BECTA's Next Generation Learning

Magic, training and education

Scott Adams the author of the Dilbert Strip cartoon series expounded in an early book the concept of a personal stupidity threshold. In a nutshell, depending on just how dumb you are various aspects of modern life, technology figuring highly amongst these, become 'not understandable to you'.

At which point, all activities that you carry out above your stupidity threshold are only accessible (cognitively speaking) through the time-honoured behaviours humans have employed to cope with the magical.

We interact with magical things (which by definition lay beyond our comprehension) through ritual behaviour aided by totemic paraphernalia and chosen 'expert' intecessionaries.

Thus today, for those who are religious believers, operating in a magical world is straight-forward; they are accustomed to its form. Others have atavistic magical superstitions to draw upon. It's the rationalist-atheists I feel sorry for. For in today's technical world, especially the world of computers, for most people it may as well be just... magic.

Well hi, welcome to the average Microsoft Office user.

MS Office was very popular with its users; its congregation of worshippers. Most of whom knew powerful magic when they saw it. Of course it made no sense whatsoever to them but bit by bit they learned the rituals they had to go through to get the great god to spit out some hard copy, embed a picture or attach something huge to an e-mail.

Seasoned speakers who need to do regular presentations with the magic lantern slide show (Powerpoint), soon learned to carry their own shrine (laptop and projector) with them as the gods would routinely frown quixotically on promiscuity with USB dongles.

In one tribe, it is said, folklore required its users to dance naked around the printer and to click the right button of the mouse with their left nipple before the left margins would reliably line up. But enough of South Croydon.

The good thing though, from a marketing perspective about magical objects is that devotees (having been once 'smiled upon' by them) rarely transfer their allegiance to other objects. Converting believers is notoriously tricky thing to do and best left to the pros. It either needs to be nearly painless or offer huge advantages. Historically the Christians were pretty good at this and had a cool package with excellent after-sales on offer.

It is at this point we realise why it is so hard to migrate users from MS Office 2003 to Open Office 3 and worse to MS Office 2007. Beacuse if, as a user of a PC you actually understood what you were doing, then when changing from Windows 2000 to Vista, Office 2000 Pro to Office 2007 or to Linux and Open Office:

a) you would still be able to find your files
b) working Mail Merge in Open Office would be as simple as in MS Office
c) embedding movies in Impress would be a doddle.

But truthfully, most don't know what they are doing, they only know what they do... and if what you need to do changes then you are in FUDsville and potentialy in trouble. This brings me to the point of this article.

Next Generation Learning

This sub-header is the slogan adopted by BECTA to describe the future of ICT in UK education. It does not in itself indicate that there was anything wrong with the previous generation of learning but it ought to.

We have lived through an era, I call it the Office era, where a generation of students were introduced to Microsoft Office and learnt to do word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, databases and desktop publishing. Put more exactly, they were trained to use MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel, MS Access and MS Publisher which were being sold into schools at discounted rates.

To be fair, the case for doing so was fairly compelling. It runs thus, 'This is the stuff you will meet in the work place so we are preparing you for the future outside school'. Brilliant strategy; 'train a generation for the fact that has not happened so that it does happen'.

Unfortunatley this approach runs a coach and horses through the nearly-forgotton debate between training and education. The latter requires understanding the former does not. Mid 20th Century it seemed more or less decided that in schools, education trumped training, but as the school-leaving age rose and league tables were invented the position changed. Metricised outcomes rule OK.

No one seemed to notice or care that education in schools, especially ICT, was reducing to training. The problem is fundamental though. A trained student, trained monkey, trained adult operates comfortably above their stupidity threshold, but of course at the end of the day it's all magic to them. And before anyone says that for computers and cars you don't need to understand them to use them.

So like our leading bankers, being a trained monkey and operating above your stupidity threshold in a world that is to all intents and purposes magical is all very comfortable, and you will gain plaudits for your skill, until something changes. Then you are lost, utterly.

The Office-era of ICT teaching is for me a metaphor for what is wrong with education. Spoon fed training of incomprehending children for a future that is nowhere near as fixed as they have been lead to believe.

The next generation must be offered something better. Education needs to reassert itself over training.