Failure to Disrupt

The Other Books of Justin Reich 📚

• iPads in the Classroom: From Consumption and Curation to Creation (2015)
• Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology: A Practical Guide for Teachers, by Teachers (2015)

Just a glimpse 👀

• Some thoughts about a very well documented and a very interesting book (Harvard University Press, 2020).
• A small book (nearly half of it is made of notes/bibliography)

If you don't have time to read it, watch this video:

At least from 2:10 to 41:31…

A "healthy skepticism about technology"? (🔗)

• skeptics
• tinkerers
• charismatics

Tinkerers

Tinkerers […] believe that major improvement is the product of many years of incremental changes to existing institutions rather than the result of one stroke of wholesale renewal. […] they embrace research and critique as a crucial check against utopian thinking. (Failure to disrupt, Introduction)

A word about “computer criticism”

The name does not imply that such writing would condemn computers any more than literary criticism condemns literature or social criticism condemns society. The purpose of computer criticism is not to condemn but to understand, to explicate, to place in perspective. Of course, understanding does not exclude hard (perhaps even captious) judgment. The result of understanding may well be to debunk. (Seymour Papert)

Coursera’s goal "is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free" (What we're learning from online education, Daphne Koller)

1. The first big bet was that MOOCs would transform the delivery model of higher education, led by a new generation of online providers.

2. The second big bet was that MOOCs would dramatically expand global access to higher education.

3. The third big bet was that through research and continuous iteration, these new online courses would provide more engaging and effective learning experiences.

These dramatic changes have not come to pass.

1. Few MOOCs offered an improved pedagogical experience for distance learners ("most courses simply recorded a professor lecturing, harkening back to the earliest days of motion pictures when the first order of business was the filming of stage plays.") + old technology (LMS & autograders unable to asses a student's essay)

2. MOOCs have created new opportunities for the already educated and most affluent (financially and academically) learners with strong self-regulated learning skills.

3. We have useful data about how many learners register, what background levels of education they have, what courses they take and complete… But very little has been discovered about how they learn.

2009: high-school courses would be replaced by online options ✨

In 2008, a Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen predicted (Disrupting class) that by 2019, half of all middle and high-school courses would be replaced by online options, and the cost would be one-third of today’s costs, and the courses will be much better.

The Disruption Machine

What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.

By Jill Lepore

"The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence."

2011: Sal Kahn reinvent education ✨

At some point, Salman Kahn is basically explaining that thanks to videos teachers are kind of obsolete.

At the end of the presentation, Bill Gates' conclusion is: "Well, it's amazing. I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education".

2013: Half the universities would be in bankruptcy ✨

MOOCs are going to revolutionize education.

Because of MOOCs, "maybe half the universities would be in bankruptcy" (Clayton Christensen)

1994: Videodiscs will revolutionize classrooms ✨

"The use of videodiscs in classroom instruction is increasing every year and promises to revolutionize what will happen in the classroom of tomorrow" (Semrau & Boyer)

The 1930s: Radios educate everyone ✨

Teaching Machines: A Brief History of "Teaching at Scale"

We have not learned from the failure of our past predictions (in fact, wishful thinking continue nowadays!

1913: Books will be obsolete in schools ✨

"Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years."

Who said that?

Thomas Edison

Interview published in The New York Dramatic Mirror in July 1913

"In education technology, extreme claims are usually the sign of a charlatan rather than an impending breakthrough." (Failure to disrupt, Part I, chapter 2 ALGORITHM-GUIDED LEARNING AT SCALE Adaptive Tutors and Computer-Assisted Instruction)

A few reasons

1. New Technologies, Old Pedagogies
2. Curse of the familiar
3. Matthew Effect
4. Trap of Routine Assessment

New Technologies, Old Pedagogies

• New learning technologies rarely innovate on fundamental pedagogical ideas.
• Remember the MOOC example? (☝️)
• LMS

Give me date

When did the first LMS appear?

"[…] the first LMS appeared in 1924 in the higher education sector, […] The first introduction of the LMS was in the late 1990s." (wikipedia)

Have you heard of PLATO?

It stands for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. It is a software that provides:

• lessons
• forums
• message boards
• chat rooms
• screen sharing
• multiplayer games
• emoticons

It can:

• track every keystroke a student made
• keep data on every answer submitted

It allows:

• students to work at their own pace
• teachers to create heir own lessons

PLATO has been built on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC machine in 1960.

Old technologies like PLATO (1960) shapes our behaviorist computer-aided instruction products.

