Ed-Tech Might Make Things Worse: So Now What?

Reblogged from Hack Education

The OECD released a “first-of-its-kind” report earlier this week on computers and education, eliciting – as all of its PISA-related reports tend to do – precisely the responses you’d suspect: a lot of “schools are doing it wrong.”
There’s always a fair amount of handwringing about PISA scores, as though the performance of a country’s 15 year-olds on this assessment is indicative of – or hell, the final word on – the strength or weakness of its school system. The interpretation of PISA scores tends to suffer from confirmation bias, simply affirming pre-existing beliefs about education policies and practices. And of course, PISA scores also provide the media with an opportunity to craft scary headlines about an impending doom of dumb….

…I confess, I’ve grown pretty tired of the response that “we must” use tech. It’s a surrender, too often and again, to this idea that we are required to interact, to connect, to think deeply through the confines of a certain kind of technology, of a certain kind of economic and social and institutional arrangement – as consumers of tech, and as the product itself.

Despite the insistence that digital technologies are “the future” and as such must be incorporated somehow into the classroom, “the future” remains an unknown. We cannot say with any certainty that “the future” will include any of the technologies that we use today…Read more>>