Welcome to The Tech Humanist Show a multimedia format program exploring how data and technology shape the human experience I'm your host Kate O'Neill Today on the show we're talking about how we can achieve a brighter future for education schools are not created equal as any parent will tell you for proof look no further than the recent college admissions bribery scandal or the fact that we still grade our schools and use those metrics to determine school budgets beyond that budgetary restrictions and teacher experience can make for vastly different education outcomes and with our rapidly changing technology some of these differences will become magnified in my book A Future So Bright I write about the opportunity for a brighter future for education which is critical to ensuring we meet united nations sustainable development goal number four ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all but when we think about what it might take to make the future brighter for education most teachers and administrators i have spoken with in the US will start their answer with budgets and move on to curricula this isn't strictly an American occurrence either i spoke with Dr. Oluwakemi Olurinola who is both an educator and an educational technology consultant speaker and a microsoft global training partner based in Nigeria about attempts to improve the education system in Nigeria and where the most significant gaps are sometimes when we think about the teaching and learning and we think about instructional materials most times we're looking at how to get these things bought you know we are talking about budgets you know sometimes we engage with some schools and they'll tell you oh i'm ict compliant because they have quite a number of laptops but then you go into how these things uh these devices are being used and you see that basically all they're doing is converting their hand nodes to soft copies and all that and that isn't really what technology integration is really about and you know sometimes you also see where budgets and the large amount of money spent buying devices and because we there used to be this imagination that once you have technology in the hands of students definitely there's improved learning and we know that that is not true yeah one of the lessons um taken away and uh was actually the gap the the skill gap of the teachers because we've seen governments budgets you know or spend on technology and then you still have that skill gap budget and curriculum are very real limitations but before we even get there there are more fundamental challenges facing education many of which are globally relevant but as we look at the challenges and what i call change factors faced by schools and teachers we see a lot more to overcome a brighter future starts with full acknowledgement of harms and risks as well as the opportunities for improvement if we want the future of education to be as bright as possible we have to do that here largely when we talk about the future we think of two extremes dystopia versus utopia while it feels like we should be aiming for utopia in our planning and strategizing deep down we know that's not possible and that makes it useless it's a problem of framing several of the experts i've spoken with share this view including Rahaf Harfoush strategist digital anthropologist and best-selling author who focuses on the intersections between emerging technology innovation and digital culture and John C. Havens executive director of the ieee global initiative on ethics of autonomous and intelligent systems and they each elaborate on why it doesn't make sense to think of things this way everything has the capacity to help us it's just that it's going to also simultaneously hurt us in some new and different ways i don't necessarily think about what's going to help humanity i think about what new challenges are going to emerge with this technology and how can we navigate that the bigger question for me becomes is like how can we prepare people to hold this duality because what worries me is that a lot of the tech crowd comes in and they try to push you this utopian version and then other people come in and they try to push you the dystopian version and the thing is is like both of those are not true but both of those are true in different ways for every single case of facial recognition that actually helps to catch a criminal there's a case of where it's being used to breach privacy i always say it's going to be equally awesome and equally terrible at the same time and that's why it's going to be so hard to predict the future and we just have to continuously ask ourselves what side of the equation are we falling on six years ago i was writing a series for mashable what i was finding is that even back six years ago there were only the extremes here's the dystopian aspect of ai here's the utopian and i just kept calling people and saying okay is there a code of ethics for ai because i'd like to know and that will kind of help balance things out and more and more no one knew of ones there will never be a complete utopia or complete dystopia they exist simultaneously within our tech and within ourselves the either or model distances us from the very real consequences of our decisions and how they play out in future realities when it comes to technology and education there are externalities to our decisions that must be considered the good news is we can make decisions that affect the future every day which means we can still bend that feature towards the most uplifting and empowering outcomes for all of humanity first though let's look at the potential harms and risks within our current system one major issue that has cropped up and been magnified since the onset of the pandemic is lack of equitable broadband access Dr Chris Gilliard a writer professor and speaker whose scholarship concentrates on digital privacy and the intersections of race class and technology explains the consequences he's seen firsthand because of this inequity in Detroit lack of access to internet can be tied to health outcomes can be tied to long-term educational outcomes or employment opportunities and things like that and if you looked at say a map a redlining map of the city of Detroit that many of the ways that these maps were drawn a lot of the disproportionate effects of discrimination are still being felt by the populations what i call that is digital redlining if you drive along eight mile or some other roads in in Detroit it's very clear 50 60 70 years later what the after effects are of these housing policies i teach at a community college i started to see through a lot of the work with students some of the ways that those effects became digital whether that was a lack of access to to broadband or lack of access to certain scholarly publications these were issues before covid but our changing education landscape has made them much