instructional technology makes strange bedfellows: hacking education or flash frying it

Technology can be used to 'hack' education -- to make it better and more authentic -- or, just as easily, to fast-food-ify it -- to make it cheaper, more convenient, more profitable and much less healthy. Let's be clear about these opposing objectives.

Saw this by way of the always interesting Alex Reid:



There seem to be two camps when it comes to enthusiasm for educational technology. Those who get excited (whether they admit it per se or not, and it seems they rarely do) by technology's Taylorizing potential for productivity, efficiency, scale, precision, and those whose enthusiasm stems from entirely different and maybe contradictory places: the potential for better, more authentic, socially constructed, learner-centric learning.

It's interesting that the two camps are coming from entirely different places and have what I suspect are to a large extent never-the-twain-shall-meet mutually exclusive aims. The ed.-tech-in-the-large camp (those concerned with productivity and the like) does not typically embrace the same causes or travel in the same circles as the ed.-tech-in-the-small gang. They do not typically see eye-to-eye. Yet somehow when it comes to web-facilitated education, the objectives of the two camps are often conflated. Administrators and policy makers concerned with costs, those inclined to decry education as "the last cottage industry" delight in the potential to leverage technology to "transmit" education more efficiently and manage it more "scientifically". Drexel's President Papadakis explains it with characteristic unabashedness:

For Dr. Papadakis, the full-timer issue poses a dilemma, since one of his bedrock ideas is to encourage the use of Internet-based courses that can be taught by inexpensive part-time or non-tenure-track teachers. As he envisions it, experienced Drexel professors will create digital courses containing computerized coursework accessible via the Internet. They’ll be offered on campus but can also be used to teach “distance learning” students who don’t take part in face-to-face instruction in Philadelphia. For the most part, these courses can be taught by junior or part-time faculty.

“Technicians can teach them” at lower cost, says Dr. Papadakis, quickly adding that he is exaggerating when he uses the word “technicians.” (Whole article is available here)

This teachers replaced by technicians nightmare scenario is *surely* not the perspective of the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning folks or the constructivists, or lord knows the EduPunks (although they at least know full well that their interests are not coincident with those of the in-the-large gang) or anyone, I wouldn't think, inspired by the educational potential of Web 2.0.

And the conflation is clear too in the video above. They start out with the in-the-large premise that education is in need of disruption because it's getting more and more expensive at a annual rate of 8-10% or so. Fair enough (and scary enough). Then we launch into Open Education / OCWC boosterism, and while I love the open education movement and its potential to transform informal learning, I'm sorry, but open education is entirely orthogonal to the issue of skyrocketing college costs (making informal education rich, robust, easy and free isn't going to change the cost structure of formal education, even in the medium term; credentialling matters, the social life of information matters). Then we get into the in-the-small pleasing issues of peer-to-peer learning and collaborative note taking and the idea of providing a structure for educational market making, for matching teacher to learner, all of which is exciting and inspiring, none of which is going to make college any cheaper.

Higher ed administrators, faculty and technologists alike need to recognize, acknowledge and talk about these dual objectives and seek to unify them to whatever extent possible or at least approach their mutual exclusivity as a problem of constrained optimization. And while we're at it, let's think harder and better about the future of and relationship between formal and informal education. (I'm looking in your direction, open education people.)