ICT has often been touted like the miracle drug for the problems that education face. Its use has been promoted to help students learn and also to keep students in school. It is also often touted as the means for students to learn the skills required in the 21st century. This giddy promotion of ICT in education has seen schools clamoring and rushing to use ICT.

The e-primer, “ICT in Education” by V.L. Tinio, published by the Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said:

As the half-life of information continues to shrink and access to information continues to grow exponentially, schools cannot remain mere venues for the transmission of a prescribed set of information from teacher to student over a fixed period of time. Rather, schools must promote “learning to learn,” : i.e., the acquisition of knowledge and skills that make possible continuous learning over the lifetime.2 “The illiterate of the 21st century,” according to futurist Alvin Toffler,“will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

It also said:

When used appropriately, different ICTs are said to help expand access to education, strengthen the relevance of education to the increasingly digital workplace, and raise educational quality by, among others, helping make teaching and learning into an engaging, active process connected to real life.”

If one reads the literature on ICT use in education, one cannot help notice an unquestioned optimism in the need and potentially successful use of ICT in education. It is interesting that the author above used the caveat “When used appropriately”. How often has one seen ICT used appropriately in the classroom? The author also uses the phrase “different ICTs are said to help” which indicates a tentativeness of the effectiveness of ICT in assisting the teaching and learning experience. The reality is that the jury is still out with regards to the impact of ICT in education. That is why it is only “said to help”. It sounds almost like a mere hope.

Only issues of costs and efficiency of ICT in education are raised. When the issue of impact is raised, it is only about the impact on learning and teaching. This is itself restrictive since education is supposed to have an impact on the other aspects of society. So why do we measure the impact of the use of technology only within the perimeters of school only?

However, Neil Postman, the social and cultural critic, has posed six questions for anyone coming into contact with technology to consider. This in my view is an important aspect of our ongoing conversations with technology. This ongoing conversations help us to understand  better the impact that ICT has on us. This conversation hopefully will allow us to slow down in our implementation of ICT if only to give us time to understand ICT’s impact better. The first of the six questions posed by Postman as part of this conversation with technology is “What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?”

So to paraphrase this question for the education field, the question is to what educational problem is this technology a solution? This may sound strange as there is an almost unquestioned belief that ICT is good for education. The only issues it seems that is discussed is how to maximize this unquestioned positive effect of ICT in schools, and not whether there is a real need for it in the first place.

Take for example, the third version of Singapore’s MasterPlan for IT in Education (MPITE) which goes by the name “FutureSchools@Singapore”, where virtual environments were promoted as the new learning platforms for students in Singapore. There was reports in the local press of a virtual market place where students can learn about being in a market place. It is with incredulity that I read such attempts to justify these new technologies. I am not against the use of virtual environments. They have their uses in simulators for example for pilots, or even bomb disposal training and other similar scenarios. But such arguments for its use in schools is strange and absurd. Is it so difficult to bring the students to a real live market? I think the experience in a real one would be a compelling one with its noise, atmosphere and smell. Will the virtual market experience do justice to its intended learning objectives? Why spend on getting on a technology that does not even come near the real experience which could be obtained for free?

There is a place for virtual environments in the classrooms but surely greater thought should be placed to decide what is worth “virtualizing” for the learning and teaching process. It cannot be just taking whatever the vendors of such technology has. Are the students learning to act like virtual surgeons only because that is the learning module available to them? Vendors are mere salesmen for the most part. At the end of the day, it is sales that drive their push for the use of such technology in schools. They are the ones who gained the most through the use of such technologies. So who gains from the use of ICT in schools? Not the teachers. And not the students. But definitely the salesmen. This is seen in the official announcement for the launch of the FutureSchools@Singapore by Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE). The whole scheme is tied to Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), who counts as one of its key responsibilities is the promotion of local infocomm firms (see here). The danger of such a partnership is that the salesmen of ICT products will drive what is being used in schools and not the schools that drive the salesmen to produce the needed ICT tools or platforms for education.

ICT is also often used as the solution for all kinds of educational goals. For example, when launching the FutureSchools@Singapore initiative, Minister of State for Education Lui Tuck Yew, was reported to have said that the aim was to get more students to participate in class as opposed to traditional one-way teacher teacher lecture approach (see here). In my view, that is astonishing. If the goal is too move away from the “traditional” teaching approach, the solution is not through ICT use. Teachers must be retrained to adopt more, for example, co-operative learning strategies. Their lesson design could be changed to move away from such traditional one-way teacher lectures without the use of ICT. Who says you need ICT to get greater student participation?

In fact, introducing ICT to teachers who have never adopted student-centered approaches only increases the difficulties for the teachers. They will have to learn how to not only move away from their usual approach to teaching but at the same time, they have to learn to integrate ICT  effectively for eduaction. This is a tall order indeed and from my previous experience in the MPITE team, likely to fail. This is backed by studies that has been done on ICT integration in education. The change in the teaching paradigm must come first before you bring ICT into the picture. So again does ICT solve this problem which is essentially a problem of pedagogy which can be corrected without ICT coming into play?

