Digital pedagogy takes it for granted that we live in an era of knowledge abundance. Part of the revolutionary character of digital has been its making available an abundance of knowledge for those fortunate enough to be on the right …
The apostles of #edtech – so quick to denounce their proudly Luddite critics as anachronistic – are themselves an anachronism. They collectively represent one of the last refuges of a centuries-old faith that has been losing ground for a long …
“Whose side are you on?” asks the critical pedagogue as he declares emphatically that he is on the side of the students. It sounds as if something like a civil war has broken out in education – a pedagogic equivalent …
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains an inspiring work. The banking model of education he set himself against is now being replaced by an online shopping model of education (learning as the active, personal acquisition of disposable stuff you …
The EdTech discourse still hasn’t faced up to the demise of the individual. The technophiles talk as if technological “progress” along current lines is liberating and empowering individuals now able, for instance, to get direct access to the colossal warehouse …
The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a meditation on monstrosity in various forms. Unspoken in the background is a monstrous tumult that includes the terror of the French Revolution, the bodies of Luddites swinging from scaffolds in England, and …
When #edtech sceptics and technophiles start discussing their digital bone of contention the sceptics know that sooner or later someone from the latter camp will come out with: “But tech is just tools – neither bad nor good; what matters …
Are lessons in digital citizenship a good thing? Surely when it comes to digital citizenship there is something that even Luddite-sympathising, politically-minded #edtech sceptics can affirm. There is something here to be positive about, isn’t there? Well, yes and no. …
The world of myth is one dominated by fate – a supra-human imperative keeping people in their place. In our high-tech world we would like to think that not a trace of that old fatalism remains. “By the sweat of …
Professor Sugata Mitra is one of the great spokespeople for the strange movement in education that is hostile to the very notion of teaching. Education is good. Learning is fantastic, especially when it involves individuals and small groups pursuing their …
Introduction 1. Sugata Mitra has been accused of being a neoliberal. Some of his supporters brush this off as bad-tempered mud-slinging by technophobes who are refusing the inevitability of change. Is it? We want to argue in this post that …
We live in an age which, for some odd reason, needs desperately to believe that it is continually being born anew – that its essence is something utterly different from the past, and so the old idea of trying to …
At no time in history have people been so obsessed with their tools. The edtech discourse turns discussions of education into discussions about the new educational tools, and the discourse of the digital revolution assumes that the latest wave of …
We have been re-reading Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, and on page 136 the central character, Rubashov, makes some interesting remarks about the implications of technological development for education. A stark contrast immediately came to mind between this perception …
If Sugata Mitra thinks of himself as basically a humble scientist investigating the benefits of educational technology, he is deceiving himself. His appeal – the crucial factor explaining his rise to fame – lies not in the scientific rigor of …
What is “personalized education”? Some teachers hear in the term nothing more than a confirmation that they are right to pay so much attention to the needs, interests and motivation of the individual pupils in their classes. Other teachers join …
In his 2013 TED talk at Long Beach California, Sugata Mitra gave a bold political twist to his story of education by placing it in the context of a grander story about empire. The now familiar story of the hole …
A few people in Greece are beginning to call for the personalisation of education and, online at least, the talk is gaining some momentum. Now, the mere idea of personalising education has an obvious initial appeal in Greece, since what …
A disturbing number of people are still talking about personalising education – making it person-centred. Often, this talk about the student as person is little more than snappy advertising copy that is left deliberately vague so that it can mean …
In glowing reports of the new digital technology written by educationalists, one of the most prominent buzzwords is: autonomy. Digital technology is great for learner autonomy, we hear. But is it? Of course, there are a thousand and one new …
Anyone using Google on November the 2nd saw this: How many different ways can you read that? Surely it cannot simply be read as an honour paid by the largest internet corporation to a winner of a Nobel prize. Can …