BY AARON BARLOW

At the “OEB Global, incorporating Learning Technologies” (once Online Educa Berlin) conference in Berlin today, Audrey Watters, one of the most perceptive thinkers on education that I know of, spoke on “Ed-Tech Agitprop.” Though her primary purpose was to debunk some of the bits of received “wisdom” about the future, ones we have been carrying around unquestioning, she also conveys a message about education that resonates back to John Dewey, at the very least.

Watters says:

We should want a future of human dignity and thriving and justice and security and care — for everyone. Education is a core part of that. But dignity, thriving, justice, and care are rarely the focus of how we frame “the future of learning” or “the future of work.” Robots will never care for us. Unbridled techno-solution will never offer justice. Lifelong learning isn’t thriving when it is a symptom of economic precarity, of instability, of a disinvestment in the public good.

Through mention of The Matrix and a Nicholas Negroponte (the creator of the One Laptop per Child project that was to revolutionize global education) claim that a pill really will, one day, replace education, Watters affirms the importance of process to education, and even “presence” (a word and concept I’ve glommed onto thanks to a comment posted in here on the Academe blog).

Learning and teaching are human activities and cannot be truncated. “So,” Watters asks, “why would Matrix-style learning be desirable? Because of its speed? Its lack of teachers?” What we are being offered is “an epistemic poverty in which human experience and human culture are not valued.”

And that, human experience and  human culture tell us, won’t take us very far.

While Watters tilts against the edutech mechanical windmills, and I applaud, my own thoughts remain focused on this particular point, that many of the new trends in “digital education” are dead ends for humanity. And that leads me back to my perennial question, the one about how I might help students in the classes I design, help them improve their own education—and do so in light of the powerful forces acting against us both, forces aching to transform education into production.

In practical terms, I am constantly trying to figure of what can I steal from the machine that will also bring its “forward” momentum to a halt and let people provide that, instead.

After all, I’m not going to be able to take technology out of the classroom. Though I avoid Blackboard and the other organized technological “aids” I am offered, I still use digital possibilities as I teach and, though I am sorely tempted to ask students to keep them off, I am even trying to find ways to integrate smartphones into the dynamic of learning.

I am no Luddite. No longer do I accept formal papers except through email, where I can easily see if the students have completed the revision part of each assignment (another student must have edited the paper using Word’s “Review” functions—which I use also, to mark the paper). In class, when I use a slide presentation, which I often do, I make sure it is not the driving force, but an accent to what I am attempting as I interact with the students. I don’t use anything “off the digital shelf” in class, for that sneaks between me and the students, but I am willing to work with my students to build blogs and websites for class purposes.

The thing I don’t want to do is turn my class over to mass-market programs that take the personal out of education, that remove the interaction between teacher and student from its central place in the process, replacing it with some sort of pill, real or metaphorical.

Watters, who I suspect would be phenomenal in the classroom were she to return her talents to that arena, shows that she understands the importance of the personal even when speaking to a large group of strangers—and probably strangers inclined to be antagonistic to her point, at that. She speaks from and of personal experience, never trying to sound “objective” or “impartial,” two of the concepts often foisted on educators by inexperienced outsiders. She brings in elements of popular culture to make her points,  and speaks conversationally.

At one point, she quotes Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II),” “Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone.” But she infuses into the line an intent Roger Waters probably never imagined. Waters was writing about the oppressive nature of a particular type of “education,” where it can seem as though the purpose is to shut students up. The line has been taken up, Watters implies, by (primarily, in my view) non-educators who imagine education can best take place without teachers, thanks to automation. They want the school of teaching without teachers.

Which reminds me of something….

Oh, yes: The satire of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, where Hoover Shoats wants to establish a Holy Church of Christ Without Christ. Shoats is a conman. I sometimes wonder (with Watters, I suspect) if many of our new automated education apostles aren’t, as well.