One thing educators can expect—a continuous barrage of new product pitches that claim to have disruptive and transformative abilities—and that is happening as Tech Companies churn out their new gadgets.
AI is just the latest iteration of that pitch. This time, the AI evangelists claim, there is finally going to be profound changes in education.
This prediction is wrong.
Schools are conservative institutions. They resist disruptive change because that’s the way they are built, for better or worse.
If they change, the do so incrementally and slowly and that is purposeful, because if schools radically changed at the arrival of every technological or pedagogical whim, they would be “fad-surfing institions.”
Institutions that surf the lastest fads don’t every really fundamentally change in ways beneficial to anybody. Once the hype and the money has been spent on EdTech and AI consultants and technological hardware, the school is still there, and history shows it is no better or worse mostly.
Schools spend millions on these so-called “disruptive and transformative initiatives and when the hype dies down and has moved on to the next thing, they are left wandering why things are still the same and where all the money has gone.
True incremental educational change does not come from adopting new gadgets and paying off EdTech and AI consultants.
True incremental change happens when educators as a community of teachers sit down and do the hard work of examining where they are and working to find solutions.
You don’t start with a solution looking for a problem to solve which is what AI seems to be. We did that with PCs, the web, social media, online learning, only to discover that our long-time problems were left behind.
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