Edtech tools: It’s like taking the Red Pill
Using educational technology often reminds me of being in “The Matrix”, it’s unclear who is influencing who. In edtech conferences and workshops I’ve attended, it’s often repeated again and again that education technologies are tools to be used. We decide what we need in our courses and then we can find appropriate technologies to help facilitate that need. We are the masters utilizing the tools made available to us. What we shouldn’t do, as I’ve been told, is take a piece of technology and then try to fit it into the course presumably because it looks cool or we’re just technophiles that like to mess around with new technology. To some degree I agree with this assessment, definitely we should just fit random technologies into our courses because we think it is cool when it is inappropriate to the educational objectives. That logic though applies to just about everything in our course, if the particular activity or material we are using does not fit the learning objectives, then it should not be used, regardless of whether it is a technology tool or not.
The problem though is that technology has a funny way of doing more than you ask it to do. So while we are telling the “machine” what to do, the “machine,” somewhat ironically, is also telling us what to do. I was watching an interesting TED video of Evan Williams, a co-founder of the Twitter:
One interesting thing that Even mentions is that Twitter started off as a side project of another main project. Not only that, but they conceptualized Twitter as a basic service providing updates of people’s status – very much like the Facebook status feature except through text messages and such. That one basic idea however, evolved into something far different from what it was originally intended to be and the side project became a main project. Twitter moved from being what most people who don’t Twitter fear it is – a bunch of random updates about people’s activities (“Just took a dump and now brushing my teeth”) to a resource that provides up-to-date, cutting edge information (“Check out this new blog about Edtech and the Red Pill”). It’s like a kid being given a seemingly simple object, like a stick, and their use of it is only limited by their imagination (using it as a magic wand, baseball bat, walking stick, etc.).
I think that educational technologies are all that way in some sense. It’s similar to buying a cell phone. At some point, we bought cell phones just to make a telephone call. At some point cell phones inevitably came with other in-built functions, like cameras, calendars, mobile web, texting, etc. Like it or not, it was there on our phone and we could choose to use it or ignore it. In the past, these may have been considered “extras” that weren’t essential to the phone, but as time passed they have become essential. Just buying a cell phone to make telephone calls would seem really outdated now (for the very least we should at least be able to text). In other words, technology has changed the way we communicate with one another, it provided options which we had not considered as necessary, but over time changed our way of communicating. So the “machine” is influencing us, the tool is shaping the way we interact with one another.
This was mentioned in another interesting video by Stefana Broadbent that highlights how the advances in technology have changed the way we communicate:
Arguably then educational technologies are changing the way we are teaching. While the edtech gurus are right in saying, pick the edtech tools that would fit appropriately in the course and fulfill the educational objectives, it is a bit foolhardy to think that this is a one-way street. The minute be begin to use educational technologies, our teaching changes to accommodate the technology. The results from some of these accommodations are unintended and, like my Twitter and cellphone examples, can be positive. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is because college teaching itself is moving away from the “sage on the stage” idea of doing pure lecturing during class time, to more active learning, involved teaching strategies. And most educational technologies (including Web 2.0) are exactly that, a way of facilitating and co-constructing knowledge. So, for example, in the past, a course may have a journaling assignment and students write weekly journal papers. Now instead a teacher decides to use a blog. A blog can essential do the same thing, BUT it also can do more. It also allows other classmates to read these blogs and comment on them (and in a much quicker fashion). Conversations can be started based on the original blog, conversations that facilitate learning. In essence you used the tool to get what you wanted, but the tool influenced you to do things a little differently as well.
I think that realizing this is important. Using educational technology is like taking the Red Pill, which in The Matrix opens up to a whole new world of reality. And as we seek to continue to adopt new educational technologies, we should have in the back of minds the simple question, how can this tool transform my teaching in a way I never thought of before?
