The reality we confronted at #altc2012 was an imposed reality – one world amongst many possible – that was not a domain in which we could claim expertise. The strange new EduTech tongue – now a hybrid between the traditional 50s business ecclesiasticism and the objectivist evangelism of Silicon Valley was foreign to most delegates. And this is where the fear comes from, a fear of not being understood, a fear of not being listened to.
From a previous position of being the “experts” of the future, it is painful to find ourselves living in a future where we seemingly know next to nothing of value – and to see the hard-won knowledge and truth that we grew uprooted and discarded. We are in the unique and awful position of knowing what is coming will not work, but being utterly powerless to stop it.
The new “experts” in educational technology were not at #altc2012. Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun and Joel Klein spoke instead on an “education panel” at “TechCrunch Disrupt” in San Francisco. Tim Cook launched another iDevice in Barcelona. David Willetts spoke at Keele University in an ultimately futile attempt to square a neoliberal need for unrestricted global markets with a conservative dream of a mythical cloistered past. Michael Gove similarly played with the future life-chances of thousands of English and Welsh school children. David Cameron played FruitNinja.
And more than a hundred senior institutional managers made more than a hundred short term decisions.
The new reality is that institutions wish to trade and compete on a “student experience” delivered by short-term,exploited, disenfranchised and (therefore) cynical academic and support staff. No matter the shininess of the interface, the humanity of learning is trampled by standardisation and the accompanying measurements. By marketing, and the need to project a uniform, designed image of perfection. Just at the point that we begin to understand the chaotic creativity of the connected world, we attempt to mitigate risk by establishing artificially simple and inhuman structures.
Ivory towers (if we ever had ivory towers – don’t academics make the same mistakes as other people, but just have better mental tools to analyse them?) are emotional places. Young post-docs don’t take on the drudgery of a series of temporary teaching-only contracts, writing REF-able papers in their free time, because they want to. They do it because they need to – for all kinds of insane reasons that few can ever understand. There will never be a university monoculture – and this is why one size will never fit all.
The most interesting sessions for me were where the humanity and passion shone through. Seb Schmoller – for so long the personification of the thoughtful, engaged and radical Association of Learning Technologists (ALT) – delivered a wonderfully moving journey through a lifetimes attempt to use computers to help people. Richard Noss called for us to understand a little more of the processes and activities that shape our lives – and reminded us that education gave us far more than just abilities, it gives us aptitudes. Amber Thomas and I poked and prodded a room full of “open education” enthusiasts until we saw the tensions and skewed perspectives that we’d earlier predicted (blog to follow). We saw knitting, fancy dress, gangster rap (Pat Parslow kicking it old-skool style): we saw mesmerising demos of software hacks, mash-ups and proofs-of-concept. A session on pilot projects progressed via reflection to a hard look at the nature of this strange thing called innovation.
These can be frustrating, occasionally cringeworthy, sometimes misguided, but never less than beautiful. Authenticity often is like this.
The weaker sessions were those that made pretentions towards science. It is clear that we have the tools to gather and analyse vast amounts of data. What we are clearly lacking is the ability to ask meaningful questions of it and receive meaningful answers, and to understand the limits of these answers. An opening keynote from Eric Mazur based around a central presumption involving the findings of measuring the “brain activity” from a self-selecting sample of 26 students is not necessarily a bad thing. But presenting it as a new “scientific” approach to learning clearly is.
It’s not just shampoo that sells better with a “science bit”. Meaningless graphs, misleading infographics and spurious explanations abound in the new wave of education. It’s what happens when we mistake a messy human reality for an empirical process, and compress it all into a “dashboard”. It is merely educational research as an arm of marketing, and as one delegate put it “Colleagues, we have utterly failed if we do not get beyond ideas like branding”.
Branding is no substitute for human understanding, and authenticity is an important part of any expertise that can be claimed. If we are going to confront this “reality”, it’s time to get messy.
Oh good, I though it was just me.