Learning is highly complex. Consequently, any attempts to teach, or to provide formal environments within which learning can occur, yield complex problems. The result is a multitude of contradictory theories and explanations on what learning is, how it happens and what teachers need to do to optimise it. How do you cater for the learning needs of every child in a class of 30? Is that really the only way to teach? What are the best methods for education? Should we push content or allow students to discover for themselves? Is dialogue more important than structure in a classroom? What do students actually learn in a formal context anyway, and how can we know for sure? Learning is very complicated, but it is also a deeply human characteristic. It's probably the most important thing we do throughout our lives, and we do it constantly. Yet it is so difficult to understand and describe. We flounder and stumble as we try to navigate a plethora of educational theories and we become bogged down in prescribed institutional pedagogies, providing no more than glimpses of true education for our students.

One of the most important questions for educators in this century is whether technology can offer a transformational influence for learning. The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the flipped classroom, games based learning, social media and mobile learning - on the face of it - seems to herald a new dawn for education. But do these methods and technologies actually live up to the promise? Technology is often great fun to use, and opens up new vistas of opportunity for all who use it, but does in actually impact positively on learning?

Schools spend an inordinate amount of their annual budgets on purchasing and maintaining suites of technology, but what are the tangible positive outcomes for students? Writers such as Larry Cuban have been asking these questions for some time, and the chorus has been joined by many other skeptics including Susan Greenfield, Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier. The common view from this camp is that computers and other technologies either distract from the real purpose of education, cause undesirable changes to the structure of our brains, or undermine knowledge and learning by trivializing it. Does the spell checker on your word processor act as a convenience, or is it a hindrance to good grammar and writing? The answer will differ depending on your personal view of what learning is. It will also depend on your views on the place of technology in education. For example, is online learning, especially free and open offerings from MOOCs, a threat to contemporary education?

We do know that technology will never replace teachers. Teachers perform roles that even the most powerful computers could never replicate. If you think that this is a bold statement, consider this: Computer can only ever follow rules. Humans can break rules consciously, and learn from the consequences. Consciousness, intuition, belief, creativity and emotional engagement are all peculiarly human traits, and none of them are rule bound. Even if you could program a computer to break rules and mimic (or model) these traits, it would still be following rules and would not be able to deviate from them. When children act unexpectedly, or demand support that requires intuition, only a human teacher who knows that child can support them effectively. Compared to the incredible complexity of the human brain, the computer is quite a simple tool. We are only just beginning to understand some aspects of the human brain, whereas computers are fully understandable, because they have been designed by human ingenuity.

Learning is indeed a very complex process, and it continues, increasing in its complexity, throughout our lives. There is no single perfect explanation about how or why we learn, and there is no single technology that supports all types of learning. One thing is clear however. To support learning of any kind, personal choice of method, tools and context are vital. Without this, we will continue down the blind alleyway of partial education, missing many opportunities along the way.

Graphic by John Hain on Pixabay


Why technology will never replace teachers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.