Audrey Watters

The author insists on this idea:
"new technologies are easy to develop; new behaviors and new cultures are not."

"Easily adopted technologies will be those that replicate existing classroom practices, but digitizing what teachers and students already do is unlikely to lead to substantial improvements in schools." (Failure to disrupt, Part II, chapter 5 The Curse of the familiar)

"Even when teachers have adequate support for technology integration, research has shown that adoption of new technologies is a process that usually begins with using new technologies in old ways." (Failure to disrupt, Part II, chapter 5 The Curse of the familiar)

Use of technology in schools:

• entry,
• adoption,
• adaptation,
• appropriation,
• invention.

At early stages, teachers replicate existing practices with technology, and over time, teachers develope approaches to teaching and learning that would be impossible without the new technologies.

Scratch Example

"Scratch is designed as the technology avatar and vehicle for constructionist pedagogy, and schools are often successful at neutering those elements of Scratch so that it can be implemented in learning environments emphasizing teacher control and student compliance with specific routines or instructions." (Failure to disrupt, Part II, chapter 5 The Curse of the familiar)

During the pandemic, "a series of collective act of conservatism"…

"faced with dramatically changing circumstances, most of the professors walked away from their lectern and sat down in front of their home office video cameras and kept teaching roughly the same way that they were teaching beforehand" (Justin Reich)

“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken away from them.” (a verse in the biblical Gospel of Matthew)

"The edtech Matthew effect posits that this pattern is quite common in the field of education technology and learning at scale." (Failure to disrupt, Part II, chapter 6 The Edtech Matthew Effect)

• New resources — even free — are more likely to benefit already affluent learners with access to networked technology and access of networks of people who know how to take advantage of free online resources.
• Technology reproduces inequalities embedded in systems.

"Much of what we can assess at large scale are routine tasks, as opposed to the complex communication and unstructured problem-solving tasks that will define meaningful and valuable human work in the future. Computers can mostly assess what computers are good at doing, and these are things we do not need humans to do in the labor market." (Failure to disrupt, Part II, chapter 7 The Trap of Routine Assessment)

Complex systems

"Schools are complex systems, and many stakeholders in school systems — teachers, students, parents, administrators, and policymaker — are often quite committed to various aspects of the status quo. The schools that exist today are an assemblage of features designed to balance competing visions of the purpose of schooling: inspiring lifelong learning, helping learners pass through gatekeeping exams, preparing people for their lives as citizens." (Failure to disrupt, Conclusion)

Schools domesticates technology

"new technologies do not disrupt existing educational systems. Rather, existing educational systems domesticate new technologies, and in most cases, they use such technologies in the service of the well-established goals and structures of schools." (Failure to disrupt, Conclusion)

Hope

First, change won’t come from heroic developers or even technology firms, but from communities of educators, researchers, and designers oriented toward innovative pedagogy and a commitment to educational equity. We need villages, not heroes."

"Second, technology won’t transform teaching and learning. Our best hope is that technologies open up new spaces for the work of holistically improving curricula, pedagogy, instructional resources, student support, teacher professional development, policy, and other critical facets of school systems. Technology, at best, has a limited role to play in the broader work of systems change."

"Finally, we must let go of the hope for the kinds of dramatic shifts that sometimes do happen in consumer technologies and instead envision the work of systems change as a long process of tinkering and continuous improvement. (Failure to disrupt, Conclusion)

Breakthrough on the horizon?

New technologies won't disrupt and transform educational systems.

Things change but they don't change disruptively. They change incrementally. They change step by step.

The whole purpose of the book is to inoculate educators from future hype cycles, to convince them that the next time someone comes around and says, "Oh! it's going to be AR or VR or AI that's going to change everything", you may say "well, that's very unlikely to happen" so we don't spend large resources chasing those products.

How AI Adaptive Technology can Upgrade Education Industry - Joleen Liang (sponsored by Squirrel AI)

Helping teachers

"People are fond of pointing out that the nineteenth-century time traveller would be astonished by our banks, factories, and operating theatres – all transformed by new technology – while the classroom has hardly changed. However, bankers, industrialists, and surgeons have had huge resources devoted to developing the specialised systems they need for transformation. Teachers have not."

"Yet it is a much more tractable problem to model the activity that moves a credit from one account to another than to model the activity that moves a mind from confusion to understanding. Governments provide education with the tools developed for industry and commerce, but who is there to help teachers and lecturers work out how to use them to transform teaching and learning?" (Diana Laurillard, Teaching as a Design Science, Preface)