Talking tech

My latest interview appears in this month's edition of Teach Secondary magazine in conjunction with a review of my new book. Here it is:

Do teachers have a choice about whether to engage with technology?

Technology is already so embedded in the fabric of schools, it's probably unavoidable now. Whether it's teacher technology, including wordprocessors, electronic record keeping or databases, or student technology, such as laptops, educational software or personal devices, technology should now be viewed as a set of tools that can be harnessed to extend, enhance and enrich the learning experience. Add the exponential power of the Web into the mix, and the argument becomes compelling. Technology offers us unprecedented opportunities to transform education. The question is not whether teachers should engage with technology, but how.

If you had to pick out the single most important technological development for education over the past ten years, what would you choose and why? 

The final line of Learning with 'e's offers a clue when I say we literally hold the future of education in our hands. The personal, mobile device has started to transform learning in both formal and informal contexts. Learning in any place and at any time is going to gain traction in the coming years, and the emphasis will be on personal learning. Students can gain access to any amount of resources and connections that will help them to learn; they can use their mobile phones to connect with others; and also create and share their own content with potentially huge audiences outside and beyond the walls of the classroom. The value of this is immeasurable.

So, you've accidentally invented a time machine, and travelled forward to the year 2115. What do the schools look like?

Communities will always need schools. How education will be conducted, and how teachers will work, is an entirely different question. I foresee a time in the not too distance future when learning spaces will blur their boundaries with the outside world, and where the use of technology to connect schools and people together while they are learning will be paramount. It's already beginning to happen. I believe the boundaries will blur in our roles too, with teachers and students becoming co-learners. The silos of subjects will also open, and trans-curricular learning will emerge - something that will be vital for the economies of the 21st Century and beyond. Children will learn new skills and literacies that will prepare them for a future we can't clearly describe. Technology will play a key role in this preparation, and teachers will remain central to the process. I don't think technology is a threat to future education. It's something we should embrace. Teachers will not be replaced by technology, but teachers who use technology will replace those who don't.

Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra on Flickr


Talking tech by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Everlasting love #lovelearning

'The only way to do great work is to love what you do.' said Steve Jobs, and here's another great quote: 'A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.' - Bob Dylan.

I haven't actually done a day's work for several years. Sounds bad, I know, but the truth is - I'm incredibly lucky to be in a job that I really love, and the bonus is that I get paid to do it. I previously wrote about this in a post called live to learn. Teaching is what I'm paid to do, but it leads to further reward for me because I learn a lot while I'm teaching. What I'm really in love with is learning. It's a love I have developed for my work that has gradually built over the last 20 or so years, and it shows no sign of waning. Any teacher will tell you that education is no bed of roses, but even through all the less positive aspects of the job, I still get a buzz out of helping others to learn, and seeing students achieve their full potential.


The Greek word for this kind of love is pragma. It describes an enduring, long lasting love that can survive the trials and tribulations of life. It's a love that has the resilience required to stand the test of time, but it also allows you to reflect back on the good times and not so good times, and appraise their value. Pragma is a love borne out of a realistic and rational consideration of the object of one's love. It's a love that lasts.

When applied to relationships, pragma represents a fair exchange, a symbiosis that benefits both parties. Those who are in pragmatic relationships often connected because of practical considerations, rather than physical attraction. This is the kind of love observed in older married couples, who have stuck to their vows and been faithful to each other throughout the years. This explains a lot to me about why I fell in love with teaching. It's because I can see the rewards I gain from the effort I put in to preparing, teaching and marking student assignments.

Teachers need pragma - to develop an 'everlasting love' - if they are to survive in a highly pressurised environment. Are you in love with learning?

Photo by eek the cat on Flickr


Everlasting love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The power of love #lovelearning

In my two most recent posts I considered the role love plays in education. This mini series on love was inspired by a lecture from a colleague entitled 'What's love got to do with it?' delivered to my final year primary education students. The key take away from his lecture was that all good relationships have a basis of love and good teaching needs good relationships. He bemoaned the fact that we only have one word to describe a large spectrum of loves, whereas the ancient Greeks had many. Using the word 'love' in many contexts does not necessarily connote romantic involvement or sexual intent, but can mean any number of other affections, but it is so often miscontrued, simply because we are forced to use the same word for many different kinds of love. An exploration of the words used in ancient Greece is therefore a useful exercise.

