The impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on public education systems around the world has been profound. It has accelerated issues of inequity, amplified mental health challenges and highlighted the promises (and perils) of technology across societies.

In many ways the COVID-19 pandemic is a rapid accelerator of the chronic issues we have faced pre-pandemic in many of our public schools. As we are about to confront the psychological, social & economic fallout during the recovery phase of the pandemic, expected to be from 2022 to 2024, we will be contending with the acute challenges on chronic issues. A place where hope is perhaps difficult to find, and a challenge to maintain with the scale of change, volatility, ambiguity and uncertainty from what will certainly be more complexities across our societal landscape over the next decade.  
 
Feeling Hopeless
As part of an ongoing exploration into what teachers and school leaders are experiencing throughout the province of Alberta, I designed a rapid response feedback tool known as a ‘pandemic pulse survey’ for the profession of teaching. This collection of research studies are the only systematic documentation of the conditions and experiences of Alberta's K to 12 public schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as such form an important part of the historic record. Within the different instruments we gathered large data sets on our colleagues’ perspectives on hope.
 
In the most recent ATA pandemic rapid research studies (spring and fall 2021), using random stratified sampling of several thousand professionals, we found that fifty four percent (54%) of Alberta teachers and school leaders identified that they felt hopeless (Alberta Teachers’ Association, 2021). This is a stunning and deeply concerning revelation, and one that has garnered serious attention.
 
Hope is Essential
Hope is essential to the profession of teaching, indeed education itself. Without hope we have difficulty seeing (imagining) the future; which is why teachers teach. To be hopeful in education, we have to imagine the treasured moments in our professional lives and then try and bend the arc of the Universe towards them like a directional beacon. While ‘hope floats’, it does need a lighthouse to navigate the often-stormy seas and darker waters of life. We all navigate significant challenges in the course of our vocation (think emergency remote teaching), but hope must become our ally, with resiliency as the means to bend the arc.
 
Of particular concern as we move into a recovery phase from this global pandemic will be to establish a new declaration of hope for our Alberta K-12 schools, and in doing so draw on individual and collective resiliency that will make hope the new contagion that may spread across our schools as a social epidemic. Think of it as hope as contagion.
 
Hope as Contagion
There are now several research studies that document social contagions, like hope or happiness. For example, Dr. Nicholas Christakis and Dr. James Fowler (2008), analyzed data gathered between the years 1983 and 2003 across nearly 5,000 individuals, which assessed happiness by asking people to respond to statements like “I felt hopeful about the future” and “I was happy.”

What these researchers discovered across more than 53,000 social and family ties was fascinating.
 
When a person in this study reported being happy, then their spouse had an eight per cent chance of becoming happy, with the effects lasting up to one year. The data further showed that the brothers and sisters of a happy sibling had a 14 per cent increased chance of virally catching the happiness bug. Further afield, friends of a happy person living up to a mile away increased their chance of becoming happy by 25 per cent, with next-door neighbours being the beneficiaries of a 34 per cent increased chance of becoming happy. This study also found that while having more friends certainly increased happiness, it was more important to have happy friends who were key influencers of the social network’s happiness.
 
The exact same contagion is needed for hope, where we have the potential as teachers to influence others up to three degrees of separation—a friend of a friend of a friend—and therefore positively impact people with hopefulness that you may have never met in the post pandemic world. In schools this means that the viral spread of hope become a collective and rapidly spreading phenomenon and presents our schools as sites of opportunity to unlock a wider community’s chances of recovery and building resiliency post-pandemic.

References
Alberta Teachers’ Association (2021). Reporting on the Third Acute Wave of
COVID-19 in Alberta K-12 Schools (Spring 2021). https://www.teachers.ab.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/ATA/News%20and%20Info/Issues/COVID-19/Reporting-on-the-Third-Acute-Wave-of-COVID-19-in-Alberta-Schools-Spring-2021.pdf (accessed November 1, 2021).
 
Boyles, S. 2008. Happiness is Contagious: Social Networks Affect Mood, Study Shows. WebMD website. https://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20081204/happiness-is-contagious#1 (accessed November 1, 2021).
 
Fowler J., and N. Christakis. 2008. “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study.” British Medical Journal 337: a2338. https://www.bmj.com/content/337/bmj.a2338.full (accessed November 1, 2021).
 
Hope Studies Central. 2021. Hope-Lit Database. http://www.hope-lit.ualberta.ca/Hope-LitDatabase.html (accessed November 1, 2021).

Read the latest updates and key findings from the world's largest research study on technology, health and learning (with a short summary of Phase I results).

To better understand the scope of physical, mental and social consequences of digital technologies in areas such as exercise, homework, identity formation, distraction, cognition, learning, technology compulsions, nutrition and sleep habits, researchers from the Alberta Teachers’ Association, the University of Alberta, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have been working on a long-term collaborative initiative entitled Growing Up Digital (GUD) Alberta.

The first phase of the GUD Alberta research initiative, conducted in 2016, explored teachers’ and principals’ perspectives around technology, health and learning, and highlighted the paradox of technology both enhancing and distracting learning.

The second phase of GUD Alberta engaged more than 3,500 Alberta parents and grandparents with detailed questions about the impact of technology on their own children and grandchildren. This survey, completed this year, represents the largest sample in North America, and perhaps the world, on parent and grandparent perspectives around technology, health and learning.

The third phase (2018/2019) will directly involve Alberta students across the province between the ages of 12 and 17 and attempt to better understand the impact of emerging technologies as it relates to their knowledge, lifestyles, learning and overall health and wellbeing using an innovative research method developed at Harvard School of Public Health by Dr. Michael Rich called “Measurement of Youth Media Exposure and Health Outcomes” (MYME). Here students will receive a random signal via smartphone and be asked to complete daily surveys, a 15-second video of their surroundings, and twice a week complete a time-use diary of their daily use of media related activities and how much time they spent that day participating in each activity.

To find out in more detail regarding what we are learning from Phases I and II, you can find infographics from the GUD Alberta research completed to date, along with keynote presentation videos, research powerpoints and a variety of other Association resources at Promise and Peril Research Index.

Phases I (2016) Key Findings
Phase I, completed in 2016, gathered a stratified random sample of 2,200 teachers and principals from across Alberta who identify baseline issues and essential research questions. The data from Phase I clearly shows that teachers and principals in Alberta hold strong perspectives around the impact of digital technologies on children and youth’s health, development and learning.

Overall, teachers report that digital technologies enhance their teaching and learning activities, with inquiry-based learning (71%) being the area of greatest enrichment. However, when surveyed on issues related to health and well-being outcomes, Alberta teachers indicated that there has been a dramatic change in their student populations over the past 3 to 5 years. Of particular note is the “somewhat” and “significant” increase in the number of students who demonstrate the following exceptionalities: emotional challenges (90%), social challenges (86%), behaviour support (85%) and cognitive challenges (77%). This data clearly illustrates a dramatic change in the complexity of the student population in Alberta.

In terms of media use, 76% of teachers “frequently” and “very frequently” observed students multitasking with digital technologies. Of particular note is that a majority (67%) of teachers from this stratified random sample believe that digital technologies are a growing distraction in the learning environment. Those who believe students are negatively distracted by technology state the degree as “very many” (48%) and “almost all” (11%) students. Further, when asked to reflect on their personal use of digital technologies, 62% of teachers feel that they themselves are also “somewhat” (75%) or to a “great extent” (14%) negatively distracted.

Generally teachers and principals perceive that Alberta students’ readiness to learn has been in steady decline. There is a strong sense among a majority of teaching professionals within this sample that over the past 3-5 years students across all grades are increasingly having a more difficult time focusing on educational tasks (76%), are coming to school tired (66%), and are less able to bounce back from adversity (ie lacking resilience) (62%). Concurrent to this, 44% of teachers note a decrease in student empathy, and over half of the sample (56%), reported an increase in the number of students who have discussed with them incidents of online harassment and/or cyberbullying.

When asked how the number of students with “diagnosed” health issues has changed in their classrooms, the following three conditions were reported by a majority of teachers to have increased: anxiety disorders (85%), Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (75%), and mood disorders such as depression (73%).
While many complex forces will be shaping these student health outcomes, the extent to which technology is one of them is of significant interest to the survey participants. Below are some representative samples of the several thousand questions and comments submitted to this survey.

Phases II (2018)
This phase of the research was designed to investigate within the home environment perceptions from Alberta parents, guardians and grandparents the scope of physical, mental and social consequences of digital technologies on children and youth. Also in this survey was a benchmark of how parents perceive the impact of digital technologies on their children’s reading, speaking, math, social skills, behaviour, emotional health, and levels of anxiety.
This research assessed the impact of digital technologies on learning and parenting practices at home and further informed the patterns already identified in GUD research Phase I that explored changes in classrooms and school communities over the past 3 to 5 years (enhancing/distracting; connecting/disconnecting).
Some of the highlights from this new 2018 GUD Alberta research related specifically to perceptions of distraction and digital addiction are below.

Technology Use at Home
- 85% of parents believe that technology makes it easier to stay in touch with friends and family.
- 62% of parents feel negatively distracted by digital technologies, and three quarters of them recognize that their technology habits influence those of their children.
- 45% of parents report that their children have a mobile device with them everynight after bed time; 41% of parents state their children never do.  These data show the polarization in terms of whether children have their phones with them at night (nocturnal screen time).
- 60% of parents in this survey indicate that their child’s use of digital technologies has a mostly negative impact on physical activity; 37% suggest it has a negative impact on emotional health; 30% suggest it has a negative impact on anxiety

In the Classroom
- 26% of parents believe their child’s use of technology at school is “too much”, with 68% of parents feeling the amount of time their children are using digital technology at school is “about right”.
-39% of parents indicate that their child’s use of digital technologies has a mostly positive impact on reading skills; 37% suggest it has a positive effect on math skills.

Digital Distraction to Digital Addiction?
- 30% of parents feel "addicted" to their own digital technologies with social media as the area of greatest dependence.
- 22% of parents believe their child is addicted to digital technology with video and video games being the areas of greatest dependence; 11% are unsure.
While the grandparents represented a smaller subset of the respondents (500+), their responses were very similar to those of parents, but reported greater concerns about what they perceive is happening to their grandchildren.  For example, 36% of the grandparents in this study feel their grandchild is "addicted" to digital technologies.  The grandparents are especially concerned about the social/emotional impacts and the impacts on how their grandchildren are learning to socialize with others.

