“What are we missing?”

What would happen if you threw a bunch of academics and developers into a room and said “educational technology – discuss”?

Following on very nicely from my last post where I discussed the different perspectives on educational technology, I found myself in a discussion with other developers which kicked off pretty much with just “education – discuss.”

I was at devmob in Dunedin a week ago, an unconference for mobile developers of all platforms (“we used to be just iOS but the rest of you were sneaking in anyway”). In true unconference style, the agenda was very ad hoc, with sessions becoming available based on demand and interest. What this led to was a lot of discussion based sessions with people from many different backgrounds sharing their experience around the given topic.

Given there were quite a few people working in the education space, a session popped up for it and through the discussions which arose, I discovered the perspective that I was missing in my own research: it was a discussion about the role of technology in education from the developers’ perspective.

I didn’t end up contributing much, and instead just tried to observe what was being said and understand the underlying message which were coming through.

Apps and infrastructure

The course of discussion started out talking about apps – who is working on or has worked on apps for education.

This soon turned into talking about the limitations and challenges of introducing mobile devices into schools, issues such as the current roll out of high speed internet and the accessibility of devices between low and high decile schools, through to the schools acting as ‘gatekeeper’ and placing restrictions in devices and what apps can and can’t do within these boundaries.

The underlying message here is of the infrastructure challenges of working in this space and the highly unpredictable nature of what can and can’t be done – every school is so different, has different restrictions and regulations and ideas of what the best way to implement technology is .

The more invisible constraints were only very lightly touched on – changing the mindsets of those who run the schools and the education system as a whole, and enabling teachers to be technically literate.

Kids and coding

However, the larger part of the discussion was about teaching kids to code. Everyone in the room seemed to agree on the fact that this was a positive thing that should be encouraged. Many in the room were parents who talked about what tools they were introducing to their children.

Devices such as the iPad are often criticised for being platforms for primarily content consumption so the underlying message here was to encourage kids to be not just consumers but producers. The device becomes a platform to learn with, not learn from: success is when they start finding their own problems to solve, after all, programming is about problem solving, not writing code. The code is the means for solving a problems.

This has been a hot topic recently, especially with the launch of code.org which reinforces this message that most schools don’t teach coding and that “everyone…should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” This quote by Steve Jobs and many others from leaders and trendsetters paint a picture about how programming should be a a core competency and that “the programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.”

What’s the difference?

What was interesting as well were the things which WERENT discussed. It was refreshing to not hear the jargon I’m used to hearing about educational technology – flipped classroom, mobile learning, e-learning, even ‘pedagogy, didn’t turn up once.

The whole experience seemed to reinforces what I already suspected: there is a disconnect between the overall aims of people who create the technology and those who use it.

Academics and educators think about pedagogy, the process of teaching, the ways in which the technology will impact these processes. Developers start with the task, the app – what does it do? Take an application definition statement for example, the way developers are encouraged to start the development process: a concise, concrete declaration of the app’s core functionality, purpose and intended audience.

My perspective

Education is broad, we could discuss for hours because many different facets. Every school is different, every country is different. Of course, the nature of the conversation and the initial provocation was broad (“education – discuss”), so it was interesting to see what direction the discussion went in.

I posted a couple of tweets, one of which I said “I would be REALLY interested to see what would happen if you threw developers and academics together to discuss ed tech.”  I had few people come up to me afterwards to ask about that comment, and what was really refreshing was one person said to me “what are we [as developers] missing?”

During the lightning talk sessions, I gave a short 5 minute presentation about “Why the Education Category of the App Store is Broken’. When I started writing it, it quickly turned into a longer rant which outlined some of the key ideas of my research in a more humorous / less academic way. I cut it down to the 5 minutes and the feedback I received was good, which in hindsight after attending the education discussion, I felt like hopefully I’d given developers some insight into, not so much what they are missing, but rather the inherent problems I’ve found in my experience with educational technology.

The challenges and questions around educational technology can’t be solved overnight, but there’s a need to combine the two perspectives which currently feel very disjointed. Both sides need to be open to the question of “what are we missing?”.  I am interested now in turning that into a full talk to take to both audiences then posing that question of “educational technology – discuss.”