Editorial

Caution: changing education, changing technology

The theme of our^very successful ALT-C 95 was Changing Education, Changing Technology.
The papers which made up the conference (a small selection of which are published in this
special issue of ALT-f) would have reflected this theme even if it had not been chosen by the
conference committee, since both educational thinking and educational technology are so
patently in flux.

Educational theory over the centuries has shown wild swings between, on the one hand, an
approach based on rote learning and step-by-step dispensing of knowledge (politically safe and
therefore the traditional route) and, on the other, one based on discovery and experiential
learning (nearly always rejected by the establishment, at best after trial periods). At present, the
direction of the pendulum is towards active learning, exploratory learning and so forth, and the
wobbles I detect from time to time probably do not indicate an imminent swing in the opposite
direction among educationists, since these wobbles are mostly caused by politicians.

Running parallel with this move towards learning centred on partnership, interactivity and
discovery are the developments in learning technology with which ALT is so deeply
concerned. But user-expectations are still largely ahead of what the technology can actually
deliver. And herein lies the heart of the problem of the relationship between changing
education and changing technology. Current educational thinking makes ever-increasing
demands on a technology which, as often as not, is unequal to the task. Hence the lack of full-
screen, full-motion, fully interactive video in multimedia CAL software. Hence the inability of
most examples of such software to distinguish between a serious student error and little more
than a slip of the finger on the keyboard, let alone to see subtle implications in errors,
implications which human teachers might easily sense. Hence the difficulties encountered in a
number of Internet-related learning schemes: the supposed information superhighway can in
reality be more like an information B road.

So while I was hardly astonished that the majority of the papers given at the conference dealt
in one way or another with changes in technology and/or reflected present trends in
educational thinking, I was a little surprised that so few of them directly addressed what for me

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Gabriel Jacobs Editorial

was the central implication of the conference's theme: the complex and potentially uneasy
relationship between the two kinds of change.

Many papers described pieces of high-risk software - high-risk because it teeters on the edge
of the capabilities of the technology available to most people, and because its effectiveness is
as yet unproven. The history of information-delivery technology shows that as soon as a new
form of it appears (chalk and slate, the printing press, tape recorders, overhead projectors,
video tapes, computer-controlled presentations, data communications . . . ) , teachers try to take
advantage of its educational possibilities, with varying degrees of success. There is of course
nothing intrinsically wrong in the desire to tread new ground; after all, if Columbus had waited
until it was perfectly safe to travel by sea, he would not have found America. On the other
hand, we are dealing here not with, say, medical research where doctors try out risky
techniques on patients who would otherwise die because there is no alternative treatment, but
rather with an area offering a whole range of well-tried methods.

Changing education is not always a consequence of changing technology, nor vice-versa. The
links between the two, inextricable though they are, are far from straightforward, and we who
consider ourselves at the forefront of educational thinking should constantly be on our guard
against the dangerous view that they must necessarily move forward hand in hand. Who dares
wins may be the motto of the SAS, but we are not in their business.

Gabriel Jacobs

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