My current article series aims to put a spotlight on some of the most interesting post-pandemic downtrends now taking shape in K12 and/or university settings. In our first installment, we focused one two of the key input/output stresses challenging educators these days: the “Great Resignation” and persistent “learning loss”. In last month’s installment, we discovered how many technology efforts in schools have become a “hot mess.” Today’s eye-opening educational trend, at least at the university level, is that things have recently turned topsy-turvy.
Let’s break here for a standard dictionary definition:
topsy-turvy: /?täps??t?rv?/ backwards or upside down; also, having been overturned or upset; an act of turning something backwards or upside down, or the situation that something is in after this has happened.
At our urban and diverse university, another colleague and I split teaching responsibilities for a very popular course on campus. The course is called “Digital Teaching and Learning” and the students are typically pre-service teachers. Let’s call them teachers-in-training. Although enrollment is generally down across all campuses in Colorado due to the pandemic, this class remains crowded with bright-eyed and inquisitive students. We have been teaching this course since 2013, refreshing it each year to match up with the evolving role of technology in education.
Yet something changed post-Rona. For years our aim has been to encourage pre-service teachers (who are sometimes averse to the use of technology in their classrooms or unaccustomed to its potential) to ratchet up the use of technology in their teaching—simply to use it more and use it well. Returning to the campus for the first time in nearly two years after pandemic shutdowns, things have turned upside down. Now we find ourselves compelled to teach students how to use less technology.
What can explain this heels over head reversal? Thanks to school shutdowns, nearly universal remote learning, and an utter dependency on technology during the Pandemic, nearly every teacher left standing now uses technology. And uses it a lot. But in the rush to provide services without adequate training up front, the lowest common denominator in technology use has burrowed down and found deep roots. More has now become less, as teachers overuse digital videos, substitute computer time for humanizing and agile instructional time, or force feed digital (no longer paper) worksheets on students with already glazed-over eyes. It’s the education sector equivalent of what we see in restaurants and public spaces: ipads or tablets substituting as parenting.
What’s largely missing here are the “better angels” of creating, making, designing and constructing with the help of technology. So, although educators are using technology more, it’s actually becoming less. Our job in higher ed is now to promote less technology use, or perhaps more precisely, to ensure that the technology we do employ is used ever more thoughtfully and with greater student agency. For our astute readers selling to the education sector, this translates into increasingly tailoring your products and services to these better angels. – Len Scrogan