Read the latest edition of The Learning Team focused on the attention economy and some of the research around distraction in a digitally saturated age. You can find the full special edition here and read my editorial below.

I have been thinking recently about what 'assurance' for a K-12 education system really means. To what extent is public assurance achieved when a system has a high level of confidence (high trust) in an environment of low standardization? Alternatively, is the public (or an individual) assured only if an education system is defined by high levels of standardization (low trust)?

As I reflect on this issue, I consider the differences between standards and standardization, impact of trust (public confidence) on assurance, the importance of equity within a society (excellent education systems achieved through equity), what is accepted as evidence (measuring what matters) and the difference between accountability (ability to count) and the need for teachers and principals to have the ability to respond (responsibility) within more complex and diverse communities. 

To pull this all together, I am developing my thinking around a conceptual matrix on system assurance that places the notions of trust and standards on a continuum. What you find below is an early draft conceptual model to frame discussions of assurance, all of which tackles the fundamental issue of advancing high professional standards, without a narrow 'standardization'.

Which quadrant on the matrix fits with the responses to the questions below:

Is the public (or an individual) assured that their K-12 education system is of high quality only if it is defined by high levels of standardization (low trust)?

Is the public (or an individual) assured that their K-12 education system is of high quality only if it is defined by low levels of standardization (high trust)?

The additional layers of my thinking in the second matrix on assurance begins to probe how issues of professional judgement/autonomy, teacher confidence/competence or even equity might result in a particular position within the matrix.  For example, low perceived competence often leads to low trust and thus a desire for higher standardization (think scripted curriculum for non-certificated teachers).

I am also intellectually playing with the idea of framing system assurance in the same light as assessment for/of learning. It might help explain why one conversation I have on 'assurance of the system's excellence' elicits OECD-PISA results, while another conversation on 'assurance for the system's excellence' might focus on teacher assessment capacity building or a myriad of other time intensive resources/supports needed to reach high trust, low standardized spaces of system assurance.

The more complex conceptual model above also starts to push out diagonally in terms of increased complexity or simplicity, greater diversity (in all its manifest forms) vs polarization(s).  There are endless comparators that could be thrown into this continuum:
(Big) Data (small)
(short) Time (long)

Your thoughts?

As co-principal investigator on this longitudinal research project it is my great fortune to be working with world-renowned colleagues from Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health (Dr. Michael Rich), the University of Alberta (Dr. Stanley Varhagen and Dr. Jason Daniels), and Boston Children’s Hospital (Dr. David Bickham).  This collaborative initiative has been named Growing Up Digital (GUD) Alberta, and is attempting to to better understand the scope of physical, mental and social consequences of digital technologies in areas such as exercise, homework, identity formation, distraction, cognition, learning, nutrition, and sleep quality and quantity. 

Growing Up Digital (GUD) Alberta - Teacher/Principal Survey (2015)
In December 2015, a stratified random sample of 3,600 teachers and principals from across Alberta were invited to participate in a GUD survey.  This request resulted in over 2, 200 participants and generated a sample that is highly representative of Alberta’s teaching population and corresponds closely to the profession’s demographics.
 
The purpose of this initial survey was to identify baseline issues and essential research questions from teachers, principals and system leaders from across the Alberta education system.  To explore the correlations between the health outcomes as reported in this survey, and technology use in students’ lives, will be the manifest work of the GUD project over time. For example, to what extent is there a correlation between students coming to school tired or anxious/depressed and (nocturnal) screen-time?

Key Findings
The data from this survey clearly shows that teachers in Alberta hold strong perspectives around the impact of digital technologies on children and youth’s health, development and learning.
 
Overall, teachers report that digital technologies enhance their teaching and learning activities, with inquiry-based learning (71%) being the area of greatest enrichment. The most common instructional uses of digital technologies on a weekly basis are to provide access to a variety of learning resources (79%), to enable communication with parents (79%), and to differentiate resources and materials to support students who have a variety of learning needs (69%).

In terms of media use, 43% of teachers “frequently” and 33% “very frequently” observe students multitasking with digital technologies. Of particular note is that a majority (67%) of teachers from this stratified random sample believe that digital technologies are a growing distraction in the learning environment.  Those who believe students are negatively distracted by technology state the degree as “very many” (48%) and “almost all” (11%) students. Further, when asked to reflect on their personal use of digital technologies, 62% of teachers feel that they themselves are also “somewhat” (75%) or to a “great extent” (14%) negatively distracted. 
 
Research around digital technologies and media use taking time away from human relationships is an active field of inquiry within the health and social sciences. Of particular interest is emerging research relating to fragmented attention (or unpredictable care) during sensitive developmental periods and the resulting impact on brain development that may lead to emotional problems later in life.

Generally teachers and principals perceive that Alberta students’ readiness to learn has been in steady decline. There is a strong sense among a majority of teaching professionals within this sample that over the past 3-5 years students across all grades are increasingly having a more difficult time focusing on educational tasks (76%), are coming to school tired (66%), and are less able to bounce back from adversity (ie lacking resilience) (62%). Concurrent to this, 44% of teachers note a decrease in student empathy, and over half of the sample (56%), reported an increase in the number of students who have discussed with them incidents of online harassment and/or cyberbullying.

When surveyed on issues related to health and well-being outcomes, Alberta teachers indicated that there has been a dramatic change in their student populations over the past 3 to 5 years.  Of particular note is the “somewhat” and “significant” increase in the number of students who demonstrate the following exceptionalities: emotional challenges (90%), social challenges (86%), behaviour support (85%) and cognitive challenges (77%). This data clearly illustrates a dramatic change in the complexity of the student population in Alberta.

When asked how the number of students with “diagnosed” health issues has changed in their classrooms, the following three conditions were reported by a majority of teachers to have increased: anxiety disorders (85%), Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (75%), and mood disorders such as depression (73%).

While many complex forces will be shaping these student health outcomes, the extent to which technology is one of them is of significant interest to the survey participants.  Below are some representative samples of the several thousand questions and comments submitted to this survey.
 
 “Is technology having a negative effect on life balance for students? Is time that should be spent socializing, in activity, reading, sleeping etc. reduced as students increase screen time? Is there a relationship between screen time and student social capacity?”
 
“Is brain activity and cognitive functioning enhanced, decreased or neutral when digital technology is used? And does this vary by the age of the child?”
 
“In my role as a high school admin [principal], I see how many kids are ‘ruled’ by their use of technology. I also see how technology is used for bullying purposes regularly. If this is our reality, then why is the push for technology in schools increasing? How do we adequately support kids who are addicted to technology to the point where it rules their lives?”
 
“Are digital technologies contributing to students' inability to focus for long periods of time?”
 
“Do you believe that using technology is addictive?”
 
“Do children have more difficulty playing and interacting than they did before?”
 
“To what extent are parents monitoring student use of technology? At what age did students begin using technology in the home?”

“Is a student's increasing online presence decreasing real world satisfaction and positive peer-to peer interaction?”
 
“I am concerned about children's growing deficits in understanding non-verbal communication cues during in-person conversations.”
 
 “Do personal electronic devices prevent normal development of social skills (including resiliency)?”

As editor of The Learning Team (a publication that goes out to 25 000 Alberta parents), I have focused the next edition exclusively on the importance and benefits of “play”. 

The articles in this new collection have been drawn together to explore the relationship between play (both free and guided) and learning, and indeed how we can encourage more outdoor play or create welcoming indoor play spaces for children.

Other articles in this November 2015 edition represent unique contributions on play from world renowned Harvard scholars that have just completed a major research study for Hasbro on the topic of play.

To frame this entire collection, below are some of my own perspectives on how “free play” can powerfully (re)shape our considerations of human learning and development.

Free Play is Fun

Close your eyes and think back to a time when you were engaged in some kind of playful activity.  When I do this, what first comes to mind is how much fun it was to be fully immersed in the often spontaneous moments.  Play at its essence is really about having fun. It is also truly ‘free’ when there are no parents or guardians hovering alongside, coaches intervening, umpires adjudicating, teachers directing or rule books guiding the activity.

Dr. Rachel White (2012) outlined six distinct characteristics of play for children in her research summary “The Power of Play”, and in doing so provides some deeper insights to what defines play:

1.       Play is Pleasurable. Children must enjoy the activity or it is not play.

2.       Play is Intrinsically Motivated. Children engage in play simply for the satisfaction the behavior itself brings.

3.       Play is Process Oriented.  When children play, the means are more important than the ends.

4.       Play is Freely Chosen.  It is spontaneous and voluntary.  If a child is pressured [she/he] will likely not think of the activity as play.

5.       Play is Actively Engaged.  Players must be physically and/or mentally involved in the activity.

6.       Play is Non-Literal.  It involves make-believe.

According to White (2012), these six characteristics of play are to be found on a continuum.  The more of the above six conditions of (free) play that can be met, the more playful (and fun) the activity becomes for the child.

The lesson here is that as parents and guardians we need to remember that the manner in which children play may not be as we envision it should be; however, as the research would suggest, adults should let play be freely chosen, intrinsically motivated, actively engaged and often make-believe if we want it to be truly pleasurable for children.

Free Play is Learning

Play is learning. Many of life’s lessons are acquired through play, like problem solving strategies, getting along with others through negotiation, cooperation and compromise, or even the early sparks of creativity when a sock becomes a puppet or a stick becomes a magic wand recreating the world with whatever the mind can imagine. Play especially helps to nurture creativity in children and youth, so that they can meet the world inside and outside of school with their own unique curiosities and imagination.

White’s (2012) research summary also supports the notion that play is learning: “In the short and long term, play benefits cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development…When play is fun and child-directed, children are motivated to engage in opportunities to learn”. Whether you are a child, youth or adult, we learn how to be more resilient, flexible, persistent, and independent through play.  As Alberta Einstein identified, play is indeed the highest form of research. 

Some scientists even suggest that play builds better brains. Dr. Sergio Pellis, a researcher at the University of Lethbridge claims that the "experience of play changes the connections of the neurons at the front end of your brain…And without play experience, those neurons aren't changed” (NPR, 2014).

Yet, despite this knowledge of the impact of play on learning, far too seldom are the conversations in K-12 education about play and its ability to foster creativity, the arts, talent diversity, or interpersonal communicative competencies for children and youth. Unfortunately, as Sahlberg (2014) would suggest, the trajectory of education reform has for too long been sacrificing play for increased standardization, more frequent testing, competition, and an increasingly obsessive focus on the disciplines of science, technology and math.

