OK, so if you're involved in educational technology,
maybe building it, buying it, or even using it
in the classroom, you've probably felt this.
This kind of disconnect. Yeah, exactly. Between
the systems you're given and, well, what you
actually need to do the job. Right. And today,
we're really going to try and crack open why
that happens. There's a fundamental reason for
that gap. There is. And the core idea here. coming
from research like Gary Ackerman's work on IT
for teaching, is that designing tech for schools
isn't like designing for a regular business.
It's just different. Oh, so. Well, if you look
closely at what teachers actually do, their workflow,
it's pretty much split, structurally split into
two very distinct, almost opposing kinds of tasks.
OK, two worlds. And that's our mission for this
deep dive, right, to unpack that. Exactly. We
need to define these two categories. Let's call
them, say, highly predictable tasks on one side.
And on the other maybe. Unpredictable authentic
learning tasks. That's a good way to put it,
yeah. And we need to understand why that first
world, the predictable one, feels so familiar
to IT folks. You know, manageable. Right. Well,
the other one. The authentic learning stuff.
It just throws in so much uncertainty. It really
challenges how we even think about designing
systems. And you really need to get this difference
because if you don't... If you try to apply a
rigid, predictable business solution to that
second kind of task. The creative messy kind.
Yeah. You end up with tech that's just frustrating.
Rigid. It actually gets in the way of good teaching
instead of helping it. Exactly. You've got to
respect the dichotomy. It's fundamental. OK.
So let's start with the familiar ground, category
one. The highly predictable tasks. This is where
IT systems feel, well, comfortable. Definitely
comfortable. Yeah. These tasks, they're defined
by being Well, predictable. Makes sense. And
they look a lot like the administrative jobs
you see in any organization, really. Like back
office stuff. Sort of. Yeah. Because the inputs
are pretty standard, the steps are repeatable,
and you know what an output should look like.
IT can handle that. So they can plan it out.
Plan it, design the system, test it. All with
a pretty high degree of certainty that it's going
to work as expected. So what are some concrete
examples for people listening? We're talking
about the basics. Yeah, the crucial standardized
functions. Think data management. That's the
big one. Like recording attendance every day?
Perfect example. Recording attendance, managing
student records, transcripts. Putting in grades,
calculating GPAs. Exactly. All that essential
bookkeeping. It fits neatly into, you know, a
requirements document that an IT department can
understand and build for. And it's not just pure
admin, is it? Does this predictability extend
to actual teaching tools sometimes? It does,
yeah. Particularly for instructional tools that
kind of mirror workforce training. Ah, okay.
Like compliance training. Right. Mandatory safety
training. Or maybe those rote skill building
apps. You know, where the goal is just hitting
a standard metric. Can the student do X? Yes
or no. The success measure is super clear in
those cases. Did they pass the quiz? Is the grade
recorded correctly? It's transactional. efficient.
And that's why, historically, so much early edtech
investment went right there. Because it fits
the model's IT already knows, like ERP systems.
Enterprise Resource Planning. Or CRM. Customer
Relationship Management. Yeah. Those systems
are built for managing predictable data within
an organizational structure. Category 1 tasks
fit right in. They provide stability. Structure.
They're the backbone, absolutely. But... And
this is the crucial part. If a school only focuses
its tech on category one... They're missing something
big. They're missing the core mission of education,
really, which is about discovery, creativity,
critical thinking, not just managing data efficiently.
Okay, that raises the obvious question then.
If category one is so clear, so manageable for
IT, why don't innovative schools just stick to
that? Why do teachers always seem to be pushing
the boundaries, needing more? Ah, because the
real deep learning. The stuff that really matters
intellectually, that happens in category two.
The unpredictable challenge. Right. The authentic
learning environment. And this is where that
whole analogy to business IT just completely
falls apart. OK. This is where the uncertainty
comes flooding in. So we need to define authentic
learning a bit more clearly. What does that actually
mean in this context? It means tasks that deal
with complex, messy, real -world kinds of problems.
Not simple multiple -choice answers. Definitely
not. These are problems that don't have one single
right answer. And it's the process of tackling
these problems that messes with traditional IT
planning. How so? What makes it so unpredictable?
