The brave new world of learning

There is a lot of debate one hears, on what education technology can and can-not do or what its potential is or even limits, or how it shall solve the challenges of education or what its pitfalls are. Somehow reminds one of Omar Khayyam – “Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went”. Hasn’t the debate gone on for too long. Its time to come forward and seize the moment. The moment of exploding content, of the power of connecting learners with educators, of analytics which can discern behavior around every click in a big data set, of personalization, of any-time learning which brings expertise to your living room or bedroom. The word technology has different connotations for learners and educators. For learners its usually the idiom through which they have understood the world they have lived in, a flat and inter-connected world of ideas. For teachers, it is sometimes that force which slowly took over their world and displaced professions and changed their world. This battle of generations is often played out in the fields of education technology. Where more giga-bytes are being created in days and weeks than from the beginning of humanity, where in large parts of the globe, there are more content devices than people. In such a world, much of the discussion on the role of technology in education is fallacious. Given the transformation in the way human knowledge is being created and curated, the manner in which it is being discovered and consumed, is the world of education dynamically adapting itself to this changing paradigm of learning? The institutional response to technology has been vacillating from teacher apathy to a self-fulfilled prophecy on implementations which did not deliver enough. There are powerful tools available for educators ( and many of the best ones are free, so it’s not even about costs ) which can be leveraged in the classrooms from tomorrow morning and one needn’t wait for every child having an iPad. And if teachers listen to kids in the classrooms, they would come up with some powerful ideas to create learning. ( we know from experience that kids are one of the smartest app designers in the world ) A raging binary is between pure online and blended models of learning. There are aspects which are best done as self-learning, some learning tasks are better accomplished in a group and wise teachers can sometime stimulate discussions and steer them towards outcomes which allow the group to learn more. And of course, learners do get stuck and need help from peers or teachers. One has already lost much of the potential when one posits it as teachers vs technology. Does online learning work better for slow or fast learners ? Watching a group of kids competing to score on a word competition app, one is able to discern the same forces which are universally true for learning – igniting motivation and then stepping back to observe and help when the group gets stuck. And tapping into the innate learning DNA of slow and fast learners requires a different approach. And one of the ways in which personalization can work is by giving insights to teachers on each learner, allowing for an appropriate intervention. Its time to end the hesitation and start embracing – app or cloud, formal or non-formal, blended or pure, auditory or visual, slow or fast learner. The brave new world of learning awaits us all.