My Learning

My recent learning has led me to a false dichotomy. I have a much more critical attitude toward educational technology while also being totally convinced that young people need broad access to powerful modern technologies as part of a meaningful education. These positions are not contradictory. There is a difference between education organized around technology and technology placed at the service of human beings. The starting point must always be the human factor: the learner, the teacher, their relationship, the community in which learning occurs, and the intellectual work of learners.

The human factor is all the more important as educational technology increasingly enters schools as a commodity. Schools purchase platforms, subscriptions, devices, assessment systems, etc., etc. accompanied by promises of innovation, personalization, efficiency, measurable improvement, ad nauseum. Yet digitizing an educational practice does not necessarily constitute an improvement. A worksheet displayed on a Chromebook is still a worksheet. A lecture watched at home is still a lecture. A discussion converted into required online post tends to be less spontaneous and less human. When participation is translated into digital traces, the things easiest for a platform to measure begin to substitute for learning itself.

With the ASSURE model, I do not have to begin this process by asking which technology I should use. I begin with students. Who are the learners in front of me? What do they already understand? What interests them? What resources and experiences do they possess? What intellectual work are they capable of doing by the end of the unit? It is on the basis of answers to these questions that the selection of media or technology is meaningful. ASSURE is a useful framework to subordinate technology to educational purposes. Sometimes the appropriate technology may be sophisticated. Most of the time however, the better tools will be a cart, track, meterstick, notebook, and conversation.

My experience creating video during this course illustrates this change in thinking. Technically, I have improved in planning, recording, editing, and coordinating visual and verbal communication. More important, however, is that I am less impressed by video simply because it is video. Producing a polished instructional video is not in itself an educational accomplishment. I now think first about what students can do with the medium that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. In physics, students can record motion, slow it down, analyze it frame by frame, compare an actual event with a mathematical model, document an experiment, or create an explanation for an authentic audience. In these cases, video is not replacing teaching or human interaction. It expands students' capacity to investigate the physical world.

I have reached the same conclusions about blogs, wikis, e-portfolios, MOOCs, and vlogs. None is inherently progressive because it is digital. A blog can be just another place to submit an assignment. An e-portfolio: an elaborate compliance checklist. A wiki can reproduce the same division of labor as a conventional group project. A MOOC can expand access to extraordinary knowledge and reduce education to content delivery. Educational value depends upon the activity and the relationships built around them. I am interested in these technologies to the extent they allow students to investigate questions they care about, collaborate, revise ideas, communicate with real audiences, and build a body of work that is truly theirs.

This is also why I am skeptical of the flipped classroom presented as an innovation in and of itself. Moving a lecture from school to home reorganizes time but does not necessarily change the underlying pedagogy. It can also shift additional responsibility onto students and families while assuming access. However, I can imagine using parts of the approach strategically. A short demonstration or video might sometimes make more classroom time available for experiments, discussion, and individual interaction with students. I will use those possibilities selectively. I am interested in freeing classroom time for richer human activity, not in relocating conventional instruction into technology willy-nilly.

At the same time, criticism of educational technology is not an argument for denying youth access to technology. This is particularly important to me as an educator working with young people denied access to the same technological and intellectual resources available elsewhere. A genuinely modern education gives students access not merely to consumer devices and commercial educational applications, but to powerful technologies for scientific investigation, computation, communication, engineering, etc. Learners have the right to encounter computer programming, computational modeling, scientific instrumentation, large datasets, radio communications, simulations, electronics, and other technologies that allow them to investigate phenomena and produce knowledge. Access must mean more than being issued a Chromebook and given passwords to commercial platforms.

There is an important difference between being surrounded by technology and possessing technological power. Learners can spend much of their lives interacting with sophisticated technological systems while being given little to no opportunity to understand how those systems work. Education should help change that relationship. Learners should be able to open the black box. They should investigate systems, manipulate variables, examine assumptions, construct models, troubleshoot equipment, write programs, analyze data, communicate across networks, and decide which technologies are appropriate for a particular problem. Technology should expand their agency rather than simply expand the capacity of institutions to monitor, measure, and manage them.

This changes what digital citizenship means to me. My ethical responsibility extends beyond teaching students to protect passwords, avoid inappropriate posts and cite source. Those things are important, but they are only the beginning of digital citizenship. Learners also need to understand that digital environments were created by people and institutions with particular purposes. They need to learn to ask who owns a platform, what information it collects, how that information is used, what behaviors its design encourages, whose interests it serves, what assumptions are embedded in algorithms and datasets, and what alternatives might exist.

Digital citizenship therefore includes critical technological literacy. A citizen must be capable of questioning technological systems. This is increasingly important when educational institutions themselves collect enormous quantities of information about young people. Schools should be especially cautious about normalizing a world in which students experience constant digital observation as an ordinary condition of learning. Efficiency and convenience do not automatically justify surveillance, data extraction, or the replacement of professional and human judgment with metrics generated by proprietary systems.

My responsibility is also to model a different relationship with technology. I can demonstrate responsible attribution, protection of student information, careful evaluation of information, etc.. But what about modeling technological judgment? Sometimes that means introducing learners to sophisticated equipment or software that allows them to accomplish something previously beyond their reach. Sometimes it means rejecting a digital tool because a conversation, physical experiment, pencil, or piece of paper is better. Saying no to technology can be as technologically literate as saying yes.

This perspective informs the physics classroom I want to create. I do not want learners encountering technology primarily through instructional software. I want them using technology to investigate the universe. They can construct and test computational models, work with shared scientific datasets, explore simulations critically, investigate the electromagnetic spectrum, and pursue independent research questions that take them beyond the boundaries of a textbook. In that environment, the teacher does not disappear. My role is even more important as someone providing knowledge, equipment, judgment, encouragement, criticism, and access while helping students undertake increasingly ambitious intellectual work.

My most important recent learning, then, is not that schools need either more or less technology. That is the wrong question. The question is what kind of education young people are entitled to, and what relationship technology should have to that education. I want learners to have access to extraordinarily powerful modern technologies, particularly technologies that allow them to investigate, understand and change their world. But I also want them to develop the capacity to question technology, including the technologies their schools ask them to use.

A modern education is therefore technologically rich without being technology-centered. It resists reducing students to data points and future customers. Technology must enlarge the sphere of human possibility rather than narrow education to what a platform can deliver or measure. The human being remains the starting point and the purpose. For me, that is the ethical principle guiding how I use technology with learners.