Free Play is Under Siege

While we are aware of the clear benefits that develop from play, time for free play has been markedly reduced over the last three decades. Since the late 1970s, children have lost 12 hours per week of free time, including a 25% decrease in play and a 50% decrease in unstructured outdoor activities. (Juster et al., 2004). Albertans are working longer hours and families are spending less time with their children (Parkland Institute, 2012). Digital technologies, often sold as virtual tutors, have sadly becoming convenient digital baby rattles, and this has resulted in some dramatic consequences for childhood.

As Carl Honore (2008) says, “It is not just kids who are under pressure now; it’s parents too. We feel we have to push, polish and protect our offspring with superhuman zeal - or else we’re somehow falling down on the job. We start from the noble and natural instinct to do the best for our kids but end up going too far. Social and cultural pressure drives a lot of this”.  Hyper-parents are investing more time, money and energy in their offspring than in previous generations, and reducing time for play in order to focus on academics or skill development at younger ages may be seen as one more strategy to give offspring a competitive edge over the pack.

Early learning researchers are now asking if kindergarten is in fact becoming the new first grade as parents and policymakers look to start formal education at increasingly younger and younger ages. A 2015 working paper entitled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade” illustrates the concerns of a shift in early learning experiences to more academic pursuits at the expense of play. As stated in this paper: “accountability pressures have trickled down into the early elementary grades and that kindergarten today is characterized by a heightened focus on academic skills and a reduction in opportunities for play.” (Bassok, Latham, and Rorem, 2015, p. 1)

For parents, the reduction in play is also being reflected in the growth in the out of school tutoring movement and the intensification of childhood. It is estimated that one third of Alberta parents now pay for private tutors (Alberta Teachers’ Association, 2014). As the Canadian Council on Learning (2007) found in their national survey, “most parents who hire tutors (73%) estimate that their children's overall academic performance is in the A or B range”. This is a global obsession, and in 2010 74% of all South Korean students were engaged in some form of private after-school instruction, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year (Ripley, 2011).

Free Play is Essential

The Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC), which represents all of the provincial Education Ministers, does not intend to separate play from learning but in fact has endorsed brining it together with learning to promote creativity in our future generations of children and youth. As CMEC reminds us in their statement on play within this November edition, “it is considered to be so essential to healthy development that the United Nations has recognized it as a specific right for all children”.

Let’s pause in our increasingly distracted, full and busy lives and consider for a moment the power and importance of (free) play for our children and youth. Remember that play should be fun, it unquestionably contributes to learning, is increasingly being put under siege and will need collective attention if we want it to be universally recognized (and practiced) as an essential part of human development and learning. I hope you will have an opportunity to enjoy (and find useful) this November 2015 edition of The Learning Team.

References

Alberta Teachers’ Association (2014). Changing Landscapes: Shaping Our Preferred Future. Edmonton, AB: Barnett House. Retrieved from: http://www.teachers.ab.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/ATA/Publications/Albertas-Education-System/ChangingLandscapes_Reader_Web%20Nov%202013.pdf

Bassok, D., Latham, S. and Rorem, A. (2015). Working paper: Is kindergarten the new first grade? EdPolicyWorks, University of Virginia. VA: Charlottesville

Canadian Council on Learning (2007). Survey of Canadian Attitudes toward Learning: Canadian attitudes toward tutoring. Vancouver, BC: Canadian Council on Learning. Retrieved from: http://www.ccl-cca.ca/ccl/Reports/SCAL/2007Archive/SCALStructuredTutoring.html  

Juster, F.T., Ono, H., & Stafford, F. (2004). Changing times of American youth: 1981-2003. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Retrieved from: http://www.umich.edu/news/Releases/2004/Nov04/teen_time_report.pdf

NPR (2014). Scientists say child’s play builds better a brain. National Public Radio (NPR). Retrieved from: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/06/336361277/scientists-say-childs-play-helps-build-a-better-brain

Parkland Institute (2012). Family day on the treadmill: Alberta families at risk of too much stress. Edmonton, AB: Retrieved from: http://parklandinstitute.ca/research/summary/family_day_on_the_treadmill

Ripley, A. (2011 September 25). Teacher, leave those kids alone. Time Magazine. New York, NY: Time Inc. Retrieved from: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427,00.html

White, R. E. (2012). The power of play: A research summary on play and learning. Minnesota Children’s Museum. Retrieved from: https://www.mcm.org/uploads/MCMResearchSummary.pdf

Blended learning, where students’ face-to-face education is blended with Internet resources or online courses, has been gaining considerable attention in education reform circles. It has become entangled with the ambiguous notion of personalized learning and is being positioned as the new way to individualize learning in competency-based education systems.

Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and a key proponent of blended learning, claims that it is the “new model that is student-centric, highly personalized for each learner, and more productive, as it delivers dramatically better results at the same or lower cost” (Horn and Staker 2011, 13).

To what extent is this a new model of learning in a digital age? How are private corporations employing old rhetoric to advance new avenues into public education? Most importantly, is blended learning becoming yet another overhyped myth on the crowded road of technology-as-education-reform panacea?

ORIGINS OF A MYTH
Students blending the use of technology with face-to-face instruction as a means of collaborating and extending their learning experiences is not unusual, revolutionary or foreign to the average Canadian classroom. As a concept, blended learning is now almost two decades old, having been imported into K–12 education in the late 1990s from corporate education, business training firms and the post-secondary education sector. Although the precise origin is unclear, it has been suggested that an Atlanta-based computer training business coined the term in 1999 (Friesen 2012), as it announced the release of a new generation of online courses for adults that were to be blended with live instruction.

Many blended learning practices already fit well with a vast array of hybrid face-to-face and digital experiences that students encounter in K–12 schools, including distributed learning, distance learning, or e-learning. Dr. Norm Friesen, a key academic in this area, suggests that blended learning “designates the range of possibilities presented by combining Internet and digital media with established classroom forms that require the physical co-presence of teacher and students” (Friesen 2012). As this broad definition illustrates, it would be difficult to find any use of technology in education that does not easily fit into this boundary.

Despite this fluidity of meaning, different models of blended learning have taken shape. In particular, Staker and Horn (2012) have attempted to classify blended learning environments into four models: rotation, flex, self-blend and enriched virtual. These four combinations range from those that are more connected to people and brick-and-mortar buildings (rotation, flex) to contexts in which the students are primarily self-directed through online courses or platforms that “deliver” the curriculum (self-blend and enriched virtual). In the more self-directed models, teachers or non-certificated facilitators are conditional and only scheduled for support as deemed necessary.

Although many models have been implemented over the last 20 years, there is scant evidence of the success of blended learning. Out of 46 robust research studies conducted between 1996 and 2008, only five have focused on results for students in K–12 settings (Murphy et al. 2014). As a recent article in Education Week illustrates, when looking for strong evidence of success around this strategy for K–12 students, very little “definitive evidence” or few significant results can be directly attributed to blended learning (Sparks 2015).

HYPE
The current hype around blended learning models, especially in the United States, is that they bring to life personalized learning for each and every child. Personalized learning, as promoted under a new canopy of blended learning, is neither a pedagogic theory nor a coherent set of learning approaches, regardless of the proposed models. In fact, personalized learning is an idea struggling for an identity (McRae 2014, 2010). A description of personalization that’s tightly linked to technology-mediated individualization “anywhere, anytime” is premised on archaic ideas of teaching machines imagined early in the 20th century (McRae 2013).

Some blended learning rhetoric suggests that personalization is to be achieved through individualized self-paced computer programs (known as adaptive learning systems), combined with small-group instruction for students who have the most pressing academic needs. For those looking to specifically advance blended learning in times of severe economic constraints, a certificated teacher is optional.

Software companies selling their adaptive learning products boldly state that the “best personalized learning programs will give students millions of potential pathways to follow through curricula and end up with the desired result — true comprehension” (Green 2013). This is part of the myth of blended learning and is marketed using superficial math and reading software programs (adaptive learning systems) that make dubious claims of driving up scores on high-stakes tests. Corporate attempts to “standardize personalization” in this way are both ironic and absurd.

These adaptive learning systems (the new teaching machines) do not build more resilient, creative, entrepreneurial or empathetic citizens through their individualized, standardized, linear and mechanical software algorithms. On the contrary, they diminish the many opportunities for human relationships to flourish, which is a hallmark of high-quality learning environments.

One of the blended learning examples that has received perhaps the greatest attention is the “flipped classroom.” It is so named because it inverts classroom instruction during the day, so that students watch online video of lectures at home at their own pace, perhaps communicating with peers and teachers via online discussions in the evening, and spend their days doing homework in the classroom. Think of the popular media hype and mythical cure for math challenges sold to the public by the Khan Academy. There is nothing revolutionary or deeply engaging about pure lecture as a pedagogy, yet apparently adding hours of digitally distributed video each evening to a child’s life makes it so. In fact, research suggests that the use of this type of lecture recorded technology, as a primary approach to learning, can result in students falling behind in the curriculum (Gosper et al. 2008).

Many myths, when viewed up close, provide deep reflections of ourselves and society. Technologies in particular have amplified our North American desires for choice, flexibility and individualization, so it’s easy to be seduced by a vision of blended learning environments delivering only what we want, when and how we want it customized.

The marketing mantra from corporations as diverse as media conglomerates to banks is that of services at any time, in any place or at any pace. Many governments have in turn adopted this in an eagerness to reduce costs with businesslike customization and streamlined workforce productivity, all with the expectation that a flexible and blended education system will be more efficient and (cost) effective.

In the mythical space of blended learning, class sizes apparently no longer matter and new staffing patterns begin to emerge. The amount of time students spend in schools becomes irrelevant as brick-and-mortar structures fade away. However, this myth disregards the overwhelming parental desire and societal expectation that children and youth will gather together to learn in highly relational settings with knowledgeable and mindful professionals (teachers) who understand both the art and science of learning. As John F. Kennedy (1962) so eloquently stated: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

The U.S. Department of Education (2013) has clearly articulated a commitment to making blended learning come to life through nebulous ideas of competency-based systems and personalized learning.