In my last two posts I outlined the place of agape in education. Agape is a self sacrificing love that causes people to do extraordinarily acts of kindness and altruism. I argued that many teachers have this kind of love, and this is what drives them to be so dedicated to their students. I also wrote about phileo - a brotherly kind of love that relishes in social connection and mutual experiences. It is this kind of love that we experience working in a great team, or involving ourselves in a club or association, and it is an essential ingredient in effective collaborative learning.

Another relevant kind of love in education is storge - often described as similar to parental love. It is the unconditional love parents have for their children, no matter what those children might do or say. Some would say this is a kind of love that is blind to imperfections, only seeing the best in our children and never holding a grudge. How does this apply in education? The educational theorist and psychoanalyst Carl Rogers once referred to 'unconditional positive regard' which is an acceptance of any student, regardless of their previous misdemeanors or track record. He argued that such acceptance of students promoted a better, more equitable form of education, because it presupposed nothing, and any achievement became possible. Students did not feel marginalised, nor did they feel the need to play up to a stereotype. Rogers' kind of unconditional pedagogy was person centred, where individual responsibility was placed upon each student.

Sometimes, teachers label certain students as 'trouble makers', or 'low in intelligence' or 'lazy', often on the word of other teachers, or rumours. This is a human attribute, and it is difficult to break free from this kind of bias. Also, as Rosenthal and Jacobson once demonstrated, such expectations of behaviour can evoke a biased form of pedagogy, where students eventually become what they are predicted to be - in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. It is therefore important that as teachers, we give our students a second (and even sometimes a third or fourth) chance. If we care for our students as would a parent, and demonstrate that storge love.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


The power of love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

All you need is love #lovelearning

Sixties pop group The Beatles sang 'All you need is love,' and then they broke up. It took them years to reconcile their differences. Love is a fragile thing. It requires nurturing with care. More songs, poems, stories and movies have been written about love than any other subject under the sun. It inspires, it overwhelms, it makes us weep, it makes us smile, or dance with joy. We are all subject to it, and we all succumb to its subtle powers at some point in our lives.

In yesterday's post I wrote about the many kinds of love we encounter, and highlighted the problem that we only have one word to describe them all. The Greeks had many words, one of which is Agape, an all encompassing, sacrificial love, borne out of devotion to the object of one's love. This kind of love is apparent in education when teachers go the extra mile and do extraordinary things to support their students and encourage them to achieve their potentials. It's the kind of love that prompts us to go on marathon runs to raise money for those less fortunate than ourselves. It's what prompts people to throw themselves unthinkingly into a rough sea to save a stranger from drowning. The deep relationship that can be forged between teachers and their students can lead to extraordinary results, and numerous authors have written about this.

Other kinds of love are equally important, not only in education, but in all facets of life. There is a form of love expressed in the Greek word Phileo which means brotherly love, friendship that does not involve any form of romantic involvement. It's where the word philanthropy comes from, to which the word Anglophile (love of English) owes its origins, and was also the inspiration for the name Philadelphia - the US 'city of brotherly love'. Phileo is a love that describes feelings of belonging, and a sense of common purpose. It's the same sense of belonging that Abraham Maslow described in his hierarchy of human needs. It's something we all crave, and is often experienced in social groupings, friendship circles and clubs, where children (and adults) share a common purpose and goals. It's also why many of us join social networks and use social media - we want to connect to others who have similar interests and backgrounds. We want to share. We want to belong.

Phileo is related to another Greek word, Koinonia, which is translated as sharing, participating together, and ultimately enjoying being together with others. Phileo is often needed when children are required to work together, and it's often the case that the groups who enjoy being together perform better. It's about fellowship - going through the same experiences and meeting challenges together. Collaborative learning is on the rise in modern pedagogy, because teachers have discovered that children tend to learn more when they discuss, compare and contrast their ideas. The essence of good collaborative learning is when students work together to achieve a common goal, and draw on each other's strengths and abilities to reach that end. Phileo love is the vital ingredient in this process, because it binds the group members together, and the outcome is mutual respect and support. In such rich learning contexts, love really is all you need.

Photo by Ibrahim Ludaj on Wikimedia Commons


All you need is love by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What's love got to do with it? #lovelearning

The lecture my colleague Phil Selbie presented this week to my final year primary education students was quite unusual in a number of ways. To start off, he played Tina Turner's pop anthem, got everyone clapping along, and he even performed a bit of a dance too. His message was clear - what you are about to listen to is not an ordinary lecture. In fact Phil's lecture was about an unusual subject - at least, unusual in that we don't often hear about it in education - love. His theme was love of learning, love of education, and especially love for each other. He argued that the success of teaching and learning is dependent upon good teacher student relationships, and that love was paramount. Phil (his name, appropriately, is loosely derived from the Greek word Phileos, meaning brotherly love) made the remark that love is a word that is easily confused in our western culture, because in English at least, we only use the one word for what turns out to be a large spectrum of different kinds of emotion and attachment - a complex array of loves, from mild affection, through passion to absolute adoration.

