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Beyond traditional teaching

Contents (click to jump to a section)


by
Stephen W. Draper,   Department of Psychology,   University of Glasgow.

Preface

I have been invited to speak in a debate at the Oxford union as part of "Beyond chalk and talk". This essay is my self-preparation for what I might say there. In places it may be too sketchy — sorry — to be readable by others, but at least the references can be given here.

The debate Motion is "This house believes virtual teaching is killing traditional teaching."
I have been assigned to speak for the motion.

Introduction

I should begin by warning you of my limited view of the area: I have only really worked on learning and teaching in HE, and am usually only thinking of this sector in what I say. I suspect that the theories and issues there apply much more widely; but equally I'm sure many don't apply to newborn infants, and I don't know where between 0 and 20 years of age they kick in. (Some research might be massively over-interpreted as suggesting age 7.)

I'm going to begin by sketching what for me are the anchor points in considering the value, if any, of using modern ICT in teaching. Debates polarise areas on a single issue: that is useful as a device for structuring the social and intellectual occasion, and is one way of eliciting the benefits of peer discussion which both Piaget and Vygotsky, to invoke but two of the area's household gods, draw our attention to. However it is not of course a good way of organising the truth, nor the structure of important ideas and points: in any important area, knowledge isn't one dimensional (even though print technology is). I'll begin, therefore, by discussing what I really think; that is, by introducing some of the key ideas underlying any real understanding of the issues implied by the motion. At the end, I'll relate them, if only superficially, to the forced choice of for or against.

What I really think

The general issue to confront in any real understanding of this area is whether technology makes any real difference to L&T at all. There are, broadly, three views of this outlined decades ago by Papert: technological determinism, incremental education-led change, and revolution i.e. that technology enables qualitatively different approaches to be taken.

I begin with arguments related to technological determinism.

Clark

Clark famously has published a series of papers arguing that there is no evidence that learning technology ever improves learning. Many of these are based on meta-analysis of studies, and he has been able to argue without effective rebuttual that all the studies either show no advantage for new technology or else changed the method of teaching as well as the technology, and that any improvements can reasonably be attributed to these changes in pedagogy. Attempts by Kozma and others to argue the contrary have not been so convincing.

Clark's metaphor was that of a delivery truck: saying that whether a delivery truck is diesel or electric has no effect on the nutritional value of the food delivered, and similarly that the technological medium for delivering teaching and supporting learning has no inherent effect of learning outcomes. Another thought along the same lines is to ask what you would say if someone asked you whether books were important to, or would revolutionise, learning. Obviously the kind and quality of book is far more important than whether you use books, videos, or speech; and conversely, you can use alternatives to books and so not use them at all. Thus neither books nor more recent learning technologies are either necessary or sufficient for learning.

This seems to imply that new technology will make no difference (and so virtual and traditional teaching will be equally effective, and the debate's motion undermined as a non-issue). If technology matters, then another angle of argument must be found; some effect that is indirect yet can be big enough to dominate.

I think this is true, except that it ignores costs. Ignoring costs seems reasonable in research. After all, the cost of doing something the first time in a lab is unrelated to how much it might cost in mass production years later.
But in engineering — in any applied area including education — it isn't.
But new media can make costs quite different; and this in practice matters; just as new techno does in other areas of engineering. E.g.s: gold plate everywhere; superconducting distb. grid; ...

Niche

I have argued (Draper 1998) on the basis of a local review, that in most cases, new ICT methods fail to do better than traditional, and so fail to kill it. Thus the motion is wrong if taken as a statement of the current average success rate of ICT in teaching. However there are exceptions, which I argued were characterised by being those projects that had been education-led rather than technology-led. Success had depended on starting with an existing problem with the current ("traditional") method of teaching, and finding a way technology could help with that problem. Thus, in effect, success comes with adopting a Clark perspective of focussing on the pedagogy not technology or medium, yet there are specific cases (niches) where technology makes the difference in finding a way to solve a problem. On this view, note, each niche success is not only a case of technology helping but also is actually a marker for a failure of traditional teaching.

So what is wrong with Clark?

So what is wrong with Clark's argument? It ignores cost; and it ignores the opening of new possibilities. These are two aspects of the same type of point: that perhaps the space of education is not fixed and eternal, but that technology might operate most profoundly by changing that space of what is possible, what is practicable, what is perceived as a need.

What might this abstract point mean concretely?