“Transitioning away from seat time, in favor of a structure that creates flexibility, allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning. By enabling students to master skills at their own pace, competency-based learning systems help to save both time and money … make better use of technology, support new staffing patterns that utilize teacher skills and interests differently … Each of these presents an opportunity to achieve greater efficiency and increase productivity.”

The cost efficiency and effectiveness rhetoric must be given special attention as part of the myth of blended learning in competency based systems.

HARM
Schools and classrooms across North America are being subjected to economic volatility and severe constraints by reduced public education funding. Blended learning can be positioned as the vehicle to bring in third-party education providers to wipe out the expectations of small class sizes and certificated teachers in traditional classrooms. This idea is gaining momentum through a variety of U.S. virtual and charter schools that are radically reducing the numbers of teachers and executing increased class sizes under the banner of blended learning. As Michael Horn states when asked to give expert advice on blended learning models, “budget cuts and teacher shortages are an opportunity, not a threat” (Horn et al. 2014).

As school jurisdictions across the U.S. turn to online learning and blended models as a way to reallocate resources, the private providers are also advocating for “eradicating rules that restrict class size and student-teacher ratios” (Horn and Staker 2011, 13). To achieve this means lifting the rules around teacher certification so that schools can replace teachers at will with para-professionals or noncertificated individual learning specialists. As Christensen and Horn (2008) suggest, “Computer-based learning on a large scale is also less expensive than the current labor intensive system and could solve the financial dilemmas facing public schools” (13).

To enable this in an education system, several policies must be enshrined by governments that would allow private schools, virtual cyber-charter schools or educational technology companies direct access to students outside of a protected public system. The first is to open up multiple pathways of learning, which are more flexible in terms of time and space, and designed around technology solutions that only the company can deliver.

The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries in America, is a clear backer of redefining and expanding the role of the teacher, and advocates that “teacher contracts and other regulatory constraints may also need to be addressed to provide the flexibility in a teacher’s role needed to make this dramatic shift in instruction” (Wolf 2010, 15).

On the surface, this flexibility sounds promising, as teachers and school leaders certainly recognize that the industrial model of command and control does not fit with our hyper-connected world. Yet the flexibility of any-time, any-place learning is manifesting itself in the U.S. around adaptive learning software programs or mandatory online learning courses that are being delivered by private companies. New course access legislation (as found in Wisconsin, Texas, Utah, Florida, Michigan and Minnesota) now allows anyone to teach online courses to students regardless of jurisdiction, certification or geographic location (Dwinal 2015). In other words, every course, for every student, anywhere, anytime — and now — taught by anyone. Half the teachers, but sold as twice the fun?

In the case of K12 Inc., the United States’ largest private for-profit provider of online education for grades K–12, student-teacher ratios are as high as one teacher to 275 students (Aaronson and O’Connor 2012). As the president and CEO at McGraw-Hill Education affirms: “With this new method and capability, all of a sudden you could see a teacher handling many more students ... the productivity could double or triple” (Olster 2013).

The harsh reality, however, is that private online schooling is not about new blended learning models, flexibility or choice, it is about profit through the constant cycle of enrolment and withdrawal of students known as the “churn rate” (Gibson and Clements 2013). In contrast, our current publically funded and publically delivered online schools across Alberta reinforce the important role of certificated teachers as compassionate and empathetic architects of learning who work relentlessly to reduce the drop-out rates and increase student engagement in virtual learning environments.

Rocketship Education, one of the many rapidly growing charter schools out of the U.S., has adopted a rotation model of blended learning known as the Rocketship Hybrid School Model for kindergarten to Grade 5 students. It combines online learning on campus with traditional classroom-based activities in order to save $500,000 per charter school per year in teacher salary costs (Danner 2010).

To accomplish this, Rocketship Education has cut half its teachers, changed its scope of practice and hired low-paid adults to supervise and monitor students in computer labs. The new staffing patterns within this rotation blended learning model place the schools in a one to 100-plus student/teacher ratio, with one or two low-wage computer lab monitors. These support personnel are endowed with titles like “individual learning specialists,” “coaches” or “facilitators” (Public Broadcasting Service 2012).

Without certificated teachers present, there is a need to gather data on student performance, so the children spend a great deal of time in a computer lab with an adaptive learning program monitoring their every interaction. John Danner, former CEO of Rocketship Charter Schools and a former board member of DreamBox Learning Inc., promotes increased screen time during the day for children. He thinks that as the quality of software improves, “‘Rocketeers’ could spend as much as 50 per cent of the school day with computers” (Strauss 2013). How many hours of development, in the minds and bodies of children and youth, are we willing to sacrifice for more individualized computer-human interactions under the guise of blended learning?

If blended learning through the rotation model is to be defined by reducing the number of certificated teachers in schools and placing students in computer labs to spend half of their day in front of math and reading software programs, then education in the 21st century is indeed heading down an antiquated and very dangerous path. This is not historically the way blended learning has come alive in Alberta classrooms, nor should it be our preferred future.

HOPE
The growth of digital media and the Internet has led to an explosion of resources and opportunities for teachers, students and learning communities. A constant shift is occurring with different mobile apps, blogs, video podcasts, social media tools, e-learning courses, or learning management systems in schools that all promise to help teachers create and organize student work, provide (real-time) feedback or communicate more efficiently.

With the proliferation of digital tools in our lives, many K–12 students now experience learning through a blend of face-to-face and digital or online media and are able to access new ideas and resources where student attitudes and engagement towards their education can be positively supported. If blended learning is to lead to positive outcomes for students, then it must be highly relational, active and inquiry oriented (both online and offline), and commit to empowering students with digital tools.

If done right, blended learning can be used to support more equitable access to learning resources and discipline-specific expertise. It may also engage students (and teachers) in a variety of online and offline learning activities that differentiate instruction and bring greater diversity to the learning context. Improving communication between teachers, students and parents and extending relationships across boundaries and time may also be an outcome of blended learning. It may also hold value by employing certain technologies that help teachers and students to formatively assess learning.

To make this truly hopeful, school-based technology infrastructure must be robust and up-to-date, with equitable access, and the necessary resources (human and technology) must be made available to pedagogically support the blending. It is not tenable if Internet connectivity is unreliable or limited, or if there exists inequitable access to bandwidth or technology infrastructure in the school and home. Finally, if technical glitches are pervasive, or if dependable technical support is not available for students and teachers, then it is unlikely that blended learning will be a sustainable concept.

CONCLUSION
Blended learning is not a new term nor a revolutionary concept for classrooms in this second decade of the 21st century. However, the way it is being (re)interpreted could be hopeful or harmful depending on how it is implemented. It is an increasingly ambiguous and vague notion that is growing in popularity as many groups try to claim the space and establish the models, despite a lack of evidence and research. We should therefore be skeptical around the mythos of blended learning before endorsing or lauding it as the next great reform.

Blended learning has occupied a place in discourses of educational change for well over a decade, but it cannot be co-opted into a movement that displaces the human dimension of learning with an economic imperative to reduce labour costs by cutting the teaching population in half. Of particular concern in times of severe economic restraint is that high schools may become the testing ground for policymakers looking at ways to redesign by cutting certificated teachers in favour of massive online cohorts of students tutored by “facilitators” or “individual learning specialists.”

Technologies should be employed to help students become empowered citizens rather than passive consumers. Innovations are needed in education that will help to create a society where people can flourish within culturally rich, informed, democratic, digitally connected and diverse communities. We should not descend into a culture of individualism through technology where our students are fragmented by continuous partial attention.

For the vast majority of students within Alberta’s K–12 public education system, we must achieve a more nuanced balance that combines both digital technologies and the physical presence of a caring, knowledgeable and pedagogically thoughtful teacher. This is not an optional “nice to have,” but a “must have” if children and youth are to build resilience for the future. Blended learning may be (re)shaped by privatization myths, with adaptive learning systems as their voice, but in Alberta, our teachers still remain the quintessence of the human enterprise of paying it forward for our next generation. It is time for Alberta teachers to claim the space of blended learning and push back at the myths and questionable rhetoric.

This article was reprinted by the Washington Post (June 21, 2015)

Citation:
McRae, P. (2015, June 21). Blended learning: The great new thing or the great new hype? Retrieved from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/21/blended-learning-the-great-new-thing-or-the-great-new-hype/

This article was printed in the Summer 2015 edition of the ATA Magazine.

Citation:
McRae, P. (2015). Myth: Blended learning is the next ed-tech revolution – hype, harm and hope. Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine 4 (95). Edmonton, AB: Barnett House Press p. 19-27.

REFERENCES
Aaronson , T., and J. O'Connor. 2012. “In K12 courses, 275 students to a single teacher.” Miami Herald, September 16. http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/16/3005122/in-k12-courses-275-students-to.html.

Christensen, C. M., and M.B. Horn. 2008. “How Do We Transform Our Schools?” Education Next 8, no. 3 (Summer), 13–19.

Danner, J. 2010. “Rocketship Hybrid School Model — Half The Teachers and Twice the Pay.” Donnell-Kay Foundation website. http://dkfoundation.org/news/rocketship-hybrid-school-model-half-teachers-and-twice-pay (accessed May 4, 2015).

Dwinal, M. 2015. “Solving the Nation's Teacher Shortage: How online leanrning can fix the broken teacher labor market.” Clayton Christensen Institute website. http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Solving-the-nations-teacher-shortage.pdf (accessed May 4, 2015).

Friesen, N. 2012. “Defining Blended Learning.” Learning Spaces, August. http://learningspaces.org/papers/Defining_Blended_Learning_NF.pdf (accessed May 4, 2015).

Gibson, D., and J. Clements. 2013. Delivery Matters: Cyber Charter Schools and K–12 Education in Alberta. Edmonton, AB: Parkland Institute.

Gosper, M., D. Green, M. McNeill, R. Phillips, G. Preston and K. Woo. 2008. Final Report: The Impact of Web-Based Lecture Technologies on Current and Future Practices in Learning and Teaching. Sydney: Macquarie University.

Green, N. 2013. “What to look for in a personalized learning plan.” DreamBox Learning website. http://www.dreambox.com/blog/personalized-learning-plan#sthash.ubJ00yA3.dpuf (accessed May 5, 2015).

Horn, M. B., and H. Staker. 2011. “The Rise of K–12 Blended Learning.” Clayton Christensen Institute website. http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The-rise-of-K-12-blended-learning.pdf (accessed May 5, 2015).

