Moving Schooling from a Paper to Digital Construct

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Mal Lee and Roger Broadie

One of the greater challenges facing schooling globally is to open the minds of school educators and governments to the reality that most schools are still paper based human constructs, employing Industrial Age structures, processes and cultures, that will increasingly struggle to provide an apt contemporary education in a digital world.

Daily educators generate reams of paper, and spend millions of dollars in the belief that an aged, inflexible, inefficient, paper based human construct can educate the nation’s young for a rapidly evolving, seemingly chaotic digital and socially networked world, where learning happens 24/7/365, anywhere, anytime.

It can’t.

Business has long recognised the imperative of moving to a digital operational construct to remain viable.

Most educators don’t appear to have grasped how much paper as a technology has shaped and continues to shape schooling, and does so unnecessarily. Nor do they appear to recognise or worry how the paper operational base stymies the evolution of schooling.

This short post is simply intended to underscore the extent to which paper has impacted schooling, to affirm the qualities of paper that obliged a distinct form of schooling and to highlight the imperative of schools, like all other organisations employing a more digital operational construct.

When, many moons ago the wonderful new technology of paper became mature and sufficiently affordable to be used as the core instructional medium in schools, there may well have been some far-sighted educators who warned of its likely impact.

  • Textual ways of describing and explaining would replace oral and visual explanations.  Handwriting would become central.
  • The learners would have to come to where the books were located, instead of teachers being able teach in homes and the community.
  • The opinions of the author of the book chosen as the instructional text, the hierarchical structuring of knowledge and a linear approach to explanation would dominate.
  • The learner would be unable to question the author or seek clarification of how the subject was explained.

·     The learners would need reveal their understanding of the content of the books mainly in writing. The teacher would assess the students understanding predominantly by how well they could explain themselves in writing.

·     Only the teachers – not the parents, the elders or most assuredly the children – would be trusted to assess and report upon the student’s learning.

But those warnings must have been outweighed by the advantages. It was surely advantageous for pupils to read more and to practice their writing. The words of great scholars and experts could reach all young people. The old oral and visual methods of transmitting knowledge were too variable, not precise enough. And teachers by then revered the book technology.

Of course, it worked well for the children of well-off parents, attending elite schools. Sufficient books could be afforded and looked after. The subjects of concern such as religion, the learned languages, the study of great authors and mathematics fitted well with a textual approach. The need for science to generate a visual understanding could be solved by creating a whole vocabulary of specialist words, through which a visual image of a complex leaf shape, or piece of apparatus could be visualised. In more recent decades the print technology likely improved the book learning of science by allowing diagrams and images to be placed alongside the textual descriptions.

It worked considerably less well for poor children with little access to other books through which to develop their reading, but they were of little concern to the elite schools. Subjects needing visual and kinetic understanding could be left to the mechanic’s institutes and apprenticeships, so again could be ignored. And so, textual, paper-based approaches came to dominate and indeed shape schooling.

Such has been the success of the paper-based instructional and assessment industries, and their enthusiastic purchasers in schools, the skewing of the learning and schooling was overlooked.

We are now at another such point. Digital technology has become mature and affordable for schools. And though the imperative is still the same – how best to help children learn – most schools, education systems and assessment organisations, are fiercely resisting adoption of a digital operational construct.

The fears of our invented far-sighted educator have all come to pass. And the affordances of the digital make their importance very clear, not only for schools but for learning beyond school and in the workplace:

  • Oral, visual and multimedia ways of presenting and explaining massively exceed textual ways.
  • Digitally connected young people learn 24/7/365 in their homes and the community, with instant access to orders of magnitude more books, at no virtually cost.
  • Different views can be sought, knowledge and explanations are hyperlinked enabling knowledge construction in different ways.
  • Learners can now question each other, the author and numerous helpful others, to seek clarification of how a subject is explained.
  • But what has not yet changed is that the young are still expected to demonstrate their understanding in writing, on paper. Hand written exams still dominate the end of Year 12 globally. 

And this is not just a technological development that primarily benefits those who can afford the considerable expense of books. With smartphones being sold in Africa for $20 and more than 70% of the world’s young digitally connected (UNICEF, 2017) this is something all with technology can benefit from.

With Ericcson (2019) projecting that by 2024 the 70% will have risen close to 90% the imperative of providing an apt education for the digitally connected young grows. 

While our imaginary educational seer anticipated much of the impact of the paper technology she didn’t foresee the extent to which it would shape the nature of schooling, or why schools globally have been so loath to move to an appreciably more sophisticated technological base, on trend to grow in power and capability exponentially. 

What we know now is that paper as a technology must be physically passed by hand to others. It necessitates bringing all the students together on the one physical site to pass around the paper. 

The technology prompted a pronounced focus on the written word, relegating voice, expression, visual intelligence, sound, images and video to the minor roles they still occupy in schools today. In a world where the young as a video generation happily use all types of digital media in their everyday life and learning scant time is devoted by schools to growing the quality of that wider usage. Rather at a stage where no employer or tertiary institution would accept a handwritten CV or presentation time must still be devoted in secondary schools to physically readying the students for the mechanics of writing three-hour examinations. 

