Stephen Holley - Blog post Week 4 and 5

1. “Computers
hate me.”
(Anonymous)
A presentation by Stephen Holley

2. How it begins.
I will be exploring the interconnected relationship between Teachers, Learners and
Digital Technologies (EdTech) that are applied to learning environments.
I will attempt to take a balanced view that explores the notion from different positions:
- A post-humanist entanglement of EdTech and human actors (Bayne, 2015)
- A central humanistic teacher led position that provides a framework to teaching and
learning (Biesta, 2012)
- A guarded approach to the onset of EdTEch in educational settings surrounding the
COVID 19 pandemic (Facer & Selwyn, 2021)

3. EdTech: Friend or Foe?
The suggestion of EdTech tools such as TeacherBot (Bayne,
2015) becoming a more ubiquitous part of educational
settings raise a few concerns for me. If the way in which
people in my household (including me!) speak to our
Amazon Echo when Alexa gets things wrong is to go by,
seeing non-human actors as anything but digital servants is
a barrier that needs to be considered.
Here I am drawn to the idea of ‘ontological designing’
(Flores, Cited Bayne, 2015 p.457), that seeks to apply
technological worlds designed by humans as being the very
things that provide humanity. With this perceived synergy
of human and non-human objects influencing educational
settings in a post-humanist (2015) fashion can we really
expect positive teaching and learning outcomes to be
produced through EdTech tools that may be on the receiving
end of very human like treatment if ‘they’ don’t meet our
required expectations? Perhaps instead of students and
pupils seeking to pull the wool over the eyes of their
teachers, they will seek to manipulate and hack their
autonomous digital TeacherBots.

4. To be a teacher or not
Some of my best teachers were not teachers at all and some of my most treasured
learning was not in school. Whether it was family holidays to Italy visiting historic
locations or spending time dismantling a broken computer to see what was inside,
these learning moments were moments of learning through not seeking learning.
Biesta’s observes that conservative education settings are not to “… learn, but …
learn something … for particular purposes …” (p.36, 2012). With the constant
pressure of working towards qualifications, milestones and measured outcomes.
Are we seeing the erosion of learning to learn? Biesta explores this further when
applying the concept of “learnification” (Biesta 2010a, cited Biesta, 2012, p.37), in
that teachers are seeing a shift towards being facilitators of learning from the “…
sideline …” (P.38). But sideline by whom or what? Is the insistence on using EdTech
somehow eroding what it is to be a teacher?
The notion of being a facilitator of learning providing meaningful learning
encounters for my learners is an appealing prospect, in the same way that Socrates
claimed he did not have anything to teach but would rather extract “… what was
already there.” (Biesta, 2012, p.40). In practice this does entail an element of
students having to unlearn in order to learn, are they equipped with the skills to do
so?

5. A case Study: Project play
Project Play was a bi-weekly timetabled session my department implemented alongside
out students' formal lessons. Students could ‘play’ with any tech-based project they
wanted (within a set budget), some opted to experiment with Raspberry Pi
minicomputers, others sort to reprogram radio-controlled toys for different uses and
one group wanted to send a Buzz Lightyear toy up with a weather balloon. The goal was
to learn through play and with no learning outcomes or assessment attached at all.
What transpired, purely from an observational perspective. Was an initial thriving of
engagement and planning by the students, with many projects starting. This positive
start soon unraveled when the students started asking questions like ‘Does this
contribute to my grade?’, ‘Do I have to attend if its not real lessons?’ and ‘Do I need this
to pass my course?’
Ultimately the project fizzled out when the students voted with their feet. It seems that
they had become conditioned to think about an outcome and not the process. Its
almost as if outcomes are in no way linked to learning at all, just turn up and do the
work that gets you a certificate. Here I am drawn to the concept of gift of teaching and
the we “… cannot force the gift upon … students. (Biesta, 2012, p.42) and vice versa.
Whilst I didn’t take the outcome personally, reflecting on the project does lead me to
think about how traditional teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools may
need to shift away from outcome driven teaching and learning.

6. Deprofessionalisation Reprofessionalisation
A convincing critique is presented by Facer and Selwyn (2021) in response to a kind false enlightenment being offered by EdTech. Suggestion
that the actual gains or improvements to teaching and learning are not yet there for all, especially in terms of equity and equality. For me, I
see this as a round peg square hole scenario, in that if we continue to try to hammer traditional teaching and learning metrics with
traditionally trained teachers into a Digital Eco System, the results are likely to not 'fit' with either traditional or new expected outcomes.
So perhaps a re-imagining of how teachers are trained and what their role entails could support a less bumpy disruption of teaching and
learning through EdTech. The authors suggested "...an era of deprofessionalisation" (p.14) and "...tools to displace teachers..." (p.15). But I
can't help but see this as ‘re-professionalisation’ and the ‘embedding’ of teachers within EdTech processes.
I found the section on EdTech promises interesting. The pandemic certainly created a sense of haste and a scramble for many to find “top-
down solutions” (p.10). But I feel that this accelerationist mindset is slightly misleading. The core of teaching and learning in my opinion is the
students, then their teachers and then (among others!) technology resources. So perhaps a bottom-up approach, born out of a re-
consideration of teacher training and pedagogy from early years onwards could be considered? This is maybe where EdTech disruption could
be redistributed, away from the sales patter of for profit EdTech corporations whispering in the ears of Senior Educational Leaders and into the
hands of re-professionalised Teachers with confident levels of EdTech agency and their learners emerging from established Digital Education
and learning experiences instead of being thrown into them without the right tools.

7. This is the
End.
In this presentation my intention was to lightly consider an academic
assortment of interrelated positions on the disruption of teaching and
learning through the lens of Teachers and their Technological environments.
To answer my question on whether EdTech is friend of foe, I think there is a
long way to go for many educators to consider a TeacherBot as an equal or a
colleague. To humanize something that is all to easy to dehumanize by
humans is a huge barrier to being effectively used by both students and
educators.
Whether this means we need to re-think the role of teachers remains to be
seen, there is a strong argument for this space being disrupted in the here
and now. With the role of teachers accelerating towards being mentors,
coaches and facilitators. We have had to adapt and adopt on the fly in
response to the pandemic. However, we might see this reactive response
begin to unravel as society seeks to force a ‘back to normal’ as quickly as
possible.
So, are teachers here to stay? I think they are, but we are going to need to
re-think how we embed new ways of working with EdTech and accept that
our pupils and students will need a pedagogy that embeds new ways of
digital learning from the very beginning. We can no longer expect the same
results delivered in the same way. Too much has happened in the last two
years for us to start going backwards.

8. References
Bayne S. (2015). Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching.
Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), pp. 455-467.
Biesta, G. (2012). Giving teaching back to education: responding to the
disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), pp. 35-
49.
Facer, K., & Selwyn, N. (2021). Digital Technology and the Futures of
Education: Towards ‘Non-Stupid’ Optimism.