So here goes with an attempt to expand a little on Tuesday's comments. What went wrong with IT in Education, apart from pretty much everything? (Yes, I'm exaggerating, but, honestly, not all that much.)
Let's start with a sort of foundational truism that everyone I know takes for granted: the new technology hugely facilitates communication at every level. The problem is that I'm convinced it doesn't. I reckon it hinders real communication.
How so? Well before I attempt a quick explanation let me explain where my sense of certainty comes from. I started teaching a good decade and a half or so before all the IT stuff really kicked in (which I'd date from roughly 1994. I think emailing in schools here started around 1995.) And teachers had few if any problems communicating with each other and with students. As far as I recall schools were organised such that they managed to do all the things back then that they do now, the obvious exceptions being holding classes and meeting parents online - but that only really started as a result of the pandemic and can't honestly be seen as necessary. You could easily phone parents back in 1978. And I'm inclined to think it's more effective teaching kids in a classroom than through a screen.
Particularly relevant to my own experience is the fact that I directed a number of quite 'big' dramatic/musical productions for schools in those early years. Now I'd say that of anything I've encountered in school life doing a big show (even a 'small' one) is the most dauntingly complex exercise in terms of the need to communicate effectively with lots of people at lots of levels. But it was do-able, without emails and messaging through various platforms.
And here comes the counter-intuitive thing. Communication was easier then. Any messaging had to be clear and kept to a minimum because (joyfully) all the platforms we now take for granted did not exist, so the capacity for last-minute changes of mind just wasn't there. These days it's by no means unusual to find out that a fairly important meeting has been postponed or rescheduled close to the last minute, often in the name of so-called flexibility.
Someone, somewhere, forgot that fixity & predictability are valuable, indeed necessary, qualities in the general run of things and even when attempting genuinely creative exercises.
I don't know of any colleague these days who doesn't complain about the burden created by the sheer amount of 'information' out there - the tsunami of 'messages'. To adopt a quasi-scientific metaphor, the signal-to-noise ratio no longer favours clarity.
So much noise!
2 comments:
I agree very much, sir. I find that accountability is something that has become increasingly rare nowadays; and is all the more to be treasured! Wish I had a chance to experience what a world, sans telecommunication, would be like!
That's really interesting. I'd not made the connection with the notion of accountability, so I was a bit puzzled when I initially read your comment. But now I think I see why you reference the concept.
I consider myself sort of historically fortunate to have experienced that world. Much as I enjoy the experience of magically accessing pretty much the entire catalogue of, say, Prince with a couple of lazy clicks these days, on the whole I'd love to be back in 1968. And not just because I had hair then.
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