A big reason why ed tech so often fails to deliver lasting educational innovation is that it is often created and implemented with minimal input from teachers and students, the end users of educational technology. Teachers are a broad, diverse group who differ greatly in each community and school. Ed tech solutions are most often created with the hope that they can be sold to a broad spectrum of schools and classrooms. They tend to be one-size-fits-all solutions, and while these companies may include a founder who is a teacher, they are often not teacher led. But there is another, more insidious notion un-derlying much of ed tech‘s troubled approach to innovation, which is that the teacher is an obstacle to be overcome.
There is a reason why Harvard and the University of Toronto and my old high school are still full, and why no one I went to school with would trade their years there for a MOOC or online degree, anymore than they would for a correspondence course. That reason is teachers.
Teachers are the key to analog education‘s past, present, and future, and no technology can or should replace them. Not because they have the most knowledge, but because without them, education is no more than facts passed back and forth. If you want facts, go read abook. If you want to learn, find a teacher.
The digital world values analog more than anyone.
An intentionally analog workplace mattered more to digital technology companies for two key reasons. The first, which I had seen at Yelp and Medium, was creating a strong, interpersonal corporate culture, bound by real relationships, in an industry where the nature of the work, and the tools used to do it, naturally lean toward isolation.
Offices that appeared at first glance like adult daycares were in fact carefully designed to maximize analog interactions, with an eye on fostering the company‘s culture of innovation and ultimate productivity.
These companies are not turning to analog out of some MadMon-inspired nostalgia for the way business was once done, or because the people working there are afraid of change. They are themost advanced, progressive corporations in the world. They are notembracing analog because it is cool. They do it because analog provesthe most efficient, productive way to conduct business. They embrace analog to give them a competitive advantage.
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