Educational Innovation and Technology: Let’s Talk About EdTech

In an article I published last year, I wrote about the term “innovation” and how it is misunderstood and overused, especially in EdTech. Many new projects or programs that claim to be “innovative” are just mere adjustments, nothing more than a passing trend, or do not represent any improvement in education.

In his book Innovación y cambio en las instituciones educativas (Innovation and change in educational institutions), Miguel A. Zabalza Beraza writes that “When you attend innovation conferences or events where teachers share experiences about changes introduced in teaching, three-quarters of what you hear has to do with incorporating ICT into the world of education at all levels,” Miguel Zabalza begins. “One hundred percent of general educational journals have dedicated special issues to the subject, and many have focused on this issue. In other words, the world of technology and the new resources that open us to the wide world of information and communication has been taking over a large part of the space and prominence in the topics of educational innovations.”

Companies and universities are constantly looking to “innovate” by bringing out new products using technology without improving anything, comments Justin Reich, Director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab. In an article published in Sage, Reich says that “educational technology evangelists tend to describe their inventions as similar to Swiss Army knives, capable of fulfilling numerous functions and solving a myriad of problems. However, they are more like a bunch of scattered, mismatched tools. Many are useful for specific tasks, but the entire collection adds up to less than the sum of its parts.”

The reality is that many things have changed in the world of education in recent years, and much of this has been due to ICT, but as Justin Reich mentions, although there are endless new applications, platforms, and inventions, many times, these sum to nothing. For this reason, it is necessary to analyze where the improvements are to assess whether their inclusion positively affects student learning.

In the book, Zabalza mentions Nicholas Carr and his book The Shallows, as he talks about superficialities and what the Internet is doing to people’s heads; he refers to ICTs as the “ecosystem of distraction technologies.” About this, Zabalza writes that “trying to read while doing a puzzle – that is what the Internet is for this author, who comes to that conclusion after having analyzed his evolution as a compulsive user of social networks. One day, he discovered he could no longer read a book or a large text. He needed to interrupt his reading occasionally, focus on other things, and check his emails.”

For Carr, technological “innovations” have not improved things as people think. On the contrary, Zabalza writes, “They have caused a kind of isomorphism between the structure of thought and the communication formats that networks use: short, superficial, heterogeneous, and discontinuous texts. Our brain becomes used to receiving numerous simultaneous stimuli, making it difficult to focus on something more stable and requiring concentration.”

Even something commonly used in classes like PowerPoint has received criticism for not improving people’s thought processes. An example of this that Zabalza mentions is Professor Edward Tufte, who published The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint in 2003, where his most significant criticism was the fact that it does not have good resolution when it comes to being projected, in addition to the fact that the information needs to be abbreviated a lot. Tufte wrote, “The convenience of PowerPoint for the speaker can prove costly for both the content and the audience. These costs result from the characteristic cognitive style of the default standard PowerPoint presentation – the foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as a model for organizing all kinds of content, dividing narrative and data into minimal slides and snippets, rapid temporal sequencing of scarce information rather than focused spatial analysis, eye-catching decor and a concern for format, not content, a business attitude that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

Author Frank Frommer agrees with Tufte. He believes that using this tool alludes to shrunken language, which reduces reasoning and analysis to merely learning slogans, and he thinks it clutters not only hard drives but also brains.

Speaking of saturation, nowadays, with so many technological tools such as e-books, tablets, computers, cell phones, and even things like video consoles saturate young people with information to the point where, as Barack Obama told students at Hampton University, “information has become a distraction, an amusement, a form of leisure rather than a tool for personal fulfillment.”

There are increasingly more studies on how these technologies impact people’s capabilities, allowing us to know if they are an innovation, a fad, or a passing change. In this regard, it will be interesting to investigate how remote learning has impacted students’ thinking structure. One study by the Smile Foundation in India, which began to examine the issue, found that 58% of educators surveyed felt that children lost social skills and were easily distracted after the COVID-19 lockdown.

Innovation does not equal change; it has to be accompanied by improvement. Through it, we seek to solve a problem or meet a need. However, in many cases, this does not happen because what is desired to be solved is unclear or irrelevant. The problem or solution is something being imposed rather than being intentional.

In recent years, all the disciplinary and sector journals and congresses have published research on countless “educational innovations.” Being “innovative” has become a synonym for being “good.” However, few stop considering whether these changes are innovations, if they genuinely impact how the student learns, and if the teacher understands the innovation and how to apply it.

So, reader: Have you encountered so-called “innovations” that came to nothing? In your opinion, what have been the best innovations of recent years? Do you think that if a teacher is not innovative, they are a terrible teacher? Have you ever felt pressured to innovate?

Translation by Daniel Wetta

Paulette Delgado

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0