Here's the problem: Teachers can get away with saying they love their subject. They can even say they love teaching at their school. But if a teacher to say they 'love' their students, what they mean might easily be misconstrued when in fact what they probably wish to express is that they are dedicated to their students and are fully committed to helping them achieve their potential. Teaching is seen as one of the 'caring professions' for good reason. The problem is that 'love' is a word that is too often misrepresented because it has many meanings, Phil argued, but teachers need to care deeply about their students if they are to help them to achieve their full potential. The Ancient Greeks, he showed, had many words for love (some accounts suggest about 30), each descriptive of different aspects of what it means to love, to care. This huge repertoire of words highlights the importance the Greeks bestowed on love. Love seems to have been eroded and undervalued in our technology driven and fragmented society - hence the lack of vocabulary to express it in all its forms.

The highest kind of love, said Phil, is Agape - unconditional love, devotion to others, possibly to the point of self sacrifice. Many teachers exhibit this kind of selfless love, he argued, staying behind after school, running after school study groups, sports training, exam revision groups, going the extra mile. This kind of selfless dedication to children's education largely goes unrewarded, but the school often relies on this kind of goodwill from its staff. For teachers who practice Agape love, the best kind of reward is to see students achieve and succeed where they would otherwise have failed. It is this kind of love for humanity that attracts people to the teaching profession, because they get the chance to make a real difference in young people's lives. As we all know, while doctors save lives, teachers make lives. Just the identification of being human together and feeling a connection to other thinking, feeling human beings - this is Agape love, and it should be central to the ethos of being an effective educator.

I intend to explore more of the ancient words for love and their implications for education in future posts.

Photo by Hu Totya on Wikimedia Commons


What's love got to do with it? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Like a sponge

I did an interview for Sponge UK last week, talking about my views on technology in learning, and speculating on the future (as you do). Here's an excerpt of the transcript of that interview, with a question about my new book:

You’ve got a new book out based on your popular blog. What ideas are you trying to get across?

It covers a wide range of concepts such as games-based learning and future technology along with a serious critique of the current learning and education system, and how it can be improved. The book challenges people to look at technology as just a tool rather than as something special. I think one of the biggest problems is that we get seduced by the ‘magical’ nature of technology when it’s first introduced. I know schools and organisations that buy the latest technology because it's new and they don't want to be 'left behind' and then once it arrives they think ‘Ok, now what do we do with it?’ And, of course, that is an absolute mistake.

What we should be doing is looking for the challenges and the problems, and fitting technology into that context to provide solutions. The other big message is that if the technology becomes central to the learning process, and people have to think too much about how they can make it work for them, they are not really thinking about learning which should be their prime focus. Technology should be made mundane, it should disappear, should become 'transparent' so learners can see through it and into the real purpose which is their learning.

I suggest doing away with computer suites, for instance, because in the real world we don’t go somewhere specific to compute, we compute anywhere - walking down the street, in the coffee shop, at the airport. People don’t go to a room 'where computing is done' because networked technology it is now ubiquitous. We hold our computers in our hands. I think the ultimate message is that we have a lot of practice going on with the use of technology in learning and there’s a lot of learning theory out there but often the two don’t come together. I want people to think about how the theory and the practice can combine to make learning environments more powerful, more effective and more responsive to individual needs. I call this digital praxis which is the sweet spot where theory and practice merge to optimise learning.

If you want to read more, the full version is on the Sponge website. My new book Learning with 'e's is published by Crown House in paperback and Kindle formats.

Photo by Steven Depolo on Flickr


Like a sponge by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

About time

Time flies like an arrow (...and fruit flies like a banana - yes... I know, I know...), and time flies in only one direction. Unless, of course, you are a fan of science fiction, and then you know. You know.... that there are more possibilities than the four dimensional world we currently live in. The flux capacitor invented by Dr. Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future movie trilogy was one such device that distorted the space time continuum (temporal displacement) and enabled him and his young friend Marty McFly (and on one occasion his dog Einstein) to traverse forwards and backwards in time - as long as they could accelerate their Delorean DMC-12 car to a speed of exactly 88 miles an hour. The film trilogy was a tremendous take on the time-traveler trope, exploring many concepts such as space-time paradoxes, personal relationships, societal change and of course, new and emergent technologies.

