Where and how did personalised learning begin, and how did it become such a focus in educational technology tools and solutions?
In Teaching Machines, education writer Audrey Watters offers a lively history of pre-digital educational technology, from Sidney Pressey’s 1920s mechanised positive-reinforcement provider to B. F. Skinner’s behaviourist bell-ringing box.
Audrey shows that these machines and the pedagogical design behind them sprang from ideas with potential. Concepts like bite-sized content and individualised instruction were later picked up by textbook publishers and early advocates for computerised learning.
Audrey recently joined an event hosted by Ashley Willcox and David Yeats at LX.lab, where she talked about her new book and answered questions from participants. Some of the key points and quotes from the session are summarised here, and a recording of the session is also available for you to enjoy in full below.
Forgotten histories of ed tech
I think that happens when we talk about the history of ed tech […]. Skinner appears in Chapter One, or maybe Chapter Two, but then he’s gone, his ideas are gone. His machines have gone, they’ve been replaced.
Audrey began her talk with a challenge to those who write about historical progress in educational technology: things are not as ‘linear’ as they seem, and perhaps not as ‘progressive’ either.
Many authors, she noted, tend to map an ever-improving evolution of psychological and educational theories over the decades. In these narratives, Skinner’s behaviourism is supplanted by cognitive science and constructivist theories, for example, and the impact of behaviourism is left behind.
Teaching Machines and personalised learning
Teaching machines may be one of the most important trends in the twentieth century—both in education and in technology—precisely because they are not a flash-in-the-pan, as some scholars have suggested, but a harbinger. Their ongoing influence can be found in the push for both personalized technologies and behavioral engineering.
Excerpt from Teaching Machines
Audrey argues that behaviourism and the technology of behaviour have never gone away. Rather, it has become the ‘foundation’ of edtech, with an influence and legacy that impacts the politics, culture, and business of educational technology we all work with today. Whilst behaviourism still has relevance, an over-emphasis on aspects such as ‘instant feedback’ and the pace and progress of learning offers a narrow lens on learning.
What’s lost in the teaching machine?
What gets lost when we prioritise a mechanistic, behavioural engineered orientation towards education? I think at this moment now, it’s important for us to think about the ways in which we have less individuals working one on one with a machine. How do we work on building more community? How do we work on building more social interactions?
In order to expand beyond this ‘mechanistic orientation’, Audrey highlighted the importance of community, connection and equity in education, looking to long-term impact rather than quick-fix solutions. How might we embrace empathy, individual care and compassion with the same enthusiasm as clever algorithms and behavioural engineering at scale?
Where to next?
This has to be a time for experimentation because what we’ve been doing isn’t working […] but rather than thinking about what are the technologies that get us there, think about what is our belief system, and how do we build practices that support that belief system?
Audrey encouraged us to challenge the assumptions, theories and norms underpinning what we do in teaching, and seek alternatives to established approaches. To do this, we need to consider the foundations of what we do and what we believe in as educators, and ensure that the technologies we use are aligned to those beliefs, and not the other way around.
Watch the full talk and Q&A on Teaching Machines with Audrey:
Teaching Machines is available via MIT Press (and anywhere books are sold)
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.