Well, the unpredictability isn't just random
chaos. It comes from, I'd say, three main things
inherent in this type of learning. OK, what's
the first one? First, the direction the learning
takes. It's often driven by the student's own
interests and questions. Which you can't standardize,
not across a whole class, let alone a grade level.
Exactly. So right away, your path isn't fixed.
Second, the learning pulls from all sorts of
information sources. Not just the textbook. Right.
You might be grabbing data from public websites,
digging into historical archives online, maybe
even generating your own data through experiments
or surveys. It's diverse and often unconventional.
Okay, student -driven direction, diverse sources.
What's the third element? The third one. And
this might be the biggest hurdle for IT requirements,
is that the output, the actual product of the
student's learning, isn't defined at the start.
It emerges. It emerges as the project goes on.
The outcome evolves based on what they discover.
You don't know exactly what it will look like
when you begin. Can you give us a concrete example
of that? An emergent product. Sure. Let's say,
okay, a history class is doing a project on local
urban development. Maybe category one systems
like shared drives help them store initial research
docs. Fine. Standard stuff. But as they dig deeper,
they realize. Yeah. You know what? The best way
to show how this specific neighborhood changed
over 50 years is to build an interactive 3D map.
Okay. That sounds more complex. Way more complex.
Way. And now, suddenly, they need access to maybe
some high -end visualization software, maybe
something that was bought for the engineering
or architecture students, and they need that
software to somehow talk to their standard cloud
platform where they're collaborating. So hang
on. They're using a tool maybe meant for designing
buildings to teach local history. That's repurposing
on a big scale. It absolutely is. And that repurposing,
that experimentation, that's the killer variable
for IT designers. Because it wasn't planned for.
Never. Yeah. When teachers are facilitating this
kind of authentic learning, they're constantly
questioning their own methods. They're exploring
new ways to teach, trying out different tools
and technologies. They are, in effect, innovators
themselves. And as the source material highlights,
they actively look for ways to use the existing
IT systems for things that were never conceived
when those systems were first spessed out and
purchased. Exactly. That must create chaos for
things like system configuration and security.
guarantees configuration drift, you know, the
system slowly moving away from its intended documented
state. Can you give an example of that drift?
Okay, imagine a standard learning management
system in LMS. It has a basic discussion board
feature, right? IT probably intended it for simple
teacher announcements or student Q &A. Pretty
straightforward use case. But then, an innovative
English teacher decides they want to use that
same discussion board to manage a really complex
multi -stage peer review process for essays,
with different threads for drafts, feedback,
revisions. Wow, okay. Can the system even do
that easily? Probably not easily. But the teacher
will find a way. They'll hack the settings, use
weird workarounds, maybe combine it with other
tools. They'll make it work because their teaching
goal, their pedagogy, is more important to them
than following the IT department's intended use
case. They're prioritizing the learning over
the system's neat little box. Precisely. and
the result of all that constant bottom -up innovation
and repurposing. It just injects way more variables,
way more uncertainty into everything IT manages.
Design, testing, security updates, overall system
stability. So the neat, tidy framework built
for category one tasks just can't cope with the
demands of category two. It kind of buckles under
the pressure. It's the classic tension, isn't
it? Stability versus flexibility. Efficiency
versus innovation. Okay, let's try and synthesize
this now. Bring the two worlds together. Because
this fundamental split, this tension, it's the
core design dilemma in EdTech, and it really
impacts schools, budgets, IT teams. Oh, it absolutely
does. It puts them in a really tough spot. On
one hand, you have to maintain those super reliable
lockdown systems for category one. Attendance,
grades, payroll, standardized test data. That
stuff has to be accurate and secure. No room
for error. Exactly. That demands stability, clear
rules, governance, long planning cycles for upgrades.
Predictability is paramount there. But at the
exact same time? At the exact same time, you
need to somehow support category two, the authentic
learning, which demands the opposite. Constant
flexibility, adaptability, the ability to integrate
new tools quickly, handle unexpected uses. And
for you listening, if you're managing a school
budget or you're designing these systems... This
split explains why that simple off -the -shelf
system, the one that worked perfectly in the
finance office, is the source of constant complaints
from your most creative teachers. They're not
just being difficult. The system literally doesn't
support the way they need to teach. And supporting
those unauthorized or unconceived uses must be
expensive, right? A drain on IT resources. It's
hugely expensive in terms of time and effort.
