Is technology enough to innovate and transform education?

Failure to Disrupt Book Review

Asia Franks

One word that is typically used when discussing innovation is technology. But innovating education involves more than just technology. Implementing intentional changes to pedagogy, instruction, and curriculum is necessary to ensure the use of technology included in the curriculum is used to improve teaching and learning. In his paper addressing innovation, Crosscombe argues that stakeholders using the word innovation assume that new products are enough to improve education but history has shown that new products create a financial burden and, in all actuality, new ideas are needed to improve the classroom experience. According to Crosscombe (2018), “Educational movements to encourage innovation disguise consumerism as pedagogy” (p. 49). When implementing new technology, it is necessary to keep pedagogy at the forefront and analyze the history of innovation to ensure that new yet ineffective technologies are not repeated.

Reich, an educational technologist, wrote his book Failure to explain why new technologies will not reinvent school systems. Reich (2020) categorizes learning into three categories and urges educators to determine which category a proposed new technology fits into and then make predictions about the outcomes based on history (p. 8). Instructor-guided, algorithm-guided, and peer-guided learning systems are described in depth and Reich offers strengths and weaknesses that these systems have on student learning.  

Reich’s book is divided into two parts. The first part describes and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of massive open online courses: instructor-guided, algorithm-guided, and peer-guided. In the second part of the book, Reich explains four obstacles that education must overcome in order for new technologies to benefit education. First, educators are adopting technology that replicates existing practices known as the curse of the familiar (Reich, 2020). Second, new resources often benefit affluent students who are able to utilize and take advantage of resources leaving socioeconomic advantage students behind which is known as the Edtech Matthew effect. Third, many learning systems can only assess routine performance rather than complex performance (Reich, 2020). This is known as the trap of routine assessments. Finally, Reich (2020) states that, “Successfully harnessing the power of data and experiments in learning at scale will involve balancing the potential rewards of research for incrementally improving learning technologies and learning science with the risks and harms that might accompany such research.” (p. 200). He explains the history of improving education by analyzing data, offers the benefits of educational research and offers strategies for managing the toxic power of data and experiments (Reich, 2020). Reich also reviews some commonly used applications in the classroom such as Quizlet, Desmos, Scratch, Math Blaster, and DuoLingo. 

Both Crosscombe and Reich advocate for the use of technology however urge educators to not fall in the trap of buying the newest application but instead deeply analyze the potential for improving pedagogy and student outcomes. I urge educators to read this book to become more knowledgeable about the history of technology and why it is not enough to transform education. Four questions that Reich urges educators to ask when choosing new learning technologies are: “What’s new? Who is guiding the learning experience — an instructional designer, an adaptive learning algorithm, or a community of peers? Pedagogically, is this attempting to fill pails or kindle flames? What existing technologies does this adopt?” (p. 233). 

References

Crosscombe, N. (2018). Innovation. Brock Education: A Journal of Educational Research and Practice, 27(2), 48–52.

Reich, J. (2020). Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education. Harvard University Press.