This post first appeared on aud.life

The last couple of workshops that I've given have been fairly technical – GitHub for Beginners sort of thing. But I wasn’t sure how technical I could or should be for the ICDE crowd. Plus the title I’d been assigned was “The History of Education Technology: Hype or Hope.” That’s not a particularly workshop-y title, so I was pretty stumped about what to say. And that was compounded by the fact that I had no idea who the participants would be or what they’d want to do.

I made some slides – available here – but mostly winged it.

The room was small with four circular tables, so I decided small group discussion was the way to go. Most of those in the workshop – I didn’t get a headcount, but I’m guessing 30–35 participants – were from the global South.

I asked the groups to talk about which education technologies they thought were the most hyped (and in which they had the most hope). And I am only jotting down these notes here so that I remember their response, because I think it was quite revealing:

Overwhelmingly, the room agreed that mobile learning was the most hyped ed-tech.

I couldn’t help but think about all the VCs and (ed-) tech entrepreneurs I’ve seen hold up their smartphone and extol the coming “mobile (learning) revolution”: “everyone has a cellphone now.” Well, no. Not everyone. And even when they do, those phones do not necessarily have Internet access. And even when phones have data plans, that still doesn’t mean that mobile learning is adequate or sufficient or a “revolution” or even a good idea.

It was fascinating to hear about African educators’ response to the hype about mobile learning: the challenges of reading educational materials on a phone, for example; the challenges of watching educational videos (either streaming or downloaded), the lack of experience using technologies for school and not merely for entertainment. Some of these concerns are common everywhere, I reckon. I think what struck me was that saying mobile learning was “the most hyped” really got to the core of some of the problems with ed-tech’s promises. I mean, MOOCs and OER were mentioned in the group discussions too – but these all fall under (into?) this larger category of mobile learning, I’d argue.

So fundamentally, I think, ed-tech remains overhyped – from the specific to the general.