New Engineering to expose hidden eternal issues

There is a profound contrast between science and engineering. The former looks for laws that are universally true regardless of what other factors also operate in each situation, while the latter looks at all but only the factors that matter in achieving one's ends in a particular situation.

Education, like medicine, is a kind of engineering, judged by its success in particular cases. Whereas science proceeds by ignoring all the aspects of a situation except the one under study, there is no limit to the number of factors engineering must deal with, while on the other hand any factor too small to make a material difference to the outcome can be ignored. A consequence is that periodically engineering discovers some new factor that must, after all, be addressed. A recent example is the Millennium bridge in London which upon being opened, was discovered to oscillate in a new way bridge designers had never had to consider before. See Petroski (1982) for many other examples.

An abstract possibility, therefore, is that new learning technology may lead education into areas and situations where new factors and principles must be considered. They may be eternal truths, but they may never before have been noticed, or important to consider in practice. In this way, new technology can lead to theoretical advances in any engineering area; and this can be associated with new practices as well as understandings. Technology could possibly kill traditional understandings of teaching by stimulating new understandings.

My anecdote on feedback and the girl who just wanted to know if she was a psychologist or should shift to geography.

New technology and new modes however test our theories and understanding in new ways, exposing aspects we hadn't really appreciated before. Though it will mean we have less experience with the new methods; and much/most of L&T success relies on implicit skill, on designs happening to work without our u. why in established contexts. This also links fundamentally to "tradition" and the disadvantages of traditional design vs. understanding what's going on. I.e. tradition goes with limited understanding but practices that are well debugged through experience.

Landauer

The argument is that usually with new technology the main change is NOT in measures/ scores on old values, but in creating quite new demands.

In favour of this is an implication of Landauer's book (on why there has been no trace of economic benefits of computers): that most change brought on by new technology is NOT in doing old things better but by doing new things that turn out to be valued. This is difficult for research, because you can't do pre-test / post-test on measures of what was being done, on what the old definitions of the task/goal were. But if you're smart enough to use measures of the new values, conservatives won't accept your research. E.g.s:
*Do word processors let us write letters faster or better? Probably not, so why do we use them?
*Do telephones save travelling? Mostly they just mean we have more conversations than we used to.
*Do ATMs (cash machines) save you travelling to the bank? Mainly they just mean more, smaller withdrawals.
*TV didn't replace radio
*TV didn't close down cinema

This is, perhaps, an aspect of the task-artifact cycle. (Carroll et al., 1991): the way in which a new artifact doesn't just satisfy the old need it was designed for, but at once leads users (not designers) to discover new uses for it.

New requirements on education?

A different argument on why there are, and need to be, changes in education is that the needs it must serve are significantly different today than they used to be even recently.

Firstly, there is the Flynn effect: IQ has risen steadily for the last 100 years. This effect seems to be real, and many efforts to explain away the evidence have failed. It is not due to better education, nutrition, social conditions in any obvious way (these hypotheses have been tested and rejected by the data). Since IQ has changed, shouldn't education now change?

Modern life and society may need different and more education. Even supermarkets, even shopping, requires different cognitive skills today than formerly.

Why has an education in classics, in Greek and Latin, so completely gone out of style? I, along with at least a third of my selected and priviledged school peers, learned Latin as a child. Today, this is a tiny minority interest, but science is compulsory from primary school on. Fundamental beliefs about essential educational curricula have changed.

The most important point, however, is a growing realisation about what it is we most need. There is now so much knowledge in our global society, that we don't face merely information overload, but knowledge overload. What we need to "have" inside our minds in order to cope is not the knowledge itself, but meta-knowledge: knowing what you need to know (and only secondly, how to get it; and only thirdly, knowing it already).

What is really desired more and more today (in education) is for Teacher to tell us what is it we need to know [about subject X]. It's not getting the content so much, as the expert knowledge of what it is you need to know. Why do I think that? consultancy; journalists phoning up; and above all: what is the luxury of working in a university, even more than the library and free fast internet access? it's being able to pick up the phone and get straightened out about almost any topic.

Cf. old mass production vs. modern mass production like clothes with a very substantial aspect of customer tailoring (!), rather than the "any color you like as long as it's black" uniformity imposed by earlier mass production methods.

Cf. tourism as an example of the demand for just-in-time information (what guide books give you), and the relationship of information to experience. Whatever grand idea you may have of education as a meta-skill, not object level information, it is going to be judged against new demands on knowledge acquisition.

Duguid argument on education

Above: education, like other professional services, you can't judge what you want. If you can do that evaluation you probably don't need to buy the service.