If I talk about these films, or show the image above, there is a reaction. I remind people that we have now 'arrived' in the year (2015) that Marty and Doc also arrived in 'the future', and people almost always say the same thing. Well, first they call me an anorak or a nerd. But then, once they've got themselves past the mild insult stage, they ask: OK, they say, so where's my hoverboard? Sometimes they ask about flying cars, but I can't help them there. As for the hoverboard, well the simple answer is, it's here. It has already been invented, although just like the earliest iterations of mobile phones or portable computers, it is quite clunky and unwieldy. The YouTube video below demonstrates it being tested out by Tony Hawk and Dave Carnie.... and here is an explanation of the physics of the hoverboard by Wired magazine. Take a look.



Yes, it looks heavy and cumbersome, and is nothing like the sleek representation of hoverboards in the movie, but give it time (see what I did there?). We could say the same thing for other technologies that first appeared on our screens in science fiction. Remember the first automatic doors that appeared in Star Trek, or the personal communicators - or even the replicators in the Next Generation series of Star Trek? They look very shiny and high tech in those television shows, but the earliest real versions were incredibly expensive, had clumsy designs and were probably not that easy to use either (for personal communicator read mobile phone, and for replicator think 3D printer). It took time for these technologies to be developed into something that - in the case of automatic doors and mobiles at least - are now taken for granted and have all but faded into the background. I'm sure the same will be said for 3D printers in the next few years.

As for the  Hendo Hoverboard - whether or not it fails to operate over water, or whether it will ever be quick enough to outrun the Biffs of this world, I don't know. I sure as hell have no idea what the pedagogical applications of the device might be either, so don't ask - but the hover board is here, and I fully expect one day for my students to be riding them around. And as for me? Great Scott! You wouldn't get me on one for all the Deloreans in Houston, Texas.

Photo from this website


About time by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Making the future of education

Many would agree that a lot needs to be done to bring education up to date. The methods we use to try to align school and university teaching with the demands of contemporary society will shape the extent to which we succeed. Some advocate the flipped learning approach and to a certain extent, the transfer of content delivery from the classroom to the home (or elsewhere) makes a lot of sense. Time in the classroom with the experts should be used for assimilation of that content, and the critical thinking and application of it, which is a great deal more difficult. A lot of institutions are adopting versions of this method, and are employing technology, particularly video and online content to achieve it.

But this is just the start, and more can be done to ensure that the present day education system adequately prepares young people to take up their roles in a rapidly changing world. One of the most significant movements in recent years, and one that I believe will have a profound impact on current educational provision, is the makerspace. Alternatively referred to as hackerspaces or hacklabs, makerspaces are based on the principles of peer learning and knowledge sharing. You have probably noticed at this point just how similar this approach to learning is to work based learning practices. People teach each other by passing on their knowledge, and learn within their community of practice, focusing on their specialisms.

In makerspaces, people come together to fix things, modify existing materials and design structures, and generally explore alternatives as they learn together. They are zones of self directed learning where there are few limits to the imagination. There is usually a lot of experimentation, exploration and prototyping and testing of new ideas. This can be a very powerful means of learning not only about the things you are fixing or modding, but also about the processes that underline them such as risk taking, discovery and problem solving. A specific theory of learning, Seymour Papert's constuctionist learning theory, could be applied to explain this. Papert suggests that when we involve ourselves in making things, we become a part of that process, by constructing mental models to represent it. Furthermore, the power of sharing what one has made with an audience reinforces the achievement and motivates learners to achieve even more.

It's not that difficult to see how this approach might be used in schools to promote better learning, and encourage students to engage more.  Makerspace learning can enable students to acquire and practice skills they will later need in the world of work. Some thinking has already gone into the pedagogy of makerspaces, and later posts on this blog will attempt to describe how these can be established in schools and universities. In the meantime, if you wish to explore this idea further, check out 7 things you should know about Makerspaces by Educause.

Photo by Mitch Altman on Flickr


Making the future of education by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Two innovations that have changed learning forever

Earlier today in an interview for Sponge UK, I was asked the question: During your career in educational technology, what single innovation do you consider the most important? On the face of it, this could be quite a difficult question to answer, simply because I have been involved in the study of educational technology since 1976, almost 40 years. As you would expect, during that time I have seen many innovations and rapid changes.

