Yogi Berra and educational technology

We will have a revolution in how higher education in designed, organized and delivered in the next 50 years – and this educational revolution will pivot around some technology or set of technologies. [But] we cannot accurately predict what this technology catalyzed and enabled postsecondary education revolution will be, what shape it will take, and what technologies will prove most important. Joshua Kim in Why We Won’t Predict the Next Ed Tech Revolution (June 22, 2011).

Prediction is hard, especially about the future. Yogi Berra (undated).

Joshua Kim is the resident pundit for Insider Higher Ed on educational technology, and he follows the Yogi Berra line: we can’t predict the future, bolstered by past examples of where we have been unable to predict dramatic changes (three large demographic changes: the Baby Boom, female workforce participation growth, and divorce). I partly agree, but I think the interesting question is not how much we can predict but where we can predict the adoption of technology in schools (both K-12 and higher ed).

It is true that dramatic change is generally not predicted because it is … dramatic and unexpected (says Obvious Man).* But despite what Kim claims, I am reasonably confident that at least some part of the Larry Cuban framework is correct: technology “disrupts” existing patterns far less than the utopian advocates of ed tech generally have assumed (and continue to argue). And the fact that Kim had to reach to giant demographic changes as his historical examples, rather than educational technology, suggests that maybe he does not really have solid evidence in the area of ed tech.

So let’s look at an example of a real change, a dramatic one that has affected everyone in higher ed, one based entirely on a technological revolution: the use of computers for producing written work. If you think this is a trivial change, I’ll simply ask which of my readers continues to use a manual or electric typewriter. Yeah, yeah, I didn’t think so. The microcomputer revolution did change everyone’s lives (and mostly for the better) in higher ed, but we don’t think of it as a revolution because it did not change the structure of college assignments. But revolution it was.

So to return to the main question I stated above, how much (or how early) could we have predicted microcomputers would turn typed papers into word-processed papers (and all that entails), and could people in the early 1980s have predicted where it would change the lives of college students and faculty? I think the brief answers are “fairly early” and “probably.” I carried a moderately-heavy Smith-Corona electric typewriter to college in the fall of 1983, but by the end of my first year I was spending hours in the college’s computer lab finishing papers in an early version of Microsoft Word. Some of my college friends used typewriters throughout their undergraduate years, but a largish minority or small majority learned either Word or WordPerfect, and a surprising chunk bought one of the early microcomputers, including the 25-pound monstrosities that passed for “portable” computers. When I began graduate school, and my parents asked what they could do to support me, I had an easy answer: a Leading Edge XT, with a (then-)giant 20MB hard drive. (Penn gave me tuition waivers along with my pitiful TA stipend.) I survived summers in grad school by temping as a secretary with knowledge of the main word processing programs and 100-wpm typing (only possible on computers, at least for me).

I was far from unique in living this transition: I think anyone looking at colleges in the mid-1980s would have understood that universal word-processing was somewhere on the horizon (if moderated significantly by the digital divide). I also think if you asked most students like me the highest value of computers, the answer would have been “to complete my assignments much more easily than with a typewriter.” The answer was most definitely not, “To entirely change what college is.” That fact does not eliminate the importance of microcomputers to college students: eliminating the mundane friction of college classes is important in and of itself. But the general scope of what microcomputing would change (before the Internet) was fairly predictable towards the start of the change.

* The fact that you can generally find someone after the fact who can document their accurate prediction is not evidence that dramatic change is easily and accurately predictable. The proof of this is left as an exercise for the reader who thinks they can time a stock market.