more noticeable and urgent shortly after the onset of the covet 19 pandemic unesco reported that 192 countries had closed all schools and universities which left nearly 1.6 billion children and young people representing more than 90 percent of the world's learners scrambling to adapt not to mention their teachers parents and guardians un data reveals a nearly insurmountable scale of lost schooling due to covid the research suggests that quote up to 70 percent of 10 year olds in low and middle income countries cannot read or understand simple text up from 53 percent pre-covered in South Africa school children are between 75 and a whole school year behind where they should be with up to 500 000 having dropped out of school altogether between march 2020 and October 2021 this has long-term implications as well in the 2005 Pakistan earthquake students missed three months of school but four years later were still one and a half years behind where they would have been then there are intersectional issues of gender class and race around the world girls education is most at risk with over 11 million girls at risk of not returning to school after COVID-19 for a variety of reasons including caregiving demands early enforced marriages adolescent pregnancy beliefs that girls aren't supposed to be educated and more on top of that there is a tremendous inequity of resources available to students in low-income communities leaving far too many students including a disproportionate number of non-white students at a significant disadvantage and then there are issues of safety with the increasing number of school shootings many districts are increasing their security often at the expense of jobs designed to help students progress New York city public schools for example have over five thousand full-time police officers but only three thousand guidance counselors the presence of these officers drives up rates of punitive measures for students of color including instances of punishment for things like burping which feeds into the school to prison pipeline on top of all this the cost of education is increasing especially higher education like colleges and universities daniel binol of wbir tv in knoxville calculated the increases in in-state tuition at the university of tennessee compared with wages over a nearly 40-year span and found that quote from 1982 to 2018 college costs at ut grew by 1430 percent while median income grew by 213 percent and minimum wage grew only by 116 percent the total amount of student debt carried by people well out of school is far too high college didn't used to be a risky investment but for many students especially those from low income backgrounds it very much is and we still haven't talked about curriculum in addition to the quality of information varying wildly from school to school many schools don't offer contemporary technical skills aren't as inclusive as they could be and don't take into account the differing learning styles of the students because of this variety of challenges we have a long way to go if we want to reach the goal of education equity so now that we've explored the downside let's take a look at the bright side what for example are the unique advantages of remote learning because i investigated the intersection of online and offline experiences from my 2016 book pixels in place i have been particularly intrigued with the pros and cons of the mass pivots to online experiences since early 2020. first online learning fosters a different type of imagination
for a long time students have existed in a binary where they are either at school where learning is done or not at school where learning is not expected to happen with the onset of online learning students homes have become a sort of third space which is described by Edward Soja in the field of human geography as quote an in-between space between binaries that enables the possibility to think and act otherwise this third-space ideology has allowed teachers to begin rejecting the long-held assumption that school buildings are the locus of learning and toward imagining ways in which meaningful learning can occur outside our rigid perceptions of what constitutes legitimate education for instance a 2021 study published in education sciences explores the ways that teachers in Scotland were pushed to not only learn how to use new digital tools for online learning during COVID-19 but to even more importantly imagine how to teach adaptively a practice that requires deep and sophisticated knowledge about learning learners and content this pushed teachers to embrace the idea that learning can occur in various forms and mediums including during activities usually seen as just for fun Dr. Olurinola encountered this in Nigeria as well and spoke to me about the joys of watching teachers embrace novelty and creativity in their teaching processes we had all forms of interventions as a country because we were aware that there was a disparity in their assets to technology especially for the not to develop cities and schools in the remote areas one of the lessons was the the skill gap of the teachers because we've seen governments spend on technology and then you still have that skill gap so one of the major things we saw the government do and i think that the learnings from the experience is teacher development we've had a lot of government initiatives government involvement in upskilling teachers especially with digital skills you had radio broadcastings you had tv stations teacher contents you know teachers teaching by the television but for some of the schools who could afford it there were technology integration at different levels and so the beauty about that period was even the creativity of the teachers we saw a lot of creativity where teachers began to use tools not originally developed for academic purposes but we saw them adapt to meet the needs with their students even during this period one nursing learned and was the importance of technology to our everyday lives we couldn't just adopt the ostrich approach so we had to stand up and embrace this change and in fairness to the teachers and to the students within that period we saw a lot of them taking up these challenges head-on you know and because the disruption was southern teachers weren't really prepared and but we saw a lot of them take up crash courses improved on their professional development you know learn how to use various technology tools and all this was just ensure that learning continued even though the pandemic was on in using third spaces to challenge the at school or not binary some students have been better able to participate and learn than they ever were in the classroom classrooms were not designed for all learning styles and with third-space learning according to authors of the study some of the underlying logics assumptions and norms that make people feel excluded and alone within