The extent of change that has occurred in this period has been quite astounding. I witnessed the development of video cassette tapes, CD-ROMs, personal computers in the 70s and 80s but this was just the start. In the 90s we saw the rapid emergence of the Internet and video conferencing, followed closely by the introduction of mobile phones and the rise of the Social Web. Social networks, blogging, podcasting, the growth of online repositories such as Wikipedia and YouTube, and the rapid convergence of older technologies all began to shape and reshape the educational technology landscape and brought us to where we are right now. Interactive technology, touch surfaces and networked resources are now taken for granted in the classroom, in the home, on the move.

To answer the interview question, I decided I had to cheat. I said that there are in fact two innovations that I believe have made the most impact on learning - social media and mobile phones. The powerful combination or convergence of these two technologies has given learners everywhere a capability to discover, create, repurpose, share and amplify content. These two technologies, once combined, have opened up endless global networks of like-minded professionals, communities of practice and connections to virtually limitless resources. The opportunities learners now enjoy are unprecedented. No previous generation has had access to as much knowledge as we have today. No previous generation of learners has been able to create and disseminate so much of their own content. And no previous generation of learners has been able to connect into the global community as quickly and easily as this present one. Another interview I gave for a French TV company is embedded below, where I elaborate on this idea, and also several other perspectives such as the future of learning, open education and new technologies.




Photo by Steve Wheeler


Two innovations that have changed learning forever by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Why technology will never replace teachers

Learning is highly complex. Consequently, any attempts to teach, or to provide formal environments within which learning can occur, yield complex problems. The result is a multitude of contradictory theories and explanations on what learning is, how it happens and what teachers need to do to optimise it. How do you cater for the learning needs of every child in a class of 30? Is that really the only way to teach? What are the best methods for education? Should we push content or allow students to discover for themselves? Is dialogue more important than structure in a classroom? What do students actually learn in a formal context anyway, and how can we know for sure? Learning is very complicated, but it is also a deeply human characteristic. It's probably the most important thing we do throughout our lives, and we do it constantly. Yet it is so difficult to understand and describe. We flounder and stumble as we try to navigate a plethora of educational theories and we become bogged down in prescribed institutional pedagogies, providing no more than glimpses of true education for our students.

One of the most important questions for educators in this century is whether technology can offer a transformational influence for learning. The advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the flipped classroom, games based learning, social media and mobile learning - on the face of it - seems to herald a new dawn for education. But do these methods and technologies actually live up to the promise? Technology is often great fun to use, and opens up new vistas of opportunity for all who use it, but does in actually impact positively on learning?

Schools spend an inordinate amount of their annual budgets on purchasing and maintaining suites of technology, but what are the tangible positive outcomes for students? Writers such as Larry Cuban have been asking these questions for some time, and the chorus has been joined by many other skeptics including Susan Greenfield, Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier. The common view from this camp is that computers and other technologies either distract from the real purpose of education, cause undesirable changes to the structure of our brains, or undermine knowledge and learning by trivializing it. Does the spell checker on your word processor act as a convenience, or is it a hindrance to good grammar and writing? The answer will differ depending on your personal view of what learning is. It will also depend on your views on the place of technology in education. For example, is online learning, especially free and open offerings from MOOCs, a threat to contemporary education?

We do know that technology will never replace teachers. Teachers perform roles that even the most powerful computers could never replicate. If you think that this is a bold statement, consider this: Computer can only ever follow rules. Humans can break rules consciously, and learn from the consequences. Consciousness, intuition, belief, creativity and emotional engagement are all peculiarly human traits, and none of them are rule bound. Even if you could program a computer to break rules and mimic (or model) these traits, it would still be following rules and would not be able to deviate from them. When children act unexpectedly, or demand support that requires intuition, only a human teacher who knows that child can support them effectively. Compared to the incredible complexity of the human brain, the computer is quite a simple tool. We are only just beginning to understand some aspects of the human brain, whereas computers are fully understandable, because they have been designed by human ingenuity.

Learning is indeed a very complex process, and it continues, increasing in its complexity, throughout our lives. There is no single perfect explanation about how or why we learn, and there is no single technology that supports all types of learning. One thing is clear however. To support learning of any kind, personal choice of method, tools and context are vital. Without this, we will continue down the blind alleyway of partial education, missing many opportunities along the way.

Graphic by John Hain on Pixabay


Why technology will never replace teachers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.