EdTech inspiration

Here's one of the great truths of EdTech: Nobody learns at a distance; everyone learns right where they are. This is also its greatest challenge. Here's why.

In order to learn, every individual needs to fit each new piece of information into their own base of knowledge, experiences, and assumptions. Maybe for a second grade class there's not a wide range of difference one student to the next (though I would never suggest that to a second grade teacher). But by the time someone hits college age, the variables of environment, culture, worldview, language, learning preferences, and all the emotional tags and triggers picked up just living life, can create dramatically different internal landscapes. 

Here's a visual of the problem.

Think of each new piece of information as a cog that a teacher hands out, saying, "Here, fit this into your internal gears and you will gain effectiveness and efficiency." The cog is the same for all, but the gearboxes are all different. The more experience a learner has, the more complex the gearbox will be. 

Now, exclude technology from this cog-nitive (sorry) process, and what do you have? Human beings interacting. People banding together, asking, suggesting, researching, comparing notes, trying things out, each one making the cog fit their own gears while supporting others as they do the same. All humanity learned everything this way until the second half of the 20th century. And then we introduced technology. 

Delivery tech, assessment tech, development tech, communications tech, data storage and reporting tech. Pick any of them and ask, does it help individuals add cogs to their gearboxes? How does it help? How much does it help? If it ignores the millions of possible variations in people's internal landscapes, then it does not help. And the closer a technology gets to the actual teaching and learning process, the more harm ignoring learner differences can do.

Now, you may think all this is leading up to the conclusion that Artificial Intelligence will be the great equalizer, the leveler of all playing fields, the mass personalization tech to end all mass personlization techs. That case can be made, but I'm not going to make it here. I'm not an AI evangelist. But I am a meaning evangelist. Tech or no tech, at the end of the day people want their cogs and their gearboxes to mean something. 

What are learners doing when they accept cogs and ask questions and piece it all together? What is the point? The goal may look like a GPA or a passed exam or approval from some governing body, but those are only markers, milestones. What learners are actually doing is building a life, a career, a future, cog by cog, brick by brick, hope by hope. Back when people could only gather in rooms to learn, this key ingredient was baked in, breathed in, rarely called out. It didn't have to be because it was obvious. It's what makes education the only product for sale in the world that actually changes a person's identity, no matter what the ad execs try to tell us. With EdTech, it's possible to ignore this ingredient. But if we ignore it, we lose our own foundation. What is missing in EdTech today is, simply put, inspiration. 

When students are inspired, they are motivated, and when they are motivated, they will find ways to make whatever technology we offer them work to their own ends. They will take ownership. We need to provide not only opportunities to learn and technologies by which to learn, but reasons to learn. Those reasons are not going to come out of an artificial neural network. They can only come from human neural networks directly connected to human hearts. Technologies assist, and guide, and simplify, and sometimes even wow. But teachers inspire. Let's build on that. Let's build that in.