Challenge of managing the new technologies in educationOne of the participants in a conference held recently raised a question relating to the recent interventions of technologies like AI and chatbots in school education and how the teachers need to respond. He also expressed the fear whether these technologies would slowly wipe out the role of teachers in schools or marginalize the roles in the learning institutions. Indeed, it was a relevant question though founded on fear.
Change has always been a part of all growth and development processes for several centuries. None the less, the speed of change is what is haunting the minds of the current generation. Alongside, the innumerable number of inventions, the convergence and divergence of technologies is also creating a wide spectrum of opportunities and challenges. Though the education systems might not have responded to them adequately, the informal impact of these new arrivals both on learning and lifestyle modifications cannot be neglected, ignored or scoffed at. It is in this context the question raised by the individual assumes significance.
It is important for us to keep the following in mind:
1. STAYING HEALTHY WITH FUNDAMENTAL OF EDUCATION
The larger objectives of education are human growth and development. The survival, co-habitation and peaceful living are the basic requirements of any community or a nation, whatever technology, whatever tools and processes they use for achieving, enhancing and ensuring these purposes. These essentials are basically woven on a web of values, learned cultures, evolved belief systems and intended goodness, truth and beauty of all things within and exterior to living. Education cannot afford to show either a blind eye or a deaf ear to these purposes. Hence, the inclusion of technologies cannot, rather should not, either provide a threat or disturb its balance in a social organization.
2. TWIN DIMENSIONS OF EDUCATION
In early days, the learning dynamics was detailed into two directional forces ‘para’ vidya and ‘Apara’ vidya – the one leading to enriching knowledge of external and the other leading to enriching the internal aspects of our existence. Over the recent decades, the focus has largely shifted towards the ‘knowledge of the external’ rather than the ‘internal’. While one cannot underplay the importance of exploring and experimenting with what is seen, heard and experienced, the importance of understanding the inner self and its conscious co-existence with the external needs to become a continuous learning exercise and experiment. With the speed of change, the ability to cope and balance them, the ability to synergize them for a greater purpose of life appears to have been challenged. Education cannot afford to devalue or give a step motherly treatment to educating the inner self at the cost of technologies. Nor do the technologies have any such intentions. It is we who handle them, need to become wiser.
3. The Danger of chasing the speed
While it is important to become inclusive with all technologies and their appendices, it is equally important to ensure that education should not chase technologies as an ‘Eldorado” or ‘Elixir de Life”. They are not and they shall never be. It appears that technologies are playing almost the role of ‘alchemy’, creating a wide variety of things on their by-lanes, in their processes of research for converting the baser things into gold. They are indeed good curative remedies for solving some existential problems in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. They help to better learning and do not cause learning. They facilitate understanding, pursuing and celebrating different perspectives of concepts, but don’t create new perspectives. They open the doors to new perspectives. While technologies could chase education, either because they have a place and value, or for purposes of market dynamics, education should not chase technologies, however allowing them to be more inclusive and get subsumed into their breathing exercise.
4. Education should respond and not react.
The emergence of new technologies has been an ongoing process. As one who started using computers four decades ago (in late seventies), I have seen how technologies have been knocking at the doors of thought leaders for their quick and heroic entry from time to time, many of them willing to take the role of clowns or comedians as they could not get a place for the hero in the educational stardom. But every technology is not educational technology. The relevance of a technology to a joyful learning process must be evaluated on ethical platforms, ensuring that they do not corrupt the larger basics of education. Though technologies have acted as powerful culture catalysts, inclusion of technologies for window shopping in education to gravitate numbers, glory, fame or leadership doesn’t serve any purpose, for the simple reason the shelf-life of every technology is increasingly getting minimal. Education, therefore, should learn to respond meaningfully and purposefully to technologies rather than considering them as fast food for a quick bite during a learning drill.
5. Education and Teachers need to evolve.
There is absolutely no need for the teaching community to succumb to any fear for using technologies. It is not a question of ‘now’ or ‘never’. It is indeed a process of ‘learn’ and ‘weather’. The possibility of the learners being ahead on the ‘learning curve’ as against their teachers is increasingly inevitable, the simple reason being the opportunity for informal learning is becoming explosive and the learners have time for it. Further, the curiosity levels of the learners are far better than those of their elders. Hence, teachers and educational institutions need to evolve in a progressive and organized manner with technologies, integrating them into processes and thought structures. The informal learning of technologies is increasingly important and inevitable for the teaching community. But mere knowledge of a technology without its purposeful, appropriate, relevant and concurrent use, it remains another piece of stacked knowledge losing its value with time.
Technologies are here to stay so long humans exist. We don’t have to be stressed about either their existence, their use, their kingdom or their dominance. All that we need to understand is that we are never servants of technologies, but either friends or masters of technologies.
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