Horn, M. B., C. Christensen and C.W. Johnson. 2010. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Horn, M. B., T. Hudson and J. Everly. 2014. “Blended Learning in K8 Schools: Expert Advice from Michael Horn.” DreamBox Learning website: http://www.dreambox.com/webinar/blended-learning-k8-schools-expert-advice-michael-horn (accessed May 5, 2015).

Kennedy, J. F. 1962. “Yale University Commencement Address.” Transcript of speech given at Yale University, New Haven, CT, June 11, 1962. Miller Center, University of Virginia website. http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/speech-3370 (accessed May 5, 2015).

McRae, P. A. 2010. “The Politics of Personalization in the 21st Century.” Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine 91, no. 1: 8–11.

McRae, P. A. 2013. “Rebirth of the Teaching Machine through the Seduction of Data Analytics.” Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine 93, no. 4. Also available at http://philmcrae.com/2/post/2013/04/rebirth-of-the-teaching-maching-through-the-seduction-of-data-analytics-this-time-its-personal1.html (accessed May 5, 2015).

McRae, P. A. 2014. “[Debate] Challenging the Promise of Personalized Learning — WISE 2014.” World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwI4oC_A0IM (accessed May 5, 2015).

Murphy, R., E. Snow, J. Mislevy, L. Gallagher, A. Krumm and X. Wei. 2014. Blended Learning Report. Austin, TX: Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

Olster, S. 2013. “Better Technology and More Productive Teachers are Just Around the Corner.” Fortune website. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/10/the-future-of-the-classroom (accessed May 5, 2015).

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 2012. “Can 'Rocketship' Launch a Fleet of Successful, Mass-Produced Schools?” PBS Newshour, December 28. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education-july-dec12-rocket_12-28/ (accessed May 5, 2015).

Sparks, S. D. 2015. “Blended Learning Research Yields Limited Results.” Education Week, April 13. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/04/15/blended-learning-research-yields-limited-results.html (accessed May 5, 2015).

Staker, H., and M.B. Horn. 2012. “Classifying K-12 Blended Learning.” Clayton Christensen Institute website. http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Classifying-K-12-blended-learning.pdf (accessed May 5, 2015).

Strauss, V. 2013. “Rocketship Charter Schools Revamping Signature ‘Learning Lab’.” The Answer Sheet blog, Washington Post, January 25.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/25/rocketship-charter-schools-revamping-signature-learning-lab (accessed May 5, 2025).

U.S. Department of Education. 2013. “Competency-Based Learning or Personalized Learning.” U.S. Department of Education website. http://www.ed.gov/oii-news/competency-based-learning-or-personalized-learning (accessed May 5, 2015).

Wolf, M. A. 2010. Innovate to Educate: System [Re]design for Personalized Learning, A Report from the 2010 Symposium. Software & Information Industry Association. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD6181.pdf (accessed May 5, 2015).

At one time or another we all come face-to-face with real hardships in life, whether they be social, emotional, financial and/or physical.  It is an inevitability of being human, and something that life’s wisdom gets around to teaching us all. 

How we cope with this adversity is dependent on our ability to manage change and reshape our lives.  To adapt, and be able to bounce back from adversity, which is a central part of the human condition, we must build resilience in children and youth.

As Editor of The Learning Team publication, which reaches over 25 000 parents across our province, I have dedicated the April 2015 edition to exploring the notion of resilience at a time in our history when it is desperately needed, perhaps not just for children but society writ large.

Zolli and Healy[1] (2012) define resilience as “the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances,” and see resilience as “preserving adaptive capacity (p. 8)—the ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling one’s core purpose, which is an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility” (p.9).

Complex societal shifts are now coinciding with a growing body of research that has documented a steady increase in the rates of depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders among children and youth across North America. According to Jean Twenge[2] five to eight times as many high school and post-secondary students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true over fifty years ago. This startling increase is not the result of any new diagnostic criteria, but in fact stems from a questionnaire, known as the MMPI--the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, that has been used to assess a variety of mental disorders with over seventy seven thousand Americans since 1938. 

Some would suggest that the decline of free play may be causing this meteoric rise in anxiety & depression, while others claim it is a result of hyper-parenting and a narcissism epidemic driven by an obsessive focus on the individual.  Whatever the causes, it is a clarion call to look deeper at resilience as one of many ways towards a more hopeful future for our children and youth.

The articles contained in this edition have been selected to provide some pragmatic and meaningful suggestions for facing reality regardless of our circumstances, finding meaning in life through positive relationships and resilient networks, and discovering ways to find new solutions to the difficult challenges we inevitably face. We explore this concept of resilience in three very different developmental spaces, which are those of children, youth and adults.  Only if we can learn to bend with the winds of adversity will we learn how to flourish in times of profound change. I hope you enjoy this collection.

[1] Zolli, A., & Healy, A. (2012). Resilience: Why things bounce back. New York: Freepress.

[2] Twenge, J., et al., (2010). Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938-2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI. In press, Clinical Psychology Review 30, 145-154.

Notions of mechanized teaching machines captured the imagination of many in the late 19th and 20th century. Today, yet again, a new generation of technology platforms promise to deliver “personalized learning” for each and every student. This rebirth of the teaching machine centers on digital software tutors (known as adaptive learning systems) and their grand claims to individualize learning by controlling the pace, place and content for each and every student. This time around, however, it is personal.

Personal choice, with centralized control, in an increasingly data driven, standardized and mechanized learning system, has long been a fantasy for many technocrats desperately wanting to (re)shape K-12 teaching and learning with technology. In this alternate reality, class sizes no longer matter and new staffing patterns emerge. The amount of time students spend in schools becomes irrelevant as brick and mortar structures fade away.  Yet this fantasy disregards the overwhelming parental desire (and societal expectation) that children will gather together to learn.

Technologies have amplified our desires for choice, flexibility and individualization in North America, so it is easy to be seduced by a vision of computers delivering only what we want, when, and how we want it customized. The marketing mantra from media conglomerates to banks is that of 24/7 services at any time, in any place or at any pace. Many governments have in turn adopted this language in an eagerness to reduce costs with business-like customization and streamlined workforce productivity - all with the expectation that a flexible education system will also be more efficient and (cost) effective.

The adaptive learning system crusade in schools is organized, growing in power and well-funded by venture capitalists and corporations. Many companies are looking to profit from student (and teacher) data that can be easily collected, stored, processed, customized, analyzed, and then ultimately (re)sold. In the year 2014, venture capital funds, private equity investors and transnational corporations like Pearson poured over $3.5 billion USD into education technology companies in the United States alone (CB Insights, 2014). Children and youth should not be treated like automated teller machines or retail loyalty cards from which companies can extract valuable data.

Adaptive learning systems (the new teaching machines) do not build more resilient, creative, entrepreneurial or empathetic citizens through their individualized, linear and mechanical software algorithms. Nor do they balance the desire for greater choice, in all its manifest forms, with the equity needed for a society to flourish.  Computer adaptive learning systems are reductionist and primarily attend to those things that can be easily digitized and tested (math, science and reading). They fail to recognize that high quality learning environments are deeply relational, humanistic, creative, socially constructed, active and inquiry-oriented.

This article paints a picture of how old notions of teaching machines are being reborn through a seduction of data analytics and competency-based personalization (think individualization). It is also intended to be a declaration against the fatalism of adaptive learning systems as the next evolutionary stage for K-12 education in the 21st Century. 

The History
For generations various devices have been patented to mechanically teach students.  The first popular attempt was in the 1920s when Sidney Pressey (1926) invented a machine that would run on two modes of operation: ‘teach’ and ‘test’. After reading through material in the teach mode, a student would flick the control to test and proceed to pull down one of four response keys.  To give the illusion of progress, the machine would score the response and wondrously record the total number of correct answers. A ‘reward dial’ could also be added so that when a correct number of responses were achieved, a piece of candy would drop into a small dish for the student (think Pavlov’s dog). It was simply a multiple choice test in a mechanical box.

Pressey’s machine was born in an age where managerial approaches to controlling and sequencing learning were popular.  It was a time of efficiency where the industrial assembly line had introduced innovative technologies, increased competition, and inspired new efforts to (re)organize companies. The industrialist Fredrick Taylor (1911) was especially influential to the teaching machine movement. His concepts of scientific management drew on studies of assembly line workers and proposed new methods for managers to speed up efficiency and productivity through a process of measurement and control. It was an era that privileged behaviourism (i.e., stimulus and response).  At this time Edward Thorndike’s (1921) popular book on Principles of Learning stressed that people all learned in the same basic way through individual practice and reinforcement.

However, it was not until the 1950s, that psychologist B. F. Skinner (1954a) made the bold claim that the dawn of the machine age of education had finally arrived.  With his particular brand of teaching machines and programmed learning he vowed that, “students could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom” (Oppenheimer, 1997).  Skinner would go on to say that his machine had an important advantage over past attempts because a student was “free to move at his own pace [and]…only moves on when he has completely mastered all the preceding material…to a final stage in which he is competent.” (Skinner, 1954b).  For Skinner, learning was about measurability, uniformity, and control of the student.  This view of learning dismissed the larger social, cultural and emotional contexts in which knowledge is created.

The next big lurch forward came from the artificial intelligence movement of the 1970s. This era reinforced behaviourist notions while introducing research in the unfolding field of computer science. This gave rise to Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) projects like PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations).

CAI treated students like patients who once diagnosed through computer testing and task analysis could be prescribed individual remediation by the software. But, the software development costs for CAI were high, and computers (both personal and school-based) were rare and expensive. Ultimately, the artificial intelligence of the computers was never really that intelligent.  Once again the teaching machines receded into the storage room.

In 2013, Dreambox Learning Inc., a technology company out of the United States, claims that their proprietary intelligent adaptive learning (IAL) system, has the “effectiveness comparable to human tutoring [and] accelerates math teaching and learning” (Dreambox Learning Inc., 2013). The company’s contracted research white paper unflinchingly states, “the level of sophistication of today’s IAL systems is far superior to similar technologies of the past” (Lemke, 2013, p. 13). This particular brand of teaching machine individualizes learning by adjusting “path and pace to stay within the child’s zone of optimized learning to accelerate understanding and critical thinking” (Dreambox Learning Inc., 2013).

It is as if we are caught in an ever renewing cycle of promises, or as Yogi Berra once observed, “It’s déjà vu all over again” (Berra, 2004). Adaptive learning systems still promote the notion of the isolated individual, in front of a technology platform, being delivered concrete and sequential content for mastery. However, the re-branding is that of personalization (individual), flexible and customized (technology platform) delivering 21st century competencies (content).