institutionalized spaces are unmasked and made visible a practice that can lead to greater inclusion self-expression and change neurodivergent students for example seem to be better able to thrive in at home learning where they're able to be in a familiar environment so the novelty of learning is not overwhelming a 2017 report from the all party parliamentary group on autism in England presented survey results showing that quote fewer than half of children and young people on the autism spectrum say they are happy at school 7 in 10 say that their peers do not understand them and 5 in 10 say that their teachers do not know how to support them Sean Arnold a special educator and stem coach in New York city noticed a significant change when his students were working from home saying i had students who were selectively mute and had never spoken to their peers in school in person but because they had a familiar space they literally spoke to their classmates for the first time in remote learning i think that's meaningful he also noted a trend nearly all of the remote students with whom he works showed more growth than in-person classmates an article by Eva Tesfaye for NPR suggests that some students with autism and other neurological differences tend to focus better without other classmates around Bobby a sixth grader in western massachusetts told NPR that he likes online learning because it's a lot easier to focus i can be in my room and be a lot more comfortable doing stuff it's worth noting that virtual learning isn't always the best solution for neurodivergent students particularly in situations when remote learning requires significant support from parents when certain learners need to focus on developing social skills with classmates or when remote learning conflicts with meeting other objectives in a student's individualized education plan that said there is a growing and vocal contingent of parents teachers and students who want to permanently incorporate virtual or at-home learning as a resource which leads us to the part where we look forward how can we achieve a brighter future in regards to education what opportunities can we take action on today our goal is to make education equitable inclusive accessible available to all ages and resilient in spite of existing infrastructure gaps and climate challenges that means there's still a need to ensure public access to at least the basics of education it's hard to quantify the spillover benefits of public education but society can only gain in both economic prosperity and overall quality of life by continuing to invest in it i've put together a number of specific areas that if we focus our attention we can have the largest impact on future prosperity first invest in educating girls worldwide unesco lists several compelling statistics on their website that demonstrate the value of education at the individual level just one more year of school can increase a girl's earnings when she is an adult by up to 20 percent and at the more macroeconomic level some countries lose more than a billion u.s dollars a year by failing to educate girls to the same level as boys Dr. Olurinola works to expand what girls see as possible for themselves in the stem fields although girls in Nigeria knew they could be doctors that was the only job they could see themselves in over time especially in this climate as gender stereotyping over about the place of a woman and the types of career that she can and she cannot do so to help change that narrative we started what we call the girls in science and technology program in shorts we call it the gists and so it's basically an initiative aimed at educating and encouraging girls by providing these girls the opportunity to learn about stem i remember that a particular time i ran a program during the girls and science and i invited girls i had almost 70 girls in in the hall and i asked how many of them wanted to be medical doctors and you had everybody's hands up i had only one person in that room of almost seventy girls who was considering a career in engineering and i realized that basically they loved signs but they didn't know what all the career options were available to them so you have the the problem of awareness and one of the things we love to do is to show them videos also of uh women who are actually blazing and different career paths even in the science and tech field so they know that this is a possibility they have people they can look up to and mentors that they can say okay if she can do it then why can't i also do it if i have an interest in this field our next actionable and necessary step is to actively work to remove racist ideas and other systemic discrimination from the curriculum and the classroom we can instead increase messages of inclusion and respect another thing to think about is reimagining our education delivery methods one model called teaching at the right level or tarle attempts to sort students based on their current knowledge and learning level rather than their age the method was pioneered in India and rolled out to 10 African countries by mid-2020 whether that method works here or anywhere is really yet to be determined but we have to be willing to try new things and make bold decisions if we want to make big lasting change where possible we should also be working to improve learning opportunities with technology this includes making accommodation for students with autism spectrum disorder or asd or who learn better in familiar environments students from the national autistic society's young ambassadors group in England submitted a seven-point plan for how they believe schools could do things differently for students with asd including things like tackle bullying more effectively provide safe spaces including a quiet room that is always available to students with asd and understand that students on the autism spectrum may have sensory differences and may be particularly sensitive to things like light and noise in addition schools can work to use technology to enhance learning that's already in the current system Dr. Olurinola explored matching
