Disruption: education must keep up

In my last blog post I outlined the impact of Asymmetry on our education system going forward. This is the second post in the ADAPT for Education series, and will focus on the effects of Disruption. Disruption entails the dramatic shift in business models and employment arising from the adoption of new technologies. There is a high degree of interest in this topic arising from issues around the future of work and its implications for skills development and loss of work. This post will address this challenge as it relates to what it means for the design of educational institutions and their relationship to the communities and societies in which they are embedded. Remember, this post will describe the factors related to Disruption, but it must also be considered in the context of the whole ADAPT framework.

It is important to note that the disruption technology creates will require not just a change in our curricula and how we teach and learn, but also the schools in which learning occurs and the relationship between those schools and the larger society. Our approach to education requires an extensive and comprehensive reconsideration.

Radically changing business models.
While the dramatic shift from bricks and mortar to online, or from taxis to ride-sharing apps are visible examples of changing business models, all businesses are having to contend with the implications of technology for meeting needs in new ways, creating significantly greater efficiency, and meeting whole new needs offered by new technology. This requires every business to continuously review how it makes money and provides products and services to its customers. For education this has implications not just for what we teach but also how we learn. However, the bigger impact of this particular element of disruption is for the school itself. If it is true that all businesses can be influenced by technology, so too schools. Consider three examples.

1. The research enterprise. While many consider teaching the primary responsibility of schools, at the university level research is its life’s blood. There are many issues related to technology and the business model of the research university. To name just two:

• As Artificial Intelligence (AI) grows in strength the whole notion of research will change. Those who are currently involved in research don’t necessarily have the tools to use the AI in the most practical and helpful form to get to insights.
• Given the commercial value of data to the business enterprise, our typical standards of open information that has fueled much of research over the last century, are under attack. The risk is that the most valuable data will not be available to researchers unless universities address the availability of data.

2. The role of the teacher. When I was Dean a student came up to me and indicated that I had been correct in 96 percent of the facts I used in my talks that year. I asked how that compared to other professors, he indicated better than most classes. The notion of teacher as expert is losing ground to Google, Wikipedia and similar sources of intelligence generally available to students. This has dramatic implications for what it means to teach. Consider a few images:

• Teacher at the side of the student, not the front of a classroom
• The best teacher available to millions of students
• Bots as Teaching Assistants
• Student and teacher as co-producer of knowledge
• The community as teachers

3. The virtual laboratory. If you ever want to be astounded by the potential of virtual reality in learning it is worth visiting one of the technology giants and seeing how virtual reality allows us to drive the Mars Rover a year before it happens; conduct surgery with blood, tactile sense and a fully accurate image of the surgery without a live patient; or see nano-particles in action. While spectacular examples they are also quite practical illustrations of how the laboratory is changing through technology and the potential to bring very sophisticated laboratories to very remote places; and very remote places to the laboratory.

Of course, the whole point of disruption is we will not understand it until it happens, thus, perhaps the biggest implication of technology and disruption is the need for school leadership to be very different now than in the recent past. As a look into what might be demanded of leaders in any domain it is worth considering a recent post I did on the Six paradoxes of leadership.

Continuous change in the relationship between people and technology.
If you look at the number of conferences on the impact of technology on society, democracy and ourselves it seems quite a popular sport to denigrate the new hegemonists for the things they are doing to us. It is clearly true that technology is changing how we interact, how we think, how we decide and even how our brains are wired. And, this impact will continue to grow. It behooves education to get in front of this, both in terms of what it means for learning, but also what it means for how we run our schools and probably most important as the entity charged with helping us be the best version of ourselves, what it means for our society. Consider each in turn:

1. Learning. In their fascinating book, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, Gazzaley and Rosen (2016) point out that our cognitive ability and primary motivations for execution were not created for the range of distractions technology is offering us. The challenge is that our goal setting selves are creating a world where our wiring is suboptimal. Thus, many of the tools we think might help us to learn are actually potentially significant sources of distraction. Theirs and the work of many others suggest that teachers need to be tremendous students of the implications of technology for learning, not at just the obvious level of what is best done virtually what is best done in the classroom, but also at a deeper, more profound level: how is technology changing the learning process itself?
2. Managing the school. One of our sons attended a school where all of his performance and requirements were available online in real time. It was an alluring invitation to become very bad helicopter parents. I will leave it to him to answer your obvious question. In retrospect, what seemed like a wonderful tool had a very dark downside, as high school students were at risk of never learning to manage on their own; the fundamental requirement of adulthood. There are many examples of how what seems obviously good use of technology in running a school, like any organization, can have quite insidious implications.
3. Role in our communities. Schools have a special place in our lives. They are the place we come to get better, to grow up, to have the difficult conversations we need to improve ourselves, as well as the communities and societies of which we are a part. This places schools in a unique position when it comes to helping us ponder through how best to anticipate the unintended consequences of technology and how best to manage them. Perhaps the ultimate version of this concern is captured in Nick Bostrom’s fascinating book Superintelligence, in which he helps us to begin navigating how to instruct a machine capable of taking over the world and large parts of the universe before it develops that capability. An event that, on technology’s present trajectory, is likely to occur within the next 40–100 years.

Problems are getting bigger, more complex and coming faster.
With disruption comes problems that are bigger, more extreme and come faster. The reason is that disruption puts the entire ecosystem in which the disrupted organization exists in play. Change one part in a major way and you force the others to accommodate. Again, the consequence of bigger, more interdependent problems exists at the level of teaching/learning, the school itself and the relationship between the school and it’s larger community. Here are a few:

1. Schools need to find combinations of deep experts and large scale integrated thinkers, in order to develop integrated approaches to the way we think about the problems we both have to study and teach.

2. How do we prepare people to deal with complex problems of this type:

• How do you teach integrated thinking?
• How do you teach character?
• How do engender the right kinds of curiosity and self-reflection required to solve large complex problems?

3. Given the dynamic nature of the problems that arise from disruption, and the interconnected nature of the solutions required, it is critical to embed learning in the problems that exist in real time in the community of which the school is a part.

Institutions are having difficulty adapting and are at risk of failing. One particularly important complex problem is that the institutions that make our societies work are having difficulty keeping up with the pace of change driven by the accelerated rate of disruption. Government, markets, schools, the legal system and the police are all having a challenge keeping pace with the change we are experiencing. Part of the reason is that institutions are designed to change slowly; their purpose is to be solid, reliable entities that provide a context to ensure the rest of our lives work well. We designed them to be conservative. However, change is happening so fast that this has the risk of making our institutions a liability, rather than a source of security and fairness. This too requires schools to adapt at three levels of analysis. We need to teach people who can manage effective adaptation in challenging times, we need to recognize that schools are themselves institutions requiring adaptation, and we need schools to be the place in which we can have the debates about how our larger institutions can effectively deal with the change they are experiencing. On this last point it is especially critical that we not pursue overly simplistic answers, which can take us down paths quite compelling, but dangerously limited or answers constrained by the institutional structure that already exists. An example of this latter challenge is captured in the word education which without any pre-thought conjures up notions of accreditation, classroom, degree and teacher/professor all of which limit our imagination as we approach the problem, so too for other institutions.

Massive loss of work and transformation of work.
Finally, the element of disruption that is most discussed and about which most people are concerned. How do we ensure our schools are helping us cope with the nature of shifting work demands and the demands of citizens as a consequence of disruption? We are about to have the fastest, largest transition in work in the history of the world. How do schools stay ahead of this?

At the level of teaching and curriculum this will require us to develop a significantly faster rate of adaptation in teacher skill and learning content. Which, will in turn require us to rethink the teacher support and sourcing model for schools. Which, will in turn require us to completely rethink the relationship between a school and its local environment, including, but not exclusively contained to, being part of the work creation process itself. That said, there is an even larger need: how do we prepare people to be members of society given the impact of disruption? Too strong a focus on the elements of employment at a given point in time risks losing the need to develop significantly more self-aware and adaptive people who have learned how to learn.

Education needs to ADAPT blog series:
Introduction
Asymmetry: education will cause disparities to grow
Disruption: education must keep up
Age: rebalancing educational wealth
Populism: [coming soon]
Trust: [coming soon]