At its most innocent, it is a renewed attempt at bringing back behaviourism and operant conditioning to make learning more efficient. At its most sinister, it establishes children as measurable commodities to be cataloged and capitalized upon by corporations.  It is a movement that could be the last tsunami that systematically privatizes public education systems.

The Seduction
So why is this movement so seductive? First, it is seen as opening up possibilities for greater access to data that can be used to hyper-individualize learning and in turn diagnose the challenges facing entire school systems. Second, the modern teaching machines, and the growing reach and power of technologies, promises to (re)shape students into powerful knowledge workers of the 21st Century.

For publishers and educational technology companies, the adaptive learning systems are a means to ‘atomize’ students (and their data) away from the shelter and protection of public education systems. It allows them to create long-term ‘personal’ relationships with students, so they can market their products over the student’s lifetime. Senior publishing executives from McGraw-Hill are not shy about stating their desire to profit off student data: "collecting data, having a student profile that goes from kindergarten through professional [life] is where we want to invest" (Olster, 2013). It also prevents materials from being shared or transferred over time by students as the materials are all digitized and copyright protected. It allows for direct marketing of products and services at any time, place or pace to students or their families.

For teachers, adaptive learning systems are sold as providing easy ways to bump test scores for each and every student, while generating detailed individual student reports through the software’s surveillance structures.  Companies market their algorithms as not only teaching better, but also freeing up teachers’ time and relieving their burdens in a world of test-based accountability. Just as Pressey (1926) stated almost a century ago, the machine will “make her [teacher] free for those inspirational and thought-stimulating activities which are, presumably, the real function of the teacher” (p. 374).

For parents, this is an extension of the growth in the tutoring movement. It is estimated that one third of Alberta parents now pay for private tutors (Alberta Teachers’ Association, 2011). As the Canadian Council on Learning (2007) found in their national survey, “most parents who hire tutors (73%) estimate that their children's overall academic performance is in the A or B range”. This is a global obsession, and in 2010 74% of all South Korean students were engaged in some form of private after-school instruction, at an average cost of $2,600 per student for the year (Ripley, 2011).

Adaptive learning systems are seductive to a North America society reeling from economic volatility, decline and severe fiscal constraints.  It is a time where the middle class is rapidly shrinking.  Parents are obsessively enrolling their children in after-school programs or tutoring with a fanatic devotion to giving their offspring a competitive edge over the pack. Hyper-parents are investing more time, money and energy in their offspring than in previous generations, and adaptive learning systems may be seen as one more tool on the treadmill to Harvard.  As Carl Honore (2008) says, “It is not just kids who are under pressure now; it’s parents too. We feel we have to push, polish and protect our offspring with superhuman zeal - or else we’re somehow falling down on the job. We start from the noble and natural instinct to do the best for our kids but end up going too far. Social and cultural pressure drives a lot of this”.

This has resulted in some dramatic consequences for childhood. Since the late 1970s, children have lost 12 hours per week of free time, including a 25% decrease in play and a 50% decrease in unstructured outdoor activities. (Juster et al., 2004). Parents are working longer hours and families are spending less time with their children (Parkland Institute, 2012). The adaptive learning algorithm, wondrously sold as virtual tutor, could also become a convenient digital baby rattle.

For students frustrated with working in a group setting, or having to negotiate the diversity of a public school setting, the teaching machine provides relief. The new teaching machine becomes the panacea for students who are struggling academically or irritated by the pace of learning in schools. Yet, as Hargreaves and Shirley (2009) suggest: “Customized learning is pleasurable and instantly gratifying. Nevertheless it...ultimately becomes just one more process of business-driven training delivered to satisfy individual consumer tastes and desires” (p. 84).

There are no quick fixes to learning and teaching. Excellence in life, and with all complex activities, takes time and patience. This time is what Malcom Gladwell (2008) calls the ten thousand hour rule, where “researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours” (p. 40). Although seductive, data analytics and algorithms of the software that magically determine the pacing, path, or content for the learner, do not reinforce this type of dedication for true expertise.

Educational technology companies and publishers are rushing to colonize the Big Data and personalized learning revolution. In the United States the trajectory of education reform is one of increased standardization, centralization and adaptive learning systems.  Far too seldom are the conversations about fostering creativity, the arts, talent diversity, or interpersonal communicative competencies for children and youth. Big data and personalized learning is the next tsunami. 

The Context

Big Data
In this first quarter of the 21st Century people have become deeply (inter)connected with machines.  These connections have blurred the boundaries between our online and offline behaviours.  The location data from our cellphones, information from credit card purchases, retail loyalty card transactions, medical records, household energy consumption or even the dynamics of our online social media connections can now be tracked and traced. Essentially we are leaving digital breadcrumbs around our increasingly connected lives. Data about our existence is consequently growing at an exponential rate, driven by an astounding 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every single day (IBM, 2013).

As our personal data grows, so does the desire to have it harvested for patterns. With the ability to track social connections and economic habits down to the individual level, micro-patterns emerge. People (and their data) become “atomized”, behaviours are tracked in real-time, and then compared with millions of other individuals. With more powerful computing technologies large data sets may even hold the power of prediction (think Amazon book recommendations, but for personal health). This is known as the ‘Big Data’ phenomenon.

Big Data is about finding the seemingly hidden connections within a population or even from our own (learning) behaviours. Companies, and some governments, are beginning to see these big data insights as holding the potential to provide new products, redesign systems and personalize services. 

As data gathering increases across society, and we crank out even more information about our behaviours, companies look to one of the last frontiers to privatize: student and teacher data. With access to big data on student populations, companies would have limitless opportunities to increase profits and growth. However in public systems, with democratic governance, it is difficult to get access to the intimate data on students and teachers. Public school jurisdictions often frustrate businesses as they try to sell (and hyper-personalize) their products to students, parents and teachers.

A Cautionary Tale
This changed with inBloom Inc., a $100 million dollar K-12 education data-sharing initiative launched in 2013 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. This massive database contained personal student information that would allow sharing of the data with 21 for-profit companies. As reported in Reuters, the inBloom Inc. database held "files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school - even homework completion. Local education officials retain legal control over their students' information. But federal law allows them to share files in their portion of the database with private companies selling educational products and services” (Simons, 2013a).

The stated mission of inBloom Inc. was to "inform and involve each student and teacher with data and tools designed to personalize learning" (inBloom, 2013). It started by populating the database with student information for free, with a plan to charge states or school jurisdictions annual fees of $2 to $5 per student by the year 2015 (Simons, 2013b).

However, two concerns arose from this particular Big Data development in K-12 education. The first was that Amplify Education Inc., a for-profit division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., built the database infrastructure for inBloom Inc.. Murdoch is internationally known for the personal wiretapping and hacking scandals of one of his companies, and he has openly articulated his interests in profiting off K-12 education: “When it comes to K through 12 education we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs...[News Corp.] is at the forefront of individualized, technology-based learning that is poised to revolutionize public education for a new generation of students” (Murdoch, 2010).

Second, parents in New York were not made aware that their children’s personal information could be shared with for-profit private technology companies without their consent. And as with the state of data security in our times, inBloom Inc. “cannot guarantee the security of the information stored … or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted” (Simons, 2013a).

The Electronic Privacy Information Center subsequently filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education charging it with violating student privacy rights and undermining parental consent (Strauss, 2013a). While in Louisiana, John White, the State Superintendent of Education, announced that he would be recalling all confidential student data from inBloom Inc. (Leader, 2013).  Three other states, Kentucky, Georgia and Delaware, were initially listed as partners on the inBloom website, but then declined to participate in this activity, with Georgia specifically asking for its name to be removed from the partner list (Simons, 2013b). 

InBloom was sold as a convenient store house for student data that would connect to software in order to tailor assignments and 'personalize learning' for each and every student.  Yet, in the end InBloom Inc. was perceived as getting too personal with their data gathering activities. On April 21, 2014 Iwan Streichenberger, the chief executive officer of inBloom Inc., announced that due to generalized public concerns over privacy, data misuse and security, it would be winding down the organization.

As many global technology companies and publishing companies such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education,  and News Corp. continue to introduce student databases and student performance tracking software (especially on mobile devices), legislation began passing in 2014 in eight states, including New York, Virginia, and Kentucky, that have placed strict legal boundaries around the ability of school jurisdictions to share student data with third party vendors or marketing firms.

Issues of privacy, data access, and who actually owns student and teacher data will continue to grow enormously in the near future.  There can be value in having big data analyzed to discover new patterns, but not at the expense of removing privacy protections for students (or teachers) within a public education system.

Data Driven Decision Making
The professional work of teaching and learning has used data and evidence to improve educational decision making for years.  Even ‘big data’ and its power can be used to help redesign a public system, as long as teachers, principals, parents and/or students give clear consent to its various ethical uses to improve student learning. Data is key to empowering and generating educational growth and insight for teachers. In fact data and evidence generated through teacher action research was a hallmark of the internationally recognized Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) for over a decade. Ironically we have more data on student assessments, and fewer opportunities for deep conversations between parents and teachers.

The right data, meaningfully and thoughtfully used, could enhance individual and collective teacher efficacy. The same data could also be used by system leaders for narrow accountability regimes and punitive action. In the United States, mandates created under the “Race to the Top” initiatives, and programs promoted by the Gates Foundation, have led to more data attempting to measure teacher effectiveness than ever before. As a society we have become obsessed with data quantity, but in many ways have fallen short on the quality of our human interactions.

Personalized Learning
Personalized learning is neither a pedagogic theory nor a coherent set of teaching approaches; it is an idea struggling for an identity (McRae, 2010). A description of personalization of learning tightly linked to technology-mediated individualization ‘anywhere, anytime’ is premised on old ideas from the assembly line era. It is a model that is being advanced by the rapidly growing private corporations, virtual schools and charter school in the United States.

Personalizing learning, as an act of differentiating learning in a highly relational environment, is not new to the profession of teaching. Legions of teachers enter classrooms to engage diverse minds across multiple activities and to support each student as he or she inquires into problems. These same teachers, who hold a keen awareness of each of their student’s particular learning styles and passions, are also simultaneously contending with issues of poverty, lack of parental involvement (or conversely helicopter parents), large classes, familial and community influences, student effort and numerous digital and popular culture distractions that add to complexity of their professional practice.

