics use (or not use) technology right now?  Many are “said to be reluctant to alter arrangements that may destabilize or subvert their authority, status and control in the classroom” (p126). I have certainly seen evidence of this in my role as learning technologist at ECA. There is a real concern amongst many academics regarding the routine recording of lectures for this very reason.
  • interesting point regarding how some technologies (such as the interactive whiteboard and powerpoint) have actually contributed to teaching being more presentational in nature (rather than facilitative) (p.129). Teacher as TED talker?
  • technology, whilst promising greater efficiencies, doesn’t of course mean teachers have more time to teach. In fact, with greater accountability requirements mean technology can intensify, rather than reduce, the pressures of time.
  • “once a course has been delivered online a teacher has little or no intellectual property rights over the future use of that material”. Presumably, one of the main reasons behind resistance to lecture capture?
  • Herbert Dreyfus (2001) “reasoned that many forms of learning and expertise are dependent on being in the physical presence of a more knowledgeable other” (p.133). Does he specify which forms?
  • teachers can (and need to) play a role in supporting students to develop digital literacies, including the ability to think critically about digital technology itself (p.135)

Selwyn references Seymour Papert (Papert, S (1993) The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, New York, Basic Books, pp.57-81) to cover “the popular notion of learning as a process of the co-construction of knowledge [which] sees the individual learner encountering and engaging with many different resources”. Again, this made me think of how technology could aid and assist this ‘connecting the dots’ approach. Perhaps Synote is already covering this?

Selwyn closes his paper with the following questions to consider (perhaps a useful starting point for a future post):

  • What can digital technology do that a teacher cannot? Conversely, what can teachers do that digital technology cannot? How easy is it to use technology to replicate the qualities of face-to-face, personal interaction with a teacher? What is lost and what is gained through the ‘mediation’ of technology-based teaching?
  • to what extent does digital technology contribute to the ‘deskilling’ of teaching as a profession? Is the comparison of the deskilling of classroom-based teachers and machine-using factory workers a valid one to make? What subtle strategies of resistance do teachers display to technology-based teaching?
  • How useful is the notion of ‘blended’ teaching in understanding the relationship between teachers and technology? What aspects of education need to be blended – this is, different technologies, different pedagogical approaches, or different types of task? Is the notion of ‘blended’ technology more applicable to particular stages or types of education?

Yes – how many of these texts consider the different requirements, and approaches taken for teaching kindergarten, to high school, to University? How many consider the different demographics within University education itself? And how to compare of teaching philosophy to, say, surgery?

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Bayne S. (2015) Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education. 20(4):455-467

I am reminded, again, of this scene from the 1969 film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie when Bayne references Usher and Edwards (Usher and Edwards 1994) regarding the humanistic foundations of Education:

“The very rationale of the educational process and the role of the educator is founded on the humanist idea of a certain kind of subject who has the inherent potential to become self-motivated and self-directing, a rational subject capable of exercising individual agency. The task of education has therefore been understood as one of ‘bringing out’, of helping to realise this potential, so that subjects become fully autonomous and capable of exercising their individual and intentional agency. (24)”

I particularly enjoyed Bayne’s neat summary of this particular piece of backwards logic: “one might ask how we have come to a point where large and expensive programmes of research in AIED, intelligent tutoring systems and educational data mining are seen as a better option for investment than – say – more or better teachers”.

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I can’t believe it’s taken me until week 5 to read this article: Biesta, G. (2012) Giving teaching back to education: responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice. 6(2), 35-49.

I devoured it. How refreshing to read an article in support of teaching, and education, which doesn’t fit within a regressive framework. In this blog post I have simply summarised the key points as I understand them. I hope to return to these in future posts.

  • education differs from learning in that it requires that students “learn something, that they learn this for particular purposes, and that they learn this from someone”
  • he goes on to chart the history of the learnification of education, in particular drawing on the influence of constructivist thinkers, and how this has “repositioned the teacher from someone who is at the heart of the educational process to one who literally stands at the sideline in order to facilitate the learning of his or her ‘learners'”(p.38)
  • crucially, “in education there is nothing that is desirable in itself”(p.38). All considerations around education, (method of delivery etc) have to be considered in relation to the “aims and ends of education” (p.39)
  • so what is education for?
    • qualification
    • socialisation
    • subjectification

He summarises as follows: “Teleology implies pragmatism, and pragmatism requires judgement, and in precisely this way we can see how once we go beyond the language of learning and (re)turn to a language of education the teacher begins to reappear” (p.40).

The section which I found particularly interesting was The Gift of Teaching. Here, Biesta refers back to ancient Greek philosophy summarising the ‘learning paradox’ and Socrates’s answer to this: that all learning is a matter of recollection, and that the purpose of education is a leading out what is already there. Socrates “is not just there to facilitate any kind of learning but that, through an extremely skilful process, he is trying to bring his students to very specific insights and understandings”. The teacher is therefore not just ‘bringing out’ what is already there but crucially is actually bringing something new . This is what leads Biesta to refer to teaching as a gift. And where is this gift-giving available? Well, most notably in a school. Schools should therefore not be thought of as places of learning, but rather places of teaching.

What is the difference between ‘learning from’ and ‘being taught by’ a teacher? Principally, it relates to a sense of control, of agency. Learners are agents of their own learning. However, when we are being taught by someone, “something enters our field of experience in a way that is fundamentally beyond out control” (p.42). These ‘lessons’ are not automatically received, and therefore the success of the gift-giving relies on “fragile interplay between the teacher and the student” (p.42). Because what is being brought by the teacher is being brought from the outside, and is therefore fundamentally other, it can be described as an intrusion (Nancy, 2000). And this intrusion offers resistance. Education is therefore not simply an exchange, an act of giving and receiving, but rather an “ongoing dialogue between ‘self and ‘other'” (p.43). And it is at this point of resistance that education begins. 

 

Re-reading week 2: Technology and the Teacher / Reflections From A Digital Education Student by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0