Part 10: learn more

Adaptive learning is likely to impact on the lives of language teachers very soon. In my work as a writer of education materials, it has already dramatically impacted on mine. This impact has affected the kinds of things I am asked to write, the way in which I write them and my relationship with the editors and publishers I am writing for. I am as dismissive as Steve Jobs[1] was of the idea that technology can radically transform education, but in the short term it can radically disrupt it. Change is not necessarily progress.

Teachers and teacher trainers need to be very alert to what is going on if they don’t want to wake up one morning and find themselves out of work, or in a very different kind of job. The claims for adaptive language learning need to be considered in the bright light of particular, local contexts. Teachers and teacher trainers can even take a lesson from the proponents of adaptive learning who rail against the educational approach of one-size-fits-all. One size, whether it’s face-to-face with a print coursebook or whether it’s a blended adaptive program, will never fit all. We need to be very skeptical of the publishers and software providers who claim in a TED-style, almost evangelical way that they are doing the right thing for students, our society, or our world. There is a real risk that adaptive learning may be leading simply to ‘a more standardised, minimalist product targeted for a mass market, [that] will further ‘box in’ and ‘dumb down’ education’ (Selwyn, Education and Technology 2011, p.101).

There is nothing wrong, per se, with adaptive learning. It could be put to some good uses, but how likely is this? In order to understand how it may impact on our working lives, we need to be better informed. A historical perspective is often a good place to start and Larry Cuban’s Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986) is still well worth reading.

To get a good picture of where big data and analytics are now and where they are heading, Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier’s Big Data (London: John Murray, 2013) is informative and entertaining reading. If you are ‘an executive looking to integrate analytics in your decision making or a manager seeking to generate better conversations with the quants in your organisation’, I’d recommend Keeping up with the Quants by Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim (Harvard Business School, 2013). Or you could just read ‘The Economist’ for this kind of thing.

If you want to follow up the connections between educational technology and neo-liberalism, the books by Stephen Ball (Global Education Inc., Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012), Neil Selwyn (Education and Technology, London: Continuum, 2011; Education in a Digital World, New York: Routledge, 2013; Distrusting Educational Technology, New York: Routledge, 2013), Diane Ravitch (Reign of Error, New York: Knopf, 2013) and Joel Spring (Education Networks, New York: Routledge, 2012; The Great American Education-Industrial Complex with Anthony G. Picciano, Routledge, 2013) are all good reads. And keep a look out for anything new from these writers.

Finally, to keep up to date with recent developments, the eltjam blog http://www.eltjam.com/ is a good one to follow, as is Richard Whiteside’s Scoop.it! page http://www.scoop.it/t/elt-publishing-by-richard-whiteside

I’ll be continuing to post things here from time to time! Thanks for following me so far.

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[1] Jobs, however, did set his sights ‘on the $8 billion a year textbook industry, which he saw as ‘ripe for digital destruction’. His first instinct seems to have been to relieve kids from having to carry around heavy backpacks crammed with textbooks: ‘The iPad would solve that,’ he said, ever practical’ (Fullan, Stratosphere 2013, p.61).