A recent story on the MicroScope website concerned the understanding (or lack of it) that teachers in the UK have of the IT they use to teach across all subjects. According to a YouGov survey, three-quarters of teachers used IT in most or all of their lessons but only 15% described themselves as being “totally computer savvy”.
Two percent of teachers admitted to being “pretty clueless” about using technology while 40% believed they had enough knowledge to use IT in the classroom. According to MicroScope’s report, 70% of teachers “were not specifically teaching digital skills that they expected to be relevant in the workplace of the future”.
Mario Di Mascio, executive sales director at Virgin Media Business (the company that commissioned the survey) talked about “a growing digital divide between the technology that is available in the classroom and teachers’ ability to effectively use it”.
I’m interested in this story because it appears to me to highlight an issue that occurs with great regularity when it comes to IT and the people that use it, wherever they and that technology might be. This is the very common ‘gap’ between what the technology can do and what the people using it are able to do with it. Or, to put it another way, the divide between the technology available in the workplace and the employee’s ability to effectively use it.
It seems to me that one of the big problems here is not necessarily that workers, be they teachers, office workers, sales executives, marketing managers or what have you, are at fault for not using the technology effectively but that the technology could be at fault for the changes it imposes on the way they do their jobs for it to be used effectively.
The first priority of teachers is to teach not to be “totally computer savvy”. Technology is merely a tool or an enabler to help them do their job. It should not be a barrier to how they do their job, nor should it be something that affects the way they do their job. The same is true for many other professions.
Relevant skills
Technology should expand the possibilities of how people do their jobs but it shouldn’t require them to invest significant time and effort learning how to make technology work for them. How teachers teach should not be shaped or moulded by how IT products work.
Similarly, when the story warns teachers could fall behind their own pupils in understanding what the technology is capable of, it makes the assumption that an understanding of how to use IT could be more important than understanding the subject teachers are teaching. The fact is that IT is capable of many things but a lot of those things might be completely irrelevant to what it needs to be used for in a particular environment.
Instead of focusing on what IT needs to do, too often we get distracted by the possibilities of what it could do. Just because a 13-year-old knows how to use technology for a particular action or task doesn’t mean that task or action has any educational value at all. The same goes for businesses. An employee may well know how to use his or her computer/tablet/smartphone to perform a certain task but that could be of no relevance to the company he or she works for.
And what about that phrase concerning teachers not teaching the digital skills they expected to be relevant in the workplace of the future? As far as I’m aware, teachers teach subjects like maths, history, geography, English, physics, biology and art. Yes, they also teach IT, but that’s just one subject in the curriculum. It seems a tad presumptuous to expect an English, geography or history lesson to also focus on the digital skills pupils need for the workplace of the future.
I don’t think I’m alone in wondering if the IT industry might well be guilty of inflating its own importance to the point where technology is the be-all and end-all rather than a means to an end.
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