Does the current and sudden rush to move courses and meetings online prove how inferior education technology is to meeting in physical space? Here’s what Tom Bennett said recently on Twitter:

There are several aspects to this issue.

• Speaking as an ed tech evangelist myself, I think Tom is right: being online is inferior in many respects to meeting in a real space. Even Mal Lee, a long-time enthusiast for digital schools and students bringing their own technology to schools, had this to say recently in a post entitled Coronavirus, Schools and the Window of Opportunity:

What is now patently obvious from the pandemic experience is that physical attendance at a physical place school must be core to schooling forever.

I’ve written about the experience of being a student on a writing course online, in the context of workshopping, which is where people share their work and invite comments from the others.

However, I do think there are other considerations:

• Working online and working in a physical space are different kinds of experience, or should be. They each have strengths that ought to complement each other. (See Prof Stephen Heppell’s excellent graphic on this subject: Thoughts for Post-Covid.) When I taught a face-to-face course recently I enhanced it with digital resources, as do many people. A “mixed economy” is definitely a good idea, though difficult to achieve with restrictions on travel and meetings, and social distancing in place. (I shouldn’t like to say “impossible”: I’m confident that I could think of a way of enhancing my course with physical artefacts if I were to start teaching it online, but I’ve been too busy of late to give it much attention.)

• The key word in Tom’s tweet is “months”. Taking a course that was designed to be taught and experienced in a classroom and transferring it online more or less overnight is bound to be unsatisfactory to some extent. But I’m inclined to think that Dr Johnson’s comparison to a dog’s standing on its hind legs is apposite: the issue is not that it’s done badly, but that it is done at all. I am full of admiration for the tutors and teachers who, with no real training to speak of, have embraced Google Classroom, Zoom and Skype and so on, trying to make the best of an unfortunate situation. And kudos too to the students who have learnt to use the technology with even less training, especially those, mainly I think in the older age groups, who have never used it before at all.

• I don’t like to play the blame game, and as I have never run a school I am not in a position to pass judgement, but I do have a question. Given that, in England at least, there are severe weather warnings every so often that cause schools to close, why have some schools not prepared adequately for such a contingency? And why have many tutors and teachers not been trained in how to make full use of the tools available? Shouldn’t there be a minimum set of expectations in this respect in the second decade of the 21st century?

• In this regard I think the English governments since 2010 have hardly helped. It’s only relatively recently that the Department for Education seem to have realised that education technology exists. Yet that led to a so-called strategy that seems to me to be a load of corporate gobbledegook — although perhaps Dr Johnson’s comment applies here as well. And at the end of February, when Covid19 was starting to become worrying, the Education Secretary praised schools that had banned mobile phones. As I said in an article in early March (before schools had shut down), sharing keyboards at this time was a pretty unsafe thing to do. You’d have thought that pupils having their own device, even if that was a mobile phone, would be welcome. Still, I do try to be positive about the DfE, despite how difficult that can be sometimes, and at least there is now a proposal to issue some pupils with laptops.* There is also support for a new online academy that will have worksheets, lesson plans and videos available. (I am trying to resist the temptation to point that the laptop for pupils idea, and proposals for virtual schools, are nothing new, but as you can tell from this sentence I have failed miserably. Let us hope that some good comes from their belated efforts.)

• At this juncture, though, I should point out that there has been research showing that when teachers are given technology to use, they often use it to reinforce their preferred teaching style; also, that if they think the technology is unlikely to be helpful, it won’t be, and the converse of that is also true. (I wrote about these pieces of research in my chapter in Enhancing Learning and Teaching with Technology: What the Research Says, by Rose Luckin (ed) (Amazon affiliate link).

• It’s a great shame, I think, that several responses to Tom’s tweet have seemed to me to be a case of reacting to Tom on a personal level rather than engaging with the point of view expressed. If you want to convince someone of your argument, unfollowing them on Twitter, “denouncing” them or shooting the messenger are unlikely to be helpful. I’m very much of the opinion that polite and measured discourse is much more pleasant, and more likely to be efficacious, than simply shouting. Fortunately, there are some really well-considered responses to Tom’s tweet, so I recommend looking at the whole thread (click on the embedded tweet at the start of this article).
  

*But see Bob Harrison’s tweet about this: