Teachers Are Irreplaceable, Right Up Until The Moment They Are Replaced

What does Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, scribes, the printing press, teachers, web technology, virtual learning, and a barking robot all have in common?  

    

Let's put them into the Education Innovation blender and take a look.

What ever happened to scribes?  Scribes were one of the most essential of professions in the 1400’s. Few people could write, and it was the scribes that hand copied existing written work. If not for scribes, the loss of ideas, wisdom, and knowledge would have been lost through the ravages of time on existing written work. The scribe was crucially important and irreplaceable, for it was the scribe who was able to preserve and pass on the knowledge of the past and current.

Then, one day, scribes became outdated. They had been replaced by movable type. It didn’t happen all at once of course. For a time scribes worked simultaneously with publishers using the printing press, but the reality was that the society in which they labored had fundamentally changed. The protestant reformation and the printing of bibles in many languages were transforming the society in which scribes and printers worked.

Scribes, not wanting to lose ground to the printers, published a very eloquent defense of scribes. The hypocrisy of it was that they used the printing press to publish it. Times had changed. The society was different and the technology of the day, the printing press, allowed for those changes to continue and spread. Scribes were no longer essential as they had once been before, swept out in the revolution of the reformation and the bible in many languages. The printing press was the technology that made it easier, not the cause.

As Clay Shirky writes, “Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary times, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society…”

He continues, “But in some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press…”

Education and classroom teachers are in much the same situation as the scribes of the 1400’s were. How is that you ask?  Simple, we are in a revolution of how our society connects, communicates, and in many regards, how it functions. The technology of the web has changed how we communicate. It has made it possible to communicate and teach from virtually anywhere. Learning is no longer limited to the teacher in the classroom or the brick and mortar school. Learning can take place anyplace and at anytime with web technologies. Online courses, online schools, etc. have arisen and benefited from the revolution of our 2.0 society.

The train has left the station on virtual education. It may not be heavily adopted yet, but it will. Why wouldn’t it?  We in education can resist, fight it, and even argue against it, but like the scribe of the 1400’s, we are living in revolutionary times and we are working along side virtual schools, teachers, and classrooms. The shift is already beginning, the question for us becomes, adapt to it and adopt it, or go the way of the scribe. I think we are much too smart not to do the former, and far too important to do the latter.

But so did the scribes.

Derek Baird at his excellent blog, Barking Robot has an excellent post in which he summarizes some of the most current research on e-learning. Take a look.

Catalytic Questions:

In what ways might your old beliefs or assumptions about education need to be eliminated?

How might you combine web based technologies and virtual learning opportunities into your educational plan?

In what ways would you need to modify your existing instructional model and methods to meet the needs of online or virtual teaching and learning?

If you imagined yourself as a student, what sorts of things would you want in online education or virtual learning?

How might you allow your school or district’s virtual teaching and learning programs develop? In what areas might you need to force the action?

In what ways might you adapt the online-based technologies you use frequently to develop your online education plan?

What else might you need to think about?

Where else can you look for ideas, methods, and models for online or virtual learning?

Comments

[Cal Teacher Blogger]

My 2¢ (or blog posts) on the subject:
Cal Teacher Blog: Reflect: iTeacher or I, Teacher?
and
Cal Teacher Blog: Reflect: Automated Education?

[Beth Holmes]

You've certainly summed up a confounding situation. I remember when Lewis Perelman predicted our current circumstance in his landmark book "School's Out," published in 1993. Perelman did not argue for reforming schools at that time. He advocated for replacing them. Even then, Perelman argued that schools needed "a new mechanism more attuned to the technology and social fabric of the modern world." He called the new mechanism "hyperlearning---a universe of new technologies" to prepare Americans for the "knowledge-age economy" and budding technological revolution. Essentially, Perelman presented a radical picture of a future---without schools.

Low and behold, almost sixteen years later, we see technology leading to the radical replacement Perelman endorsed. I believe educators can still grab this bull by the horns - but the beast is charging now and it has the momentum. It is time for educators to face the stampede---or be trampled.

Complacency is a frustrating thing...

[Rob Jacobs]

Beth, I love that line, "the best is charging now and it had momentum. It is time for educators to face the stamped--or be trampled." Sounds like the making a great post.

I think the thing we have to remember is the only people about to get run over by this stampede is us. The students who are on the way don't know it is a stampede. For them, running with the bulls is the way it has always been. They look at us and must think, "Why are you standing in they way of this? Isn't this the way it has always been?"

Cal Teacher I thought your thoughts about using software and losing the connection with students was a great point. Moving from I Teacher to iTeacher. I loved this quote, "We need to fight the I, Teacher syndrome by becoming iTeachers; by training ourselves to use the technology wisely, appropriately, and effectively, so that the technology doesn't end up using us!"

The best technology allows us to learn from each other. Twitter, blogs, etc that help us reach out to each other. We learn FROM each other USING technology. Twitter or blogs teach me nothing unless someone is putting up great content, ideas, etc. and engaging me.

[Ben]

Is it the case though that there is no objectivity of the situation? Our view of the world, technology and the needs and demands of society are skewed by being caught in the middle of a rapid changing environment.

It is very easy to jump into trends trying to define a new role before it is too late, and later look back and realise that we may have missed the point. Learning and technology offer a huge potential shift in the *way* we learn, however it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine *what* we learn.

How are learners in this new age supposed to filter the misinformation that the proliferation of the web has brought us. Perhaps the role of teachers will become guardians of the information, giving accreditation and influence to what is worthy of study and interest to those learning.

I am sure that the scribes of the 1400's evolved with and contributed to the technology of the time (if not purely because of the nature of their role and what they stood for). They in effect, may have steered the successful uptake and the values of the technology. A role, surely, analogous to teachers now.

[Rob Jacobs]

Teachers are certainly going to have to change and evolve to meet the demands of how learners will learn in the future, and the challenges of using technology as tool to that end.

As you said, and I agree with, "Learning and technology offer a huge potential shift in the *way* we learn, however it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine *what* we learn."

[Stefan Jechel]

Teachers will never been replaced, but they have to adapt to the new reality and start using the new technologies, for example the ones provided for free on www.standardstoolbox.com.

[Aimee Chou]

Hi Ron, I'm several years late to this discussion, but loved your analogy on scribes. Hope you do not mind that I quote you in my blog post about New York City's budgetary priorities shifting to education technology and (seemingly) away from teachers themselves. Here is the link, if you're curious: http://bit.ly/fdszjM.

"Money talks," as the saying goes, and I'm sure money had an increasingly adamant message to scribes of yesteryear. Very curious to see how the tech/teacher dichotomy plays out in the future!