There is a more insidious reason why ICT is promoted. The introduction of ICT purportedly for education is used by schools as kind of benchmark about the quality of schools. This is true of schools both in and out of Singapore. If schools have a large number of ICT equipment, then the schools are seen as progressive and good.  The availability of ICT equipment is seen as part of the “international standard” of the schools. Often as mentioned above, little thought is given to its proper use that leads to meaningful learning. ICT is therefore used a mere marketing tool for gullible parents. I have highlighted other examples of such inane use of ICT in schools before in my blog. Singapore has benefited in this way. Foreigners are impressed by the breathtaking array of ICT-related equipment in a typical Singapore school. Without a doubt this is also one reason why Singapore’s education system is highly regarded. It solves the Singapore government’s need to promote Singapore as an education hub. In a similar light, private school owners in countries elsewhere in the world, also introduced ICT to change the prestige attached to their schools.

In short, there is no need to think that ICT is required to teach students to “learn, unlearn and relearn”. It is not even true that it will make that goal easier. Too often, when we try to answer the first of Postman’s questions about the use of technology, we find that we have not thought through carefully what is the problem that ICT is meant to solve, especially in the light of how it is envisaged that ICT is to be used in schools for education. Perhaps, I should end this post with what Alan Kay, considered to be the Father of the PC, has to say about how ICT is used in schools:

“But I think the big problem is that schools have very few ideas about what to do with the computers once the kids have them. It’s basically just tokenism, and schools just won’t face up to what the actual problems of education are, whether you have technology or not.
Think about it: How many books do schools have—and how well are children doing at reading? How many pencils do schools have—and how well are kids doing at math? It’s like missing the difference between music and instruments. You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won’t give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.
On the other hand, if you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don’t need musical instruments, because the kids can sing and dance. But if you don’t have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that.
The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas….”

~ from “face to face: Alan Kay Still Waiting for the Revolution (See here for full interview)

In my last post, “ICT: FutureSchools@Singapore, the MOE and the Amish”, I wondered about our tendency to “unleash” technology on society, and schools in particular. Marshall McLuhan was talking about this way back then in the 1960s.

McLuhan theorized that technology can have an effect on us because technology has that ability to “extend” or “amputate” our abilities. When McLuhan said that the “medium is the message (or massage)” he meant controversially that the medium in which we function will determine what we learn and not the content. One wonders if McLuhan is still around what he would say to the immersive virtual environments that students in Singapore will be experiencing in school soon. What abilities of ours will be extended in such environments? What abilities would be amputated?

McLuhan’s views was somewhat preceded by John Dewey. But it seems that this view is preceded by the Amish. Mcluhan espoused his views in the groovy, colourful era of the 1960s but the far from colourful Amish seems to have been asking this question as a basis for their community’s development far longer.

Several years ago, I found this article, “Look Who’s Talking”, on WIRED, by the web visionary, Howard Rheingold. Recently I revisited the article and I still think it makes for fascinating reading. What strikes me most about the article is that here is a web visionary, perhaps the first man to coin the term “web communities”, talking about a group of people who are often seen to be modern-day Luddites (which they are not). Rheingold is fascinated with how the Amish leaders’ approach to deciding what technology is to be used by the community.

What Rheingold discovered then was that the Amish were not anti-technology but they were very mindful of the impact of technology on their community especially with regards to their “togetherness”. According to Rheingold, the primary question that the Amish leaders ask when discussing the use of a new technology in the Amish communities is “Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?” To the Amish community, nothing must damage this principle. So in the Amish communities you see brand new state-of-the-art gas-fired barbecue pits but no cars or internet. Barbecue pits goes down well with the Amish because it encourages family and community togetherness while cars will lead members further away.

When Rheingold started to find out about the Amish use of technology he had a few questions in mind. He wanted to know:

What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance (of new technology), as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?

I think the questions above are valid for most modern societies, like Singapore too, that have been enthralled by science. Rheingold’s questions has me taking another look at how Singapore has been approaching the issue of ICT use for education. I would be the first to admit that I am an unabash proponent of the use of ICT for education. Of course, Rheingold’s questions goes beyond schools only. But after reading about the new ICT initiative, FutureSchool@Singapore, by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore, about using new technologies to help students learn, I wonder often if we are moving “ahead” without deep thought about how these technologies are going to affect us, more specifically, the students in Singapore schools. Technology is often “unleashed” upon us. We are expected to be technology-conversant but we seldom seriously conduct conversations about our use of technologies. As Rheingold puts it:

I never expected the Amish to provide precise philosophical yardsticks that could guide the use of technological power. What drew me in was their long conversation with their tools. We technology-enmeshed “English” (the Amish description of the non-Amish American world) don’t have much of this sort of discussion. And yet we’ll need many such conversations, because a modern heterogeneous society is going to have different values, different trade-offs, and different discourses. It’s time we start talking about the most important influence on our lives today.

I came away from my journey with a question to contribute to these conversations: If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?

Today, we just hurry to get enmeshed. Are we behaving Borg-like and just assimilate everything that we come across? Are we also in too much in a hurry with adopting technologies for education without considering their real impact? What do we become if we continue with this Borg-like behavior?