Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM
“Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM” is an old tech phrase describing the idea that IBM and other established companies were safe bets when choosing technology and services providers. But perhaps that saying was tested recently, as several outlets reported on “NYC schools [being] ‘frustrated and angry’ by IBM’s fumble on remote learning snow day.”
“New York City Public Schools’ transition to remote instruction on Tuesday in anticipation of a winter storm was disrupted after its user validation system experienced capacity issues, district officials said on social media.
(Snip)
The district announced on its website Monday afternoon that it was moving to entirely remote instruction and that all schools would be closed on Tuesday in anticipation for a winter storm. New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks told a local news station that the large number of users logging in at the same time should not have come as a surprise to IBM.”
The main issue, though, isn’t necessarily whether IBM is to blame. The larger point is that shifting to a day of remote learning from time to time—and doing it well—requires a huge amount of effort. It seems to me that many of the conversations about occasional remote learning, especially among policymakers and less-than-fully-informed advocates, don’t consider just how hard it is. One sign of the challenge, in fact, is that the articles about IBM’s problems seem to assume that once students got online, they had a good experience—as if getting online was the goal, not a small step towards the objective of some meaningful instruction that day. But to have meaningful learning requires that teachers were well prepared to instruct online, students had good places to work remotely, caregivers had some idea what was going on, and more…and that doesn't even address the hardware and access issues.
Did students and teachers have a good experience? I have no idea in this case. I hope it was great, but I worry that most occasional remote learning days are subpar, because the ROI on investment needed to make it really good just doesn’t pencil out.
Moving on to a separate article…
When will we get past smart people saying dumb things about technology in education?
“New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom.”
Is that statement accurate? I suppose it depends on what you mean by “upending” education.
But the tone of the article doesn’t reflect much understanding of the history of technology in education. It lists AI, gamification, immersive environments, and data gathering/analysis as “game changers” without much evidence, and without any reference to all the previous technologies that were supposed to transform education and did not.
I believe AI could be hugely impactful in education. But it’s certainly not yet, and the other three listed “game changers” have been around long enough to make clear that they have had minor impacts at most.
If this was yet another tech advocate or minor source, I wouldn’t bother writing about it. But this is an article from Stanford, quoting Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz.
The writer and Dean should know better. Predictions regarding the way technology will transform education have been around for at least 100 years, and while there have certainly been incremental changes, few if any have been game changing. But when readers, perhaps with less direct experience in education, see articles like this from sources like this, they reasonably believe that such observations are accurate.
That’s not to ignore the many online, hybrid, and blended courses and schools that are having a huge positive impact on students’ lives. But the mechanisms to create these positive changes have nothing to do with what is described in the Stanford article.