The Most Persistent Myth

this will revolutionize education no prediction has been made as often or as incorrectly as that one in 1922 it was Thomas Edison who declared that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely if not entirely the use of textbooks yeah and you know how that worked out by the 1930s it was radio the idea was you could beam experts directly into classrooms improving the quality of education for more students at lower cost and that would mean you require fewer skilled teachers a theme common

to all of the proposed education revolutions like that of educational television in the 1950s and 60s studies were conducted to determine whether students preferred watching a lecture live or sitting in an adjacent room where the same lecture was broadcast via closed-circuit TV what would you prefer in the 80s there was no debating computers were the revolutionary solution to our educational woes they were audio-visual interactive and could be programmed to do almost anything you like well at the time they could run Oregon Trail but their potential was obvious researchers suspected that if they could teach kids

to program say how to move a turtle around a screen then their procedural reasoning skills would also improve so how did it go well the students got better at programming the turtle but their reasoning skills were unaffected even by the 1990s we had not learned from the failure of our past predictions and I quote the use of video discs in classroom instruction is increasing every year and promises to revolutionize what will happen in the classroom of tomorrow video discs yeah those giant oversized CD things remember when they revolutionized education nowadays plenty of things are poised

to revolutionize education like smart boards smartphones tablets and MOOCs those are massive open online courses and some believe we're getting close to a universal teaching machine a computer so quick and well programmed that is basically like having your own personal tutor in Sheen a student could work through well-structured lessons at their own pace receiving immediate and personally tailored feedback and all without the interference of a meddlesome and expensive teacher do these claims sound familiar over the past 100 years a lot of areas of life have been revolutionized but education is not one of them by

and large students are still taught in groups by a single teacher and that is not what a revolution looks like some might blame this state of affairs on the inertia of our educational institutions it's just too hard to get a huge bureaucracy to change but I think the reason technology hasn't revolutionized education is something else something that goes to the very heart of what education is let's consider the process of learning say you want to teach someone how a human heart pumps blood which learning a do you think would be more effective this animation with

narration or this set of static pictures with text obviously the animation is better I mean for one thing it shows exactly what the heart does for decades educational research focused on questions like this does a video promote learning better than a book our live lectures more effective than televised lectures is animation better than static graphics in all well-controlled studies the result is no significant difference that is so long as the content is equivalent between the two treatments the learning outcomes are the same with all different media how is this possible how can something which seems

so powerful like animation be no more effective than static graphics well for one thing animations are fleeting and so you might miss something as they go by Plus since the parts are animated for you you don't have to mentally envision how the parts are moving and so you don't have to invest as much mental effort which would make it more memorable in fact sometimes esthetic graphics perform better than animations and I think this points to a really fundamental aspect of Education which is it doesn't matter what happens around the learner we are not limited by

the experiences we can give to students what limits learning is what can happen inside this head that is where the important part of learning takes place no technology is inherently superior to any other researchers spent so much time investigating whether one medium or technology was more effective than another that they failed to investigate exactly how to use the technology to promote meaningful thought processes so the question really is what experiences promote the kind of thinking that is required for learning recently that research is being conducted and we're finding out some pretty important stuff I mean

it may sound obvious but it turns out learning with words and pictures together whether they're animation & narration or static pictures and text works better than words alone also we see that anything which is extraneous needs to be eliminated from a lesson for example on-screen text competes with visuals so learners perform better when it is omitted than when it is present now that we know how best to make educational videos and any experience can be simulated in the video setting YouTube must be the platform that will revolutionize education I mean the number of educational videos

on YouTube is increasing every day so why do we need teachers well if you think that the fundamental job of a teacher is to transmit information from their head to their students then you're right they are obsolete I mean you probably imagine a classroom where this teacher is spewing out facts at a pace which is appropriate for one student to fast for half and to slow for the rest luckily the fundamental role of a teacher is not to deliver information it is to guide the social process of learning the job of a teacher is to

inspire to challenge to excite their students to want to learn yes they also do explain and demonstrate and show things but fundamentally that is beside the point the most important thing a teacher does is make every student feel like they are important to make them feel accountable for doing the work of learning all of this is not to say technology has had no impact on education students and teachers work and communicate via computers and videos are used both inside and outside of classrooms but all of this is best characterized as an evolution not a revolution

the foundation of Education is still based on the social interaction between teachers and students for as transformative as each new technology seems to be like motion pictures or computers or smart boards what really matters is what happens inside the learners head and making a learner think seems best achieved in a social environment with other learners and a caring teacher [Music] [Music]