Educational technology is often seen as a straightforward solution to teaching challenges. Yet, beneath the surface lies a complex dynamic. Who ultimately shapes educational technology? This piece explores the proximity between those who buy and sell edtech and the gap between these decision-makers and those who actually use it. This imbalance influences both innovation and pedagogy.
Thinking about the Edtech Echo Chamber
Author: Prof John Traxler, UNESCO Chair, Commonwealth of Learning Chair and Academic Director of the Avallain Lab
Since joining Avallain and whilst continuing to work as a university professor, I have been reflecting on the nature of the edtech environment. My perspective is not only very generalised, subjective and impressionistic. It also overlooks major disturbances, most obviously the global pandemic, the alleged ‘pivot’ to digital learning and the global explosion of artificial intelligence, with its haphazard adoption in education.
Specifically, I have been thinking about the small informal community of people within the organisations of the education sectors who design, develop and sell dedicated edtech systems and other people who buy, install and maintain such systems. On behalf of their respective organisations, they are engaged in transactions that are highly focused, highly technical, highly complex and highly responsible. The members of this informal community, both ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’, must, by the nature of their enormous expertise, share very similar backgrounds, values, language, ideas and influential personalities in order to be effective. Their experience suggests that in their careers they can change from ‘sellers’ or ‘buyers’ and back again several times.
I suspect that they share a kind of groupthink that seems, certainly in their terms, to be productive, objective and transparent. By this, I mean that the buyers and sellers agree on what they should be discussing (and what not to discuss). This groupthink determines the direction of procurement and consequently focuses on making existing products and systems faster, bigger, cheaper, more secure, more attractive and more compliant, and builds on current perceived successes.
The User Community
There is, however, another informal community involved, on the periphery of the informal edtech buyers and sellers community, namely that of teachers, lecturers, learners and students.
My worry is that because of differences in values, language, ideas and influential personalities, any discourse with these communities of teachers, lecturers, learners or students is much less efficient and effective. It is often perceived as partly mutually incomprehensible, characterised by one community or the other using concepts, methods, tools, values and references not wholly or confidently understood by the other.
As an example, many organisations using educational technology are trying to address equity, inclusion and diversity in their provision and their ethos. They may also be trying to promote different models or strategies for teaching and learning. Whilst the communities of teachers and lecturers know whom to involve to advance these initiatives within their own work, moving upstream and being able to articulate their needs in technically meaningful ways seems generally much more difficult. There is a chasm between ‘academic’ departments, doing the teaching, and ‘service’ departments, running the digital technology.
Obviously, issues like staff retraining, interoperability and managerial nervousness further limit the scope for systemic, as opposed to incremental, change. So do the business models of educational organisations and, for example, of education and academic publishers.
Horizon Scanning
I did consultancy for the UK NHS, National Health Service, some years ago, helping to improve their edtech ‘horizon scanning’ capacity, and whilst it is possible to develop methods and tools for this, I now worry that the problem is the possible inability to break out of the groupthink, out of the accepted views, of the community in question. At the time, I expressed this slightly differently, saying it was easy to see innovations on the horizon coming straight at you, but the challenge was to spot the relevance of those on the horizon, appearing further off to the left or way off to the right. Again, there is a difference between ‘hard’ technical stuff on the horizon and ‘soft’ educational stuff.
There might be a connection between these observations about horizon scanning and other work on tools and methods to support brainstorming, which attempt to generate new ideas within a community as opposed to recognising ideas outside the community and on the horizon.
I might be equating the groupthink of various closed but informal groups with the ideas about paradigms, scientific or otherwise, but in a practical sense, I wondered how we promote the ‘paradigm shifts’ that bring about dramatic but benign or beneficial transformation. In short, where do new products come from?
Breaking the Edtech Echo Chamber
In conclusion, I am attempting to make a case that the people buying and selling educational technology often understand each other much better than they understand the people using it, and thus educational technology is driven by technology push (or technological determinism) rather than pedagogy pull.
I think this builds in some pedagogic conservatism. There might be other reasons or perspectives, but this gap remains a critical challenge.
The future of educational technology depends on breaking down silos and aligning the expertise of buyers and sellers with the lived needs of educators and learners. Together, fostering shared language and values will empower all stakeholders to participate in shaping tools that genuinely enhance education.
1 Perhaps this current piece could be reworked to address these two issues but I think both have served to reinforce existing attitudes and values, and that pronouncements of systemic transformation may be premature or overstated or misleading.
2 But clearly this can only be impressions and could never be based on anything purporting to be ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’.
3 I think in fact I am saying this community articulates and represents a ‘paradigm’ as defined by Thomas S. Kuhn in his 1974 short paper Second Thoughts on Paradigms (available online at https://uomustansiriyah.edu.iq/media/lectures/10/10_2019_02_17!07_45_06_PM.pdf), albeit a modest one compared to Darwinian evolution, heliocentric astronomy or even object-oriented programming.
4 There is also a factor understood in requirements engineering about the human incapacity to answer questions about the future; ask customers or users what they would like in the future and they will reply, what they already have but faster. This too builds in conservatism. Fortunately, there are various better techniques to elicit future requirements from customers or users.
5 Characterised on one side by fairly generalised, abstract and social ideas and values and on the other by specific, concrete and technical ideas and values, though it is difficult for this characterisation to be objective and neutral.
6 It could be the grand ‘connectivist’ conceptions of the early ideologically driven MOOCs or merely flipped learning, self-directed learning, critical digital literacy, project-based learning, situated learning and so on.
7 Which might explain why most universities and colleges seem stuck in the digital technology of the 1990s, namely the VLE/LMS and the networked desktop computer, in spite of the ubiquity of social media and personal technologies.
8 Defined here as the ability of different hardware and software systems with different roles within a complex organisation to work together.
9 ‘Horizon scanning’ is the activity of intercepting and interpreting ideas that are emergent, unformed, unclear and then seeing their practical relevance ahead of colleagues and competitors. There are various methods and for the NHS we attempted to synthesise and validate a method from those already in government departments, universities and corporations.
10 Thinking of Teflon and Post-Its.
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