Time to power up!

Empowerment is a cultural thing. It depends on the environment in which one is operating. Throughout my life, I have been directly involved with technology. I’ve been interested in it, and it has been something towards which I have always been drawn. As a result, I quickly became identified as a “nerd” or a “geek”. I spent afternoons working on the computer or playing games, and I became very familiar and comfortable with the systems. As a result of having done this, I have nurtured an attitude of giving things a go. You know, the space where you have the freedom to take a shot at figuring something out. I won’t get it on the first attempt, but I’ll give it a fairly good effort. I believe this can be attributed to years of trying to get programs and games to work, to repairing internet connections and on being exposed to new platforms. One has to immerse oneself to become capable and familiar with the material. Without having gone through the trial-and-error process, I do not feel I would be as equipped to work with digital media as I am now.

I think there’s a general assumption that often happens when one observes someone being good at something. I’m certainly guilty of falling into the trap of thinking that someone is just naturally gifted and that their talent comes to them without much effort at all. Really, the exact opposite is usually true: it’s hours and hours of working at the task that creates familiarity and, eventually, mastery and not just raw talent. Of course, talent plays a part in all this—aptitude cannot be ignored completely—but it’s the effort that is made that makes all the difference. 

None of what I’m saying is particularly new or revelatory. This is all stuff that people like Malcolm Gladwell and Ken Robinson have been writing about for years. What I think hasn’t necessarily been spoken about, though, relates directly to what I do for most of my working days: deal with getting staff and students to be more capable and empowered users of technology.

Any of us who work in technology know that much of our time is spent troubleshooting. It can range from something as simple as needing to change a setting on an iPad to needing to rebuild servers to ensure that essential services are running. Almost every day, I have students and staff members coming to see me to get their digital textbooks working, or their wifi configured, or their email set up or to sort out their wireless presentation software etc. While I am always glad to help with this, I’ve begun to realise that this is not actually educationally sound practice. 

I am, first and foremost, a teacher. Our jobs as teachers are to empower others, to help them to see their own potential and to enable them to do things that they did not know they were capable of doing. Often, to do this we must push our students to do new things. We have to provide the space in which they can work things out for themselves, and, in so doing, develop the ability to be more self-reliant in future. Taking over the task for them defeats the purpose completely and often has a negative impact.

Let me illustrate this with a personal example: when I was young, I often wanted to help my father with tasks. I would try to help with the gardening, or sweeping or painting, or washing the car, but always the story ended the same way: he took over and did everything. It was always quicker and easier for him to do the job himself, so that’s what he did. Eventually I stopped offering to help and when I was asked to do things, I deliberately did a bad job so that he would just take over and I could get back to whatever I was doing (usually playing computer games). I learnt nothing. And now when I need to do things around the house, I lament the fact that I haven’t learnt them. Luckily the troubleshooting mindset I have from working with computers means I have a method of sorting out the problem, but it would be preferable if I had a clearer frame of reference. 

So, now I’m starting to employ this in my own day-to-day practice. I don’t just take the iPad or mouse from the student or teacher, I talk them through the process, or I point them in a direction. For many people, computers and technology continue to be sources of intimidation and bafflement; otherworldly pursuits for select individuals who “get it”. The problem with this is that the computer stuff is not going away. It’s not even slowing down. If people want to be equipped for life in the future (and by ‘future’ I mean any time ahead and not some dark Blade Runner-eque world), they are going to need to know how to take charge of this technology and not be trumped by it.

As teacher trainers and teachers, we need to be empowerers. We need to create spaces where our ‘customers’ feel able to take chances, to investigate, to fiddle, to ‘see what this button does’. If we’re not doing that, we are not fulfilling the fundamental purpose of our job, and that is a very sad thing indeed.

We need to ensure that our strategies for staff development are focused on taking the fear away, on helping people learn how to troubleshoot their own problems and to give things a go. Once that culture has been created, those of us who are doing the training can spend more time on extending and showing people how to make technology an even more powerful teaching tool and how to move the curriculum in exciting and meaningful directions. We are all ‘computer people’ now, and the sooner we all start acting like it, the better.