specific technologies to different lessons to solidify concepts we see that different kind of contents require different kinds of engagement one of the common tools for use is powerpoint the powerpoint presentation doesn't actually address every form of engagement and so for instance i want to teach maths and there are other math tools that allow for you to collaborate for instance if i'm using Onenote and i'm sharing that notes with all my students they all can collaborate on that space to work out that mathematics equation that has a better output than presenting rigid content just using a powerpoint presentation and so because powerpoint is there it's easy to use sometimes it's abused and for instance i'm teaching a literature class uh maybe you have you've written a book on Tech Humanist i think one of the ways to bring to life that's content is to actually Skype with you or have you on on zoom and have my students connect with you via a live session and ask you questions concerning the content content that you have written your book this is something that we can do because technology enables it it will be difficult for you to have come into my classroom but we can do this in real time because we have technology enabling and the learning on that topic is actually enhanced in our increasingly digital world we also need to teach both critical media and digital literacies the rise of misinformation and disinformation suggests that more people would benefit from skills in reading comprehension critical thinking and questioning motives driving media and institutions a study published in pnas in 2020 used facebook's tips to spot fake news article to create a short course and quiz which was given to 5 000 participants the result people's ability to spot fake news increased by 26.5 this also means teaching kindness and empathy if our goal is global equity that means thinking of ourselves as a global community and using technology to showcase our authentic selves Dr. Olurinola spoke to me about how she teaches her students to think of themselves as members of a global community i know that the fusion of technology is beginning to blur therefore i believe that efforts should be focused towards the development of global competencies for our students because the world without doubt has become more interconnected coming from a developing country we know that it becomes more imperative that we train our students to be globally competent to develop the skills to know how to live learn and work even in the global village and then as we make these global connections also because people are working remotely and you know you have more global communities uh rising athletes also need to be aware of how to successfully navigate and interact within the digital space things like kindness and empathy there isn't really a dichotomy between your online self and your offline persona your online and offline personnel should be the same and so if i'm kind as a person even when i'm online when i'm using tech i should be kind in my use of tech and kind when i'm online engaging in the digital space we need to learn how to be good citizens and how to develop global competencies and also learn to appreciate differences when they exist and so for me that's the future i see along those lines spoke with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury who is currently the director of the machine learning ethics transparency and accountability team at twitter about the dichotomy between our education system and the workplace and the skills taught versus the skills needed if i were to pick one thing that got me the most interested in this technology is actually the potential for edtech what something like edtech should be is a complete reimagining of education because number one educational systems do not actually help people get jobs they don't help people do well at their jobs like everyone always jokes about the number one skill you need to learn in colleges excel and that's the one thing they don't teach you right so if there is this disconnect between quote the real world the jobs we get and then educational systems how they're we know there's inequality there's just so so much that can be resolved with this technology whether it's remote learning or customized learning whatever it is when i started my job at accenture before then people were talking about lifelong learning and how ai really means that we have to embrace learning and really think about how we're going to spend the rest of our lives educating ourselves what amazing aspirations and i sincerely hope that what we don't do is just try to like stick technology into the existing broken infrastructure that is our traditional education system because that that would be a disservice not just to us as humanity but also to the technology and the potential of technology so but is it is it also true or not that once you use technology to sort of accelerate or amplify a given system that where it breaks might be what's instructive about where those institutions are already failing us specifically using the education example there are so many people that are very look at the inefficiency of these systems and what does work and what doesn't work and if we really think about this again like going back this notion of human self-determination what is the purpose of this system and frankly can we just objectively take a step back and motionlessly ask is it serving the purpose it is intended to serve i think there are plenty of people who have been pointing out the systemic clause well now we have technologies and systems that theoretically could be designed to solve these problems instead of being designed to simply reinforce the power imbalance and the structural inequalities and we're going to ignore what these people say because it's much easier to just perpetuate amplify and now like cement all of these inequalities rather than do like the extra amount of work it would take to like fix things some of the skills that will be most in demand are difficult to automate manual skills like plumbing and other fine motor work and the skills commonly called soft usually mature versions of unique to human abilities such as making decisions in context judgment calls nuanced management leading with emotional intelligence and so on as the future workplace remains uncertain we also need to teach humans to be adept at making meaning if our identities are tied too closely with our jobs many people are in for a massive loss of self as the upheaval in the job marketplace forces millions of people to change career paths as we build our way to the ideal future one way to fight this is to have a better sense of how we make meaning in our lives and how we can begin something new without losing track of ourselves this is by no means an exhaustive list but consider it a blueprint to build and amend as we go taken as a whole this may sound like a lot of work but if we all focus on one thing we can influence our combined efforts can build a future that works for everyone thank you for listening to The Tech Humanist show this episode was produced and edited by Chloe Skye with research by Ashley Robinson and Erin Daughtry at Interrobang and with input from Jupiter F. Stone and Elizabeth Marshall you can find more information about the show's guests and links to their projects at TheTechHumanist.com where you can also find more episodes
or you can subscribe at itunes or wherever you get your podcasts special thanks to all of our guests for lending their voices and ideas to help make the future a brighter place I'm Kate O'neil and you've been listening to the tech humanist show from KO Insights
2022-04-12