Go to any education conference or even better BETT, the largest education show in Europe, and you would think (not mistakenly) that hardware and software are the core of education. But the dissenting voices who think that IT is not the solution to educational improvement have a major new voice in Michael Schrage, co-director of the M.I.T. Media Lab. In a recent article published in the Financial Times, he tore into what he sees as the inherent weakness of edutainment software based on uninterrupted excitement and students’ constant engagement by a ‘silicon seducer’.
Schrage argues that rewarding inattention and impulsiveness, far from helping learning, actually damages students’ cognition. He further says there is no relationship between the spending on IT and improved educational outcomes. Schrage’s missive, along with two recent UK research studies that drew much the same conclusions, are unlikely to influence educational policy and spending in the UK. They should, and Gordon Brown’s new International Business Advisory Council would be far better off listening to someone like Schrage than to Bill Gates, who is very unlikely to ever say that software is not the solution to all the UK’s educational and economic needs.
