If you've been in the "ed-tech" space long enough, you listen to enough conversations and start getting your head around the major issues people often get wrong. One of them is culture. I've titled the post "Ed-tech v/s Culture", because that's what I see happening in many places with many projects. I think this is a dangerous trend.
Education, or more generally learning, especially for young children, never happens in isolation, and often times, happens more outside the school than in. To put it one way, it is a long process of enculturation one in which many people play a part - friends, parents, uncles, teachers, mentors et. al. This process takes place at a different pace across different societies, and the societies themselves are at various stages of cultural evolution (for lack of a better word).
Throughout history, there have been many precedents of new technologies shaping culture, but, to be honest, it's a tight feedback loop. The sages in India wouldn't have discovered '0' if they weren't imagining things in huge time-periods, and astronomical scales that required the invention of zero. There are many other examples from the modern age, and it is a generally well known fact that culture and technology are often interlinked, quite closely.
What happens then, when a piece of technology, which is almost futuristic to it's intended audience is air-dropped and folks with access to it are left to themselves. (Kind of like if aliens flew to earth and shared the plans for cold-fusion or faster-than-light travel). To make matters worse, the targeted audience of ed-tech projects is generally young children, who may be incapable of taking the decisions by themselves, mostly because the societal sphere they exist in doesn't play any significant influencing part. This happens as a result of technology being treated as a commodity rather than as an agent of cultural change.
A more tangible example is the recent news story about iPads being hacked by kids in a school in LA.
Wrong!
The critical mistake that happened here was a piece of new technology was introduced in an existing ecosystem, and all the parties involved (mainly the parents) weren't informed of it's true ramifications. Hence they were never able to influence or guide their children of how it might be useful to them, what the various risks were or atleast keep an eye on what's happening. I guess a physical analogue could be a child discovering cigarette smoking, and instead of having a parent telling them that it's bad for their health, you have a machine that says "access denied". It doesn't take a lot to imagine what would happen next.
iPads are commonplace in the US, but in many remote regions of the world, people have never seen an old cellphone before, let alone a computer or a tablet. In such a situation, it is almost delusional to assume that airdropped laptops or tablets would lead to expected or intended results. Projects that make such an assumption and don't engage with local communities and encourage grassroots efforts are doomed to less than ideal, sometimes even negative results. I see it happening with OLPC in many places.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is no easy, elegant way to make this happen. You can have all the technical infrastructure and resources you want, but it is not going to lead to the "education revolution" that you were hoping for. Lasting change only happens through grassroots efforts; and a deep appreciation for the communities in which the new piece of technology is being introduced. The sooner that ed-tech community realizes this, the better it will be for everyone.
Best,
Anish
Education, or more generally learning, especially for young children, never happens in isolation, and often times, happens more outside the school than in. To put it one way, it is a long process of enculturation one in which many people play a part - friends, parents, uncles, teachers, mentors et. al. This process takes place at a different pace across different societies, and the societies themselves are at various stages of cultural evolution (for lack of a better word).
Throughout history, there have been many precedents of new technologies shaping culture, but, to be honest, it's a tight feedback loop. The sages in India wouldn't have discovered '0' if they weren't imagining things in huge time-periods, and astronomical scales that required the invention of zero. There are many other examples from the modern age, and it is a generally well known fact that culture and technology are often interlinked, quite closely.
What happens then, when a piece of technology, which is almost futuristic to it's intended audience is air-dropped and folks with access to it are left to themselves. (Kind of like if aliens flew to earth and shared the plans for cold-fusion or faster-than-light travel). To make matters worse, the targeted audience of ed-tech projects is generally young children, who may be incapable of taking the decisions by themselves, mostly because the societal sphere they exist in doesn't play any significant influencing part. This happens as a result of technology being treated as a commodity rather than as an agent of cultural change.
A more tangible example is the recent news story about iPads being hacked by kids in a school in LA.
Following news that students at a Los Angeles high school had hacked district-issued iPads and were using them for personal use, district officials have halted home use of the Apple tablets until further notice.Assuming that tablets were being given to children to foster creative learning, an incident like this should actually attract adulation rather than criticism, where the children came across a problem, and they worked, hopefully creatively, to find a solution to it. However, that's not what happened, and the school halted home use. Why? I can take one guess. It was because the parents of those children were never "involved" by the school in the process of their children gaining access to iPads. The were most likely made to sign some legal document, which they would have happily did - who wouldn't like to have a new iPad, right?
Wrong!
The critical mistake that happened here was a piece of new technology was introduced in an existing ecosystem, and all the parties involved (mainly the parents) weren't informed of it's true ramifications. Hence they were never able to influence or guide their children of how it might be useful to them, what the various risks were or atleast keep an eye on what's happening. I guess a physical analogue could be a child discovering cigarette smoking, and instead of having a parent telling them that it's bad for their health, you have a machine that says "access denied". It doesn't take a lot to imagine what would happen next.
iPads are commonplace in the US, but in many remote regions of the world, people have never seen an old cellphone before, let alone a computer or a tablet. In such a situation, it is almost delusional to assume that airdropped laptops or tablets would lead to expected or intended results. Projects that make such an assumption and don't engage with local communities and encourage grassroots efforts are doomed to less than ideal, sometimes even negative results. I see it happening with OLPC in many places.
Unfortunately (or fortunately) there is no easy, elegant way to make this happen. You can have all the technical infrastructure and resources you want, but it is not going to lead to the "education revolution" that you were hoping for. Lasting change only happens through grassroots efforts; and a deep appreciation for the communities in which the new piece of technology is being introduced. The sooner that ed-tech community realizes this, the better it will be for everyone.
Best,
Anish
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