March 11, 2024
This might be an unpopular article, or even an unpopular point of view. Especially as I am hosting a series of interviews for the EdTech Showcase podcast, but here goes. . .
I’m tired of all the new EdTech. I’m tired of technology teaching the same ways and the same things our teachers are teaching. I’m tired of the promises of better test scores and faster learning. The old way of teaching isn’t working. Better test scores create nothing but a series of numbers. Faster learning usually aligns with faster forgetting.
Don’t get me wrong, I love technology. Tech that is new, that is innovative, that creates less work, does the things we don’t want to do, or automates task work. Tech that enlivens, engages and creates new ways of interacting, creating, storing information is exciting. But tech that does what teachers have been doing is useless. Let the humans do their job; a big part of school and learning isn’t the material or content, it’s the connection, the mentorship, the friendship, the social time together as humans. The micro interactions and the deep discussions; even on zoom these things are not the same without being in contact with other people. Our students are anxious, disconnected, addicted, and unhappy; tech may not be the whole problem, but more of part of the problem doesn’t equal the solution.
There is a lot of promise in technology. We can use it for good. Our students need to learn digital literacy and critical thinking. But technology can’t make up for losing a year with other humans. Just saying it seems asinine: “We lost a year of learning because of ‘zoom school.’ We have so much learning loss, let’s fix it through online learning programs.” Does this sound nuts to anyone else?
In November I held a panel event with experts in business and education. The conversation came around to AI, gamification, and the future of learning. All of my panelists, not one, ALL, said that gamification is dangerous to real learning, learning should come from humans, and they don’t want AI “friends”. (Even the students in the audience agreed with that one.) Any one of these topics could be a whole other article, so let’s dig a little deeper.
Is gamification dangerous to learning? Learning is a slow process. It involves understanding concepts, questioning ideas, creating solutions, making mistakes and trying again. This is a process that takes time, energy, attention and often collaboration. Games, by contrast, happen fast—there is a problem, a decision, and a solution (or your character dies) and you start again. They give quick hits of dopamine each time you make a correct choice in the game. It takes a lot longer to get the satisfaction of a dopamine hit from attempting, correcting mistakes, and getting to a solution. While gamification of material can show quick results, students may not be able to correlate these in-game experiences to real life challenges. In addition, the consistent dopamine release may be causing more harm than good as the brain’s natural reward system becomes inadequate to feed the increased desire for more dopamine.
It’s very difficult to learn to interact with humans by watching humans interact on a screen. We learned this with television. Children rarely took what they saw on TV and applied it to real life. Seeing an actor, or avatar, solve a problem on a screen doesn’t mean that a child will use the same logic to solve a similar problem. For me, it was DeGrassi Junior High. We watched it in school and I liked the show and sometimes watched it at home, but in any given situation I would never stop and remember the outcome of an episode.
As a school leader I get pitched on a lot of programs and as a podcast host I have the privilege of talking to founders and creators of these tools. Recently there have been a few founders and developers of social-emotional learning curricula that have reached out to talk. Each time I ask if the educator can be the facilitator, or if it’s an actual hands on game or system. Each time the answer has been ‘no’ it’s a video, or an app, or an online interactive game. Organizations are using online systems to teach human skills. I really believe that we must learn human skills from humans for them to be effective and transferrable.
I see the desire to support our students and to do it in a way that is easier for educators who have so many different initiatives, curriculum, and programs to implement already, but the development and mental health of our children depends on us stepping up and connecting with them and teaching them, human to human, heart to heart. The current generation, GenZ, has spent almost 10 hours fewer per week socializing and hanging out together than earlier generations. They struggle with social meanings, body language, facial expressions. Teens today spend up to 9 hours a day on screens and up to 10 hours fewer per week with friends. They’re missing out on skills and experiences you cannot learn from a screen, even an interactive one. We need to spend more time together.
If you have seen the movie Her you understand the promise and danger of AI friends. When this idea was posed at our panel event, our audience jumped into the conversation. Would you want a friend who knows you so well they know what you want to hear and when you need to hear it? A friend who always agrees with you? A friend who will always listen and say the ‘right’ things? Our panel said no, the students in the audience said no, but what happens when the AI gets so good, and we get so dependent on our dopamine hits, and we spend more time with computers than with people?
How do we stop this spiral and support our students? With the radical idea of learning from humans. The tech-driven dependence on immediate gratification makes this challenging. Our students are quickly disengaged when they don’t get an immediate hit of dopamine; they struggle with attention, they struggle to appropriately use screens, our educators struggle to engage them with tangible content. We need to build this focus for our students, we need to put in the time and effort to develop gratification from learning and creation. We need to create the time and space in our classrooms for our teachers to be facilitators of the development of social emotional skills, interpersonal skills, a growth mindset, and a love of learning. It’s only when we can slow down, apply care, and build relationships and connections that we will be able to utilize the natural reward systems in our brains for real, transferable, enduring learning. It’s not easy, but the things that are worth it rarely are.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Tanya Sheckley for Intrepid Ed News.