Personalizing learning can be a progressive stance to education reform, and is in line with many new forms of assessment, differentiated learning and instruction, and redesigning high schools beyond age cohorts and classes.  More flexible approaches to education are undeniably necessary, and findings ways to personalize learning will be important if students are to adequately develop the skills and knowledge that will help them creatively navigate an uncertain future. However, personalized learning defined as an isolated child in front of a computer screen for hours on end is folly.

The Enablers
To enable this all to happen in an education system, several policies must be enshrined by governments and school districts that allow publishers or educational technology companies direct access to students. The first is to open up multiple pathways of learning, which are more flexible in terms of time and space, and designed around technology solutions that only the company can deliver. On the surface this flexibility sounds promising, as teachers and school leaders certainly recognize that the industrial model of command and control does not fit with our hyper-connected world. Unfortunately, the flexibility of anytime, any pace learning is manifesting itself in the United States around adaptive learning software programs or mandatory online learning courses that are being delivered by private companies.

The U.S. Department of Education (2013) has clearly articulated a commitment to making this happen with ‘Competency-Based Learning’ or ‘Personalized Learning’: “Transitioning away from seat time, in favor of a structure that creates flexibility, allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning. By enabling students to master skills at their own pace, competency-based learning systems help to save both time and money…make better use of technology, support new staffing patterns that utilize teacher skills and interests differently…Each of these presents an opportunity to achieve greater efficiency and increase productivity.”

The notion of creating new staffing patterns has evolved in the United States to redefine and expand the role of ‘teacher’. The new staffing patterns with this model have shown to reduce the teaching force to a 1 to 150 pupil teacher ratio with the monitoring of students in computer labs, tutoring and marking supported by non-certificated staff with titles like ‘Coaches’, ‘Facilitators’ or ‘Individual Learning Specialists’. In the case of K12 Inc., the United States largest provider of online education for grades K-12, it is reported that student teacher ratios are as high as 1 teacher to 275 students (Aaronson and O’Connor, 2012). As the President and CEO at McGraw-Hill Education affirms: "With this new method and capability [adaptive learning systems], all of a sudden you could see a teacher handling many more students...the productivity could double or triple" (Olster, 2013). The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries in America, is a clear backer of redefining and expanding the role of the teacher, and advocates that “teacher contracts and other regulatory constraints may also need to be addressed to provide the flexibility in a teacher’s role needed to make this dramatic shift in instruction” (Wolf, 2010, p. 15).

The Challenges
1. Commodification of Student Data:
Public schools must be the guardians of students' personal data. Teachers, as the guardians of children, cannot collect ‘big data’ without parental consent and then allow it to be passed on to companies looking for a new marketplace in public education. With adaptive learning systems companies can market directly to the individual student or parents, without the obstructions (or guidance) of a robust public education system.

The data analytics crusade in schools, and issues of who owns and controls the ‘big data’ of children and youth, must be highly contested.

2. Reductionist Thinking:
Adaptive learning systems can divert teacher and student attention to only the ‘basics’ of math and reading.  In some cases even privileging just one curricular area. As DreamBox Learning Inc. forcefully states in direct emails to parents: “Research has shown that mastery of early math skills is the single best predictor of future academic success - more important even than early reading!” (McRae, personal communication, January 28, 2013).

In respecting individuality and difference, we need to move education systems towards actions that Yong Zhao (2009) says will provide “more diverse talents rather than standardized labourers, more creative individuals rather than homogenized test takers, and more entrepreneurs rather than obedient employees.” (p. 181). A narrowing of cognition through the teaching machine will not build the kind of confidence, social agility, cooperation and creativity that children growing up in post-industrial society need. As Dewey (1938) said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

3. Learning is Socially Constructed:
Research out of the learning science makes it clear that learning is successful when it is socially constructed, and occurs in an active and inquiry-oriented process that engages people in social, emotional, cultural and deeply intrapersonal experiences. This research will likely hold true whether our future learning environments are enacted face to face, online or in blended learning online/offline contexts as this carbon and silicon line begins to blur. It also holds true regardless of whether one is considered digitally literate or whether one is a member of the New Millennial Generation (Gen M).

4. Adaptation:
There is much good in providing opportunities for students to have more personalized experiences with learning, but the world does not adapt to people, we must adapt to the world. To adapt, and be able to bounce back from adversity, which is a central part of the human condition, we must build resilience in our children and youth.

Zolli and Healy (2012) define resilience as “the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances,” and see resilience as “preserving adaptive capacity (p. 8)—the ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling one’s core purpose, which is an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility” (p.9). Resilience not only encourages adaptability, but it also strengthens 21st Century collaborative skills, connectivity and an appreciation of diversity in the world around us. Resilience is not shaped through teaching machines, but it is through highly relational learning environments. It will be especially important in a global world defined by increased volatility, ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity.

5. Echo-Chamber Effect:
We are entering a digital age of mobility where students can access the information they want at any time, place or pace through a variety of devices. This will have a profound effect on critical thinking as individuals are increasingly fed only the exact type of information (specific political views, topical book themes, local environmental conditions) and sources (individual blogs, twitter feeds, facebook updates, or websites) to which they digitally subscribe.  In many ways, hyper-personalized (customized) digital spaces have the potential to limit students to only the content that they want to see, hear and read about.  A condition can then arise in online communities where participants find their own opinions constantly echoed back to them (i.e., echo-chamber effect), thus reinforcing a certain sense of truth that resonates with their individual belief systems (McRae, 2006).

This then challenges a call for a diversity of talents, and positions free will and personal choice as taking on new (and obscured) meanings in digital echo chambers.  In considering personalization and technology, we need to be thoughtful about the role of critical thinking, diversity and chance (serendipity). These are all important for learning and will have long-term implications for society.

6.  Children and Screen Time:
To what extent do we want children and youth spending even more time immersed in adaptive learning software programs during the school day? A growing body of research indicates children between the ages of 8 to 18 already spend an average of 7.5 hours a day in front of screens (e.g., television, computers, video-games and phones) (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010).  To gather even more data through adaptive learning systems, children will need to spend time allowing the machine to monitor their every interaction. John Danner, former C.E.O. of Rocketship Charter Schools and a member of the Board of Directors of DreamBox Learning Inc., envisions even more screen time during the day for children: “As the quality of software improves, Danner thinks “Rocketeers” could spend as much as 50 percent of the school day with computers” Strauss (2013b).

Those who work with children, families, schools and communities are asking serious questions about the effects of online digital activities on health and mental well-being. We should be particularly concerned with late-night screen time, especially if children are spending hours in front of the screen with the virutal computer tutor at home. A growing body of new research indicates that nocturnal screentime decreases sleep quality and quantity thus negatively affecting children’s readiness to learn (Howard-Jones, 2012; Rich, 2012). How many hours of the developing minds and bodies of children and youth are we willing to sacrifice for more individualized computer-human interactions under the guise of data analytics?

A Better Path
There are no simple computerized solutions to the complex and diverse challenges of poverty and inequity, or lack of parental engagement (conversely hyper-parenting) facing schools.  In an effort to continually improve educational practices and create great schools for all students, what might be a better path to the seduction of adaptive learning systems?

We can establish conditions of professional practice where high quality teachers and principals, with a sense of efficacy, can differentiate instruction and advance new forms of assessment for learning with/without technology. Teachers could be engaged in a conversation, earlier rather than later, around how they might use data (big or small) to enhance student learning.

Technologies could be employed to help students become empowered citizens rather than passive consumers. Innovations are needed in education that will help to create a society where people can flourish within culturally rich, informed, democratic, digitally connected and diverse communities.  We should not descend into a culture of individualism through technology, where people are fragmented by a continuous partial attention.

The education of our next generations should not be about machines but, rather, a community of learners whose physical, intellectual and social well-being is held sacred. This point of view is driven by the human desire to connect, maintain friendships, tell stories, share thoughts and inquire into the nature of the world. It is a perspective that naturally flows together with the research on learning that suggests that education is not just about content or physical place but also a collective and highly relational set of experiences within a community of learners.

Emerging technologies and smart data certainly have a place in educational transformation, but they must be employed to enhance what research in the learning sciences continues to reinforce as the foundation of learning: the pedagogical relationships between students, teachers, parents and community. Attempts to displace this human dimension of learning with the teaching machine (whatever you imagine this to be) is a distraction to the most important support great schools can offer students each and every day – relationships, relationships, relationships.

References

Aaronson T. and O’Connor J. (2012). In K12 courses, 275 students to a single teacher. Miami, FL: Miami Herald. Retrieved from: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/16/3005122/in-k12-courses-275-students-to.html

Alberta Teachers’ Association (2011). Changing Landscapes for Learning Our Way to the Next Alberta. Edmonton, AB: Barnett House. Retrieved from: http://www.teachers.ab.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/ATA/News-Room/2011/Changing%20LandscapesOctober2011_Proof2.pdf

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing Company.

Dreambox Learning Inc., (2013). Adaptive learning: Intelligent Adaptive Learning. Bellevue, WA: DreamBox Learning Inc. Retrieved from: http://www.dreambox.com/adaptive-learning

Berra, Y. (2004). Yogi Berra: Yogi-isms. Little Falls, NJ. Retrieved from: http://www.yogiberra.com/yogi-isms.html   

Canadian Council on Learning (2007). Survey of Canadian Attitudes toward Learning: Canadian attitudes toward tutoring. Vancouver, BC: Canadian Council on Learning. Retrieved from: http://www.ccl-cca.ca/ccl/Reports/SCAL/2007Archive/SCALStructuredTutoring.html  

CB Insights (2014). Ed Tech Investment & Exit Report: 2014 On Track for New Funding Record. New York, NY: CB Insights. Retreived from: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/ed-tech-investment-report-2014

Eisner, E. (1994). The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs, Third Edition, New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company.

Gladwell M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. New York, NY: Little, Brown & Company.

