When Tech Makes Educational Decisions

"The internet is a bad place. Young people really shouldn't use it at all."

The speaker was not some cranky parent or enraged luddite. It was the guy in charge of maintaining the network in my high school. In other words, the guy responsible for making sure it was possible for our students to access the internet. This was many years ago, but it slapped me upside the head with the realization that thanks to technology, a lot of educational choices were being made by folks who were not actually educators.

Okay, maybe we shouldn't have let him drive...

Plenty of teachers remember the worst of the early days of school internet connections. Inadequate infrastructure and bandwidth because nobody in IT actually asked teachers what they thought they would do with the internet once it was hooked up. Clunky hardware running crappy software that had been purchased without talking to any classroom teachers. And when teachers were consulted, it largely took the form of, "This is what we're going to do unless you convince us it's a terrible idea in the next day or two." (Note that this approach does not allow for the possibility that it's a mediocre idea and that many better ones exist.)

Oh, and internet access. Schools and their IT departments were afraid of the dark corners that students would wander into, and the various tech grants required filtering. So in many locations, the default was that pretty much everything on the internet was blocked unless someone in IT decided that there was a good reason for teachers to have access to a particular site. Teachers may have been given access to a form that would allow them to make their case.

Conditions improved, but the tension between teachers and techs is probably destined to be eternal. In my school, teachers initiated adoption of Moodle as a learning platform, but after a few years the tech department determined that it was too expensive and troublesome to maintain, so we switched to something that came bundled with the security service.

The tide can be tuned in positive directions, including opening up the internet much further to staff use. And in fairness, classroom teachers can drive IT folks up the wall, too (we could talk about my colleague who couldn't figure out why her computer was slowing down after she filled her entire hard drive with cross-stitch patterns, or the time I set off an alert by accidentally turning up a bunch of search returns loaded with obscene images). The solution is often more surveillance (in house, not the usual corporate data mining that comes with every software product, which is its own area of concern, though it can also be a chance for students to learn two important digital safety rules-- nothing you do on line is private, and nothing you "erase" is ever gone. At any rate, IT folks have legitimate concerns and priorities-- they just don't always match up with educational ones.

Every school district should have a system in place for the tech folks to get feedback and direction from the teaching staff, and no, some sort of form that allows teachers to humbly request favors from the tech department doesn't count.

I have been thinking about all of this as the current coronavirus pandemic shuts down schools and millions of students are thrown onto on-line schooling. How many learning platforms, software packages, content sets, and other techy details of education are, at this moment, being chosen and controlled by non-educators? How many teachers are finding that their hands are tied by the folks who run their school's IT department?

This is, of course, the smaller local version of the national argument that has been raging since education reform was a tiny glint in Bill Gates' eye. Silicon Valley has a real problem with knowing what they don't know. Witness this tweet from this morning:

please, tech people. PLEASE. if you dont have a background working in healthcare/medicine, stop the hackathons and just give money.

the potential to do harm is too high, and designing for medicine is a thing. health communication/tooling is a specialty, not a weekend project.

Ed tech is one of those areas where I wish teachers were less shy about asserting their expertise, more willing to say, "I'm the professional expert here, and you need to listen to what I have to tell you about this program, or there's no point in our talking." I really hope that as schools migrate on line for the next few days/weeks/months, teachers speak up and say things like "I need the program to do X; please, make that happen for me" instead of "Well, okay, this isn't really what I want or need, but I guess I'll find a way to work with it." It's a great thing that US teachers are adaptable and accommodating--that's how we've managed to get the work done over the years. But we have often been too accommodating to amateurs who want to sit in the driver's seat when they've never driven before.

Education decisions should be made by the education professionals, not the tech department. With rare exception, they don't have the training or experience for it, and their main concerns are not education concerns. They have no more business deciding what tools teachers should have for teaching than teachers have telling them how to run a 150-unit computer network smoothly. Teachers, insist on speaking up.