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So - and for the record - here are a few of my core beliefs about edtech:
First, I believe deep in my bones that learning is a relationship. That authentic learning has everything to do with the educator / learner relationship - with the mentoring and coaching and caring that is inseparable from the art of teaching.
Therefore, if we believe in learning - even (especially) if we are technology people - that we need to do everything to champion and support educators. I don’t see a relationship-based approach to edtech as problematic. In fact, the very best online, low-residency, and blended learning approaches (all of which rely on technology) are constructed around a relational (rather than transactional) model.
Second, I believe that the smartest thing that edtech people can do is communicate our understanding of the limits of technology. Technology can help, but only when it is used as complement to educators.
Any talk about technology substituting for educators reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how learning works. This again is why trends towards public disinvestment in postsecondary education, and the adjunctification of the faculty labor force, are so distressing. Supporting education means supporting educators.
Third, it is time for all of us working in edtech to come to terms with the mixed (at best) track record of our profession. We need to separate the advances and affordances of online, low-residency, and blended education (which are many), from the hype and overpromises of the edtech industry. Those of us in edtech need to think critically about who benefits, and who loses, when big money (and monopolistic) interests drive educational decisions.
Every educator working at the intersection of learning and technology should be skeptical about the overblown claims that tend to accompany every new wave of educational technology. We can be excited about future advances in digital learning - including adaptive learning environments and virtual reality or whatever - but we should balance our enthusiasm with some historical knowledge of the long-term failures of technology to improve learning (or lower costs).
My suspicion is that most edtech people working in and around higher ed share these same core beliefs.
It is equally true, I fear, that there are strong pushes outside of higher education to substitute technology for educators.
We need to resist the higher ed / edtech productivity agenda. An agenda that claims that if only higher education achieved the technologically based market efficiencies (and philosophical worldview) other industries, that we will finally achieve 'a revolution in higher education'. (Claims that we need to create the Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon of higher education emerge with a depressing regularity).
How we as an edtech community defend the role of educators over technological solutionism is an interesting question.
My sense is that we are doing too little, at least as measured by the continued assault on the security, status, and autonomy of faculty - and the growing political acceptance that public support of higher education is a cost to be borne, rather than an investment to be made.
Can you articulate some of your core edtech beliefs?