Hargreaves, A. & Shirley, D. (2009). The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Howard-Jones, P. (2012 April 25). The impact of digital technologies on human wellbeing. Invitational Research Colloquium on Promise and Peril: The Impact of Technology on Children, Schools and Communities. Edmonton, AB: Alberta Teachers' Association. Retrieved from: http://www.teachers.ab.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/ATA/Teaching-in-Alberta/Paul%20Howard%20Jones.pdf

inBloom (2013). inBloom: Our mission. Atlanta, GA: inBloom, Inc. Retrieved from: https://www.inbloom.org

IBM (2013). Big data at the speed of business: What is big data. Armonk, NY: IBM Corporation. Retrieved from: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata

Juster, F.T., Ono, H., & Stafford, F. (2004). Changing times of American youth: 1981-2003. Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Retrieved from: http://www.umich.edu/news/Releases/2004/Nov04/teen_time_report.pdf

Kaiser Family Foundation (2010). Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8–18 year olds. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Leader, B. (2013). Superintendent John White recalls student data stored with nonprofit inBloom. Monroe, LA: The News Star. Retrieved from: http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20130419/NEWS01/130419017/Superintendent-John-White-recalls-student-data-stored-nonprofit-inBloom?nclick_check=1

Lemke, C. (2013). Intelligent adaptive learning: An essential element of 21st century teaching and learning [White Paper]. Bellevue, WA: DreamBox Learning Inc. Retrieved from: http://www.dreambox.com/white-papers/intelligent-adaptive-learning-an-essential-element-of-21st-century-teaching-and-learning

McRae, P. (2010). The politics of personalization in the 21st century. Alberta Teachers' Association Magazine 1 (91): 8-11. Edmonton, AB: Barnett House. Retrieved from: http://www.teachers.ab.ca/Publications/ATA%20Magazine/Volume-91/Number-1/Pages/The-Politics-of-Personalization-in-the-21st-Century.aspx

McRae, P. (2006). Echoing voices - emerging challenges for educational practice on the internet. In T. Reeves & S. Yamashita (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2006 (pp. 2622-2629). Chesapeake, VA: American Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). 

Murdoch, R. (2010). News corporation to acquire education technology company wireless generation. Washington, DC: News Corporation Press Release. Retrieved from: http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_464.html

Olster, S. (2013). CNNMoney: Better technology and more productive teachers are just around the corner. New York, NY: Cable News Network Retrieved from: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/10/the-future-of-the-classroom

Oppenheimer, T. (1997). The computer delusion. Atlantic Monthly 280 (01): 45–62.

Parkland Institute (2012). Family day on the treadmill: Alberta families at risk of too much stress. Edmonton, AB: Retrieved from: http://parklandinstitute.ca/research/summary/family_day_on_the_treadmill

Pressey, S. L. (1926). A simple apparatus which gives tests and scores-and teaches. School and Society, 23(586):373–376.

Rich, M. (2012 April 25). Finding huck finn: Reclaiming childhood from a river of electronic screens. Invitational Research Colloquium on Promise and Peril: The Impact of Technology on Children, Schools and Communities. Edmonton, AB: Alberta Teachers' Association. Retrieved from: http://www.learningourway.ca/images/pdf/Dr%20Michael%20Rich%20-%20ATA%20Research%20Colloquium%20Keynote%20Presentation.pdf

Ripley, A. (2011 September 25). Teacher, leave those kids alone. Time Magazine. New York, NY: Time Inc. Retrieved from: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427,00.html

Skinner, R. (1954b). Teaching machine and programmed learning [Video file]. Retrieved from: http://youtu.be/jTH3ob1IRFo

Simon, S. (2013a). K-12 student database jazzes tech startups, spooks parents. New York, NY: Thomson Reuters U.S. Edition. Retrieved from: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/03/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130303

Simon, S. (2013b). School database loses backers as parents balk over privacy. New York, NY: Thomson Reuters U.S. Edition. Retrieved from: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/29/us-usa-education-database-idUSBRE94S0YU20130529

Strauss, V. (2013a). Lawsuit charges Ed Department with violating student privacy rights. Washington, DC: Washington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/13/lawsuit-charges-ed-department-with-violating-student-privacy-rights/

Strauss, V. (2013b). Rocketship charter schools revamping signature ‘learning lab’. Washington, DC: Washington Post. Retrieved from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/25/rocketship-charter-schools-revamping-signature-learning-lab/

U.S. Department of Education (2013). Competency-based learning or personalized learning. Washington, DC: United States Government. Retrieved from: http://www.ed.gov/oii-news/competency-based-learning-or-personalized-learning

Wolf, M.A. (2010, November). Innovate to educate: system [re]design for personalized learning: A report from the 2010 Symposium. Software & Information Industry Association in collaboration with ASCD and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Washington, DC: Software & Information Industry Association. Retrieved from: http://siia.net/pli/presentations/PerLearnPaper.pdf

Zhao, Y. (2009). Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Zolli, A. & Healy, A. M. (2012). Resilience: Why things bounce back. New York, NY: Freepress.

Within a 21st-century tsunami of change to K-12 education, innovative teaching and learning practices that employ emerging technologies are sweeping into our collective imaginations with the broader goal to transform education. Too often, however, the space for dialogue about the truly innovative practices that learning and technology can enable is non-existent, superficial or uninformed, and thus more thoughtful considerations and questions remain unasked or answered.  This blog post is meant to share some of the perspectives and provocations around innovation, emerging technologies and educational practice.

Innovative teaching and learning with technology is a dynamic, challenging and creative act.  In assessing how digital technologies might be used appropriately to engender more innovative learning experiences, educators might consider using the well-conceived Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model (Koehler and Mishra 2009).  TPACK tries to reconcile the complexity and dynamics of student learning as it relates to technology and the multifaceted nature of teachers’ knowledge. Rather than conceptualizing content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK) and technology knowledge (TK) as isolated entities, TPACK focuses on the interplay between these knowledge sources. TPACK asks educators to consider how the various knowledge sources apply to a particular learning situation. No single pedagogical approach applies to every teacher or every student. The teacher must traverse the elements of content, pedagogy and technology and understand how they interact in the context of learning. A more thorough explanation of TPACK can be found in the thoughtful work of Koehler and Mishra (2009).

Yet a caution remains, technology should not be considered the principal driver of innovative educational transformation (as technological determinists would argue), nor just a neutral and innocuous tool (as technological instrumentalists make claim). The reality is far more complex and it serves the profession of teaching well to dig deeper into the dialogue around innovation and emerging technologies in education.

On the more mechanistic side of the conversation related to innovation resides the technological deterministic view that envisions technology as the primary determinant of human experiences. As Selwyn (2011) notes, technological determinism has influenced discussions about innovative educational change for many years. In their day, filmstrips, radio and televisions were characterized as having the power to radically transform public education and offer the most innovative solutions to educational challenges. In the early 1920s, for example, Thomas Edison predicted that the motion picture was “destined to revolutionize our educational system and … in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks” (Oppenheimer 1997). This prediction was followed 40 years later with psychologist B. F. Skinner’s assertion that the dawn of the machine age of education had finally arrived and that “with the help of teaching machines and programmed instruction, students could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom” (Oppenheimer). In our contemporary setting the buzz is around the iPad or the ‘holy grail’ of digital textbooks vaunted as pedagogic panacea. The proliferation of motion pictures has not fully withdrawn the desire for educational print, and the teaching machines (whatever you imagine those to be) have not yet displaced the will for teachers and students to gather together to learn in inquiry oriented classrooms.  History offers perspective and provides us with at least two important insights: (1) there have always been, and always will be, strong and weak educational practices and (2) technologies in education, as Selwyn (2011) establishes, rarely live up to the utopian forecasts of their most enthusiastic advocates. Rarely is the imagined future of innovation accurate; more often than not the predictive space tilts heavily in either an overly optimistic or a deeply pessimistic direction.

More commonly, at the other end of the spectrum, lives the technological instrumentalists deception;  technology is just a “tool”; an innocent object; value-free and in the service of whatever subjective goals we chose to ascribe the device.  According to this view, technology is culturally neutral and innocuous (Kelly 2005; Levy 2001). Such a view ignores Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) caution that, just as we shape our technologies, so they subsequently shape our habits of mind and physical selves.  As educators champion the visible promise of technology to engage students and enhance their learning experiences, we must also recognize that technology is not neutral, nor is it “just a tool”.  The more invisible perils of pervasive media exposure and its psycho-social and physiological impacts are beginning to surface in the research on public health. With the developing minds and bodies of children and youth there is an increasing need to be cautious of the impact of online digital activities for offline health and mental wellbeing.  When implementing technology, teachers, as pedagogical leaders, should take into account such factors as the age, gender and education level of students, the socioeconomic status of the community and the beliefs that a student’s parents and peers hold about the value of technology both in and outside a school setting (McRae 2011).

School leadership, an important part of the visioning for how technology lives within a learning context, is constantly being (re)shaped in an era full of contradictions and paradoxes around emerging technologies.  A sea of questions are constantly ebbing and flowing for school leadership (broadly defined) around how to engage students with the innovative uses of digital technologies.  Some of the most pragmatic questions emerge for school leaders around how to effectively and efficiently navigate the costs, complexity, access and supports required to place information and communication technologies into the numerous imaginative learning scenarios put forward by parent communities, superintendents, students and teachers.  The most challenging systemic issues, however, reside in the larger context and include poverty and inequity, a lack of parental engagement (or conversely hyper-parenting), large class sizes and complex compositions that impede more personalized learning experiences, and student readiness to learn bound up in the numerous digital and popular culture distractions impacting society.

As we swim in a sea of emerging technologies and envision their power to transform our public education system we must not forget to ask ourselves what it is that we ultimately hope to achieve. Here are two questions related to innovation and emerging technologies as a force of educational transformation that I hope you may take up in professional conversations, at the Destination Innovation conference or perhaps even on this blog.

1) How might educators engage with digital technologies so that students can become empowered citizens rather than passive consumers? 

2) What technological innovations will help to create a society where people can flourish within informed, democratic and diverse communities, as opposed to a culture of narcissists that are fragmented by a continuous partial attention?

Note: This blog post is drawn from a new chapter I recently published in a book entitled Rethinking School Leadership: Creating A Great School for All Students available at www.lulu.com (http://tinyurl.com/85xvrdq).

References

Kelly, K. 2005. “We Are the web.” Wired Magazine (8)13. Available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html(accessed March 20, 2012).

Koehler, M J, and P Mishra. 2009. “What Is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge?” Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education 9(1): 60–70.

Levy, P. 2001. Cyberculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: Mentor.

Oppenheimer, T. 1997. “The Computer Delusion.” Atlantic Monthly 280, no 1 (July): 45–62.

Selwyn, N. 2011. Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age: A Critical Analysis. London and New York: Routledge.