Misrepresentation: getting stuff over that couldn't easily be justified in detail. I.e. selling a bundle, and earning enough public trust to get the bundle sold without micromanagement/interference. Partly because customers can't evaluate things well themselves; partly because experienceing variable quality, provided the average is high, is itself educational.

Communities, not just information. Is there a text with this course // is there a class or community with this text? TVI: replace lectures by videotape BUT seen and discussed by a discussion group.

Accreditation is one key things HEIs do. And value goes NOT with the course or the k. but the HEI itself.

The motion

To write on this, I have to analyse what virtual, killing, and traditional mean (not to mention teaching).

To discuss the motion, we have to analyse the key terms. But as so often, and particularly frequently in ideas about education, the most important thing is not to offer a vote or an answer to the usual, spontaneous, "tabloid" questions, but to discover what the good questions are by demolishing the wrong questions, most often by identifying the false presuppositions in them.

Virtual: actually we don't usually take much notice of the material aspects of other people, particularly in learning situations, so virtual don't matter. E.g. don't remember your students, don't search their bodies; in fact, as BodyWorlds shows, we really have no idea what they (or we ourselves) are like under our skins. Similarly for sexual love: we think of it as physical, yet we prefer a phone conversation with our beloved to a cuddle with someone we don't fancy. Teaching has never been about physical, material, "real" interaction [except a) using pain as a motivation b) SM teaching and physical skills]. And anyway, to avoid virtual teaching would be to avoid using books or writing, as if the physicality of talking were important.

Killing: Really, this is about Papert's and others' views of progress in education. Incremental or revolutionary. Papert (1980) p.186.
If techno-inevitability then kill in the populist sense of the motion.
If incremental, then killing may mean evolving /improving until gradually not recognisable.
If Papert revolution of ideas, then something else again. But not by the techno, only enabled by it. Discuss other technologies, and parallels: so often, the transforming technologies create new demands but don't wipe out the old. And another side of this, is we don't understand what education does: Duguid.
I.e.: Killing as a) replacement and abolition; b) swamping; c) evolving out of recognition.

Traditional

the sense that "traditional" was bad as so much tradition is (slave owning, physically abusing children and calling it teaching, ....).
As Samuel Johnson, according to Boswell, said "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel", and recently a journalist in the Independent echoed this as "tradition is the most common hypocrisy of the fundamentalists" in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Trad is bad
b1) Most say "tradition" is actually the best hour of their 20 years of educ.
b2) slow, poorly adapted to L
b3) poorly adapted to needs, to fast changing world k.

Conclusion

No to techno-inevitability / determinism.
But yes, change is happening but SHOULD be happening for several reasons. All of these both stem from technology and amount to saying that "traditional" is bad.

Whether it is "virtual" that characterises the changes of what is needed and what is happening is another matter.

References

Brown, John Seely & Duguid, Paul (2000) The social life of information (Harvard Business School Pr, Boston Mass.) Especially ch.8 "Re-education".

Carroll J.M., Kellogg, W.A. & Rosson, M.B. (1991) "The task-artifact cycle" in J.M.Carroll (ed.) Designing Interaction: psychology at the human-computer interface pp.74-102 (Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge University press).

Clark, R.E. (1982). "Review of media in instruction : 60 years of research" Educational communciation and technology journal, vol.30 no.1 pp.60?.

Clark, R.E. (1983). "Reconsidering research on learning from media" Review of Educational Research, vol.53 no.4 pp.445-459.

Clark, R.E. (1991). "When researchers swim upstream: reflections on an unpopular argument about learning from media" Educational Technology, vol.? Feb. pp.34-38.

Draper, S.W. (1998) "Niche-based success in CAL" Computers and Education vol.30, pp.5-8

Kozma, R.B. (1991). "Learning with media" Review of Educational Research, vol.61, no.2, pp.179-211.

Special issues ofEducational Technology Research and Development (1994) vol.42 nos.1-3 [For a collection of papers on the Clark-Kozma debate]

Flynn effect (on rising IQ). Start point NewSci 2 March 2002 p.25-27. Also New Sci 21 April 2001 p.44. Main ref was PsychBulletin 1987? vol.101 p.171.

Landauer,T.K. (1995) The trouble with computers: Usefulness, usability, and productivity (MIT press; Cambridge, MA)

Papert, S.A. (1980) Mindstorms: Children, computers and powerful ideas (Basic Books: New York).

Petroski, H. (1982) To engineer is human: the role of failure in successful design (Macmillan: London).

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