One can argue paper promoted the strongly linear approach to teaching and learning that dominates school teaching. It is likely most teachers and teacher educators still believe the linear, the movement from chapter 1, to chapter 2, and so on is the ‘right’ and only way to learn. Tellingly the approach stands in marked contrast to the non-linear, hyperlinked, constructivist approach to learning with the digital used by the world’s young – and old – outside the classroom (Lee, Twining and Broadie, 2018).

Paper, and the associated linear nature of the instruction enabled teachers to control the flow of information. It helped place the ‘masters’ in charge, using the information flow to manage the class. The astute distribution of paper assignments, readings and tests assisted class control. Many teachers moreover used the book, particularly the text book as the de facto syllabus, teaching program and teaching resource. Turn to page 32, do exercise 12.

Paper as the underpinning technology not only obliged site, but also group based teaching, the sheer logistics of working with reams of paper stymying the forays in to more individualised teaching.  

Paper as a static, unchanging but highly durable technology unwittingly fostered the all-pervasive sense of constancy and continuity, with most schools continuing to operate year after year as insular, stand- alone, inward looking entities reliant on the suite of paper based resources available within the walls. What do we have class sets of?

The introduction of the many digital technologies not only removed the teachers’ and indeed student’s need to work within these now aged constraints but opened all manner of opportunities to learn.

A hundred plus years of schooling, doing much the same thing year after has engendered the belief that the practises adopted to work with the paper technology are the only way to run a school and teach.

What appears to have been forgotten is that all organisations, schools included, are human constructs shaped by the variables of the time and place, whose practises should be continually challenged. It is appreciated many other factors, the likes of educational philosophy, context, culture, resourcing have impacted on the nature of schooling but the remarkably similar nature of schooling worldwide stems in the main from the paper construct.

We are not for a moment suggesting abandoning all within that construct, or doing so overnight. Paper is, and will on current trends continue to be an important instructional technology for many years, but its use is waning, being replaced increasingly by far more sophisticated, efficient, effective and cheaper digital media. In schools the cost of the paper photocopier remains an important (and expensive) part of the budget.

There are many, many vital elements of schooling that must retained in any new construct. The challenge is to decide which and identify how they are best addressed.

Lipnack and Stamps, in commenting in 1994 on the emergence of networked organisations tellingly noted; 

Boundaries are conceptual, not physical, in virtual workplaces and need to be to be completely reconceived so that the ‘physical site’ thinking is no longer a limitation (Lipnack and Stamps, 1994, p15).

The digital construct

A quarter of century on it is time schools understood they are part of an increasingly connected world, and that when learning can and does happen 24/7/365 and is not restricted to the ‘physical site’ they should be employing a digital construct, with the digital underpinning all operations. 

The possibilities opened within such a construct are theoretically virtually unlimited, and are being added to daily.

The limit is largely the human imagination.

The movement to a digital construct obliges the educational decision makers to think about every current school practise and its continued use, the desired and not.

That said, the reality is that the legacy of the paper construct is immense and universal, and it will likely be years before many aspects of the construct will cease to impact. The thinking is ingrained in the minds of generations worldwide, in legislation, bureaucratic procedures, working conditions, salary agreements, law and vitally the culture.

Schools and systems shaping a digital construct must contend with that reality, and the attendant constraints to change.

The great plus in moving to a digital construct – aside from the many opportunities opened, and efficiencies and economies made possible – is that it prompts schools and systems return to first principles, and decide on the education, and indeed teaching they want to provide. That vision, those principles should inform the design of the construct, and the digitally based school ecosystem/s created to facilitate and support the desired learning.

It is the same as in business. The ‘business agenda’ should shape the organisational form and the technologies used.

The history of the use of the digital in schooling in the last 25 plus years (Lee and Winzenried, 2009), (Lee and Broadie, 2018) strongly suggests most school decision makers haven’t appreciated that imperative. Most don’t appear to have grasped successful digital evolution and transformation is first and foremost a human challenge, that requires astute minds to shape the desired operational construct, and then to identify the facilitating technologies. 

The form the digital construct might take we’ll discuss in the next post.

Conclusion

Suffice it to reiterate the crucial point made earlier – it is vital all associated with schooling understand most of the world’s schools are operating within a human construct shaped strongly by paper technology.

The construct served the world well for many centuries but structurally

and culturally it has struggled for decades to accommodate accelerating, digital evolution and transformation, and provide the desired apt contemporary education.

That will only be possible within a digital construct.

  • Lee, M and Winzenried, A (2009) The Use of Instructional Technology in Schools, Melbourne ACER Press
  • Lee, M and Broadie, R (2016) A Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages. 2ndEdition Armidale Douglas and Brown – http://douglasandbrown.com/publications/
  • Lee, M. Broadie, R and Twining, P (2018) Your Kids Being Digital. A Guide for Digitally Connected Families. Armidale. Australia Douglas and Brown
  • Lipnack, J & Stamps, J 1994, The age of the network: Organizing principles for the 21st century, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York
  • UNICEF (2017) Children in a Digital World. UNICEF December 2017 – https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SOWC_2017_ENG_WEB.pdf