When a teacher pushes a system beyond its design,
who fixes it when it breaks? The IT team. Right.
They spend hours troubleshooting weird issues,
finding workarounds, patching security holes
that pop up because the system is being used
in unexpected ways. It's basically creating technical
debt or configuration debt within the school's
context. And I bet it also leads to what people
call shadow IT. Oh, definitely. Teachers just
get fed up. They'll start using their own personal
cloud accounts or finding free online tools or
installing software the district hasn't approved.
Because the official school system is just too
rigid or slow to adapt to what they need now
for an emerging student project. Exactly. The
inflexibility of the Category 1 focus system
actually drives the creation of these decentralized
unsupported solutions, which of course creates
massive headaches for data privacy, security,
and management down the line. So the innovative
teaching still happens? Sometimes. Yeah, but
it happens despite the official IT infrastructure
not because of it, you know stepping back and
looking at the sources like Gary Ackerman's work
you mentioned This isn't a new problem he's identified.
He's been focused on this specific tension for
a while, hasn't he? He really has. It's been
a central theme in his research and writing,
this core idea that schools are not businesses
and the technology needs are fundamentally different
because of this split in tasks. He really challenges
that common assumption that you can just take
business IT practices and drop them into a school.
Yeah, his book titles actually say it all, don't
they? Things like technology and schools. It
isn't like this in business. That title just
crystallizes the whole issue we're talking about.
And you see it in his earlier work too, right?
Like, efficacious technology management from
2018 or technology -rich teaching from 2015.
They all grapple with the same core challenge.
How do you manage technology effectively, efficiently,
when the central activity it's supposed to support
real teaching and learning is inherently experimental?
often unpredictable, and driven by human interaction
and creativity. It's a framework that actually
makes sense of the friction. It validates the
teacher who feels constrained by the tech. And
it validates the IT director who feels like their
carefully planned systems are constantly being
undermined or broken by the users. It shows the
conflict is structural. It's baked into the nature
of education itself, not just personalities clashing.
Exactly. It's the fundamental difference between
designing systems primarily to manage information
efficiently. Category 1. First is designing systems
to facilitate discovery and creation. Category
2. Okay, so just to recap quickly, we've covered
these two critical types of tasks teachers face.
The predictable, data management, admin -like
tasks. Category 1, familiar territory for IT.
And then the unpredictable, complex, authentic
teaching and learning tasks. Category 2. where
student interest and emergent outcomes drive
everything, introducing massive complexity for
IT systems. And we've seen how trying to manage
category two with systems designed only for category
one leads to frustration, workarounds, shadow
IT, and ultimately hinders innovative teaching.
Right, and it forces us to confront the fact
that the most powerful pedagogical moments, the
real breakthroughs in student understanding often
happen precisely when teachers and students push
technology beyond its intended limits. Which
brings us perfectly to our final... provocative
thought for you, the listener, to chew on after
this deep dive. Okay. If the most valuable, most
impactful teaching often relies on teachers constantly
finding ways to use IT systems for purposes that
were never conceived in the original plans. If
that hacking and repurposing is actually a sign
of good, responsive teaching. Then does that
mean the most effective educational technology
systems need to be designed differently from
the ground up? Do they need to somehow embrace
their own... well. planned obsolescence, or at
least plan for perpetual reconfiguration. Should
constant flexibility, the built -in capacity
for ongoing unplanned change Should that be the
primary design feature for EdTech, maybe even
more important than long -term stability or rigidly
defined functions? It's a radical shift in thinking.
It absolutely is, because that changes the whole
budgeting and procurement model too, doesn't
it? Moving away from buying durable, fixed systems
towards investing in fluid, adaptable platforms
and maybe the ongoing support needed to manage
that constant change, that's a massive challenge
for most districts. A huge challenge, but maybe
a necessary one. Something to think about. Definitely
food for thought. All right. That's all the time
we have for this deep dive. Thanks for joining
us. Thanks for having me. We'll catch you next
time.