John Travers

I’m feeling slightly smug that twenty years ago when computers were mere babies in schools, I wrote a little column in an educational journal titled ‘Clayton’s Computer’. At the time everyone in Australia knew Clayton’s as the name of a non-alcoholic drink (’The drink you have when you are not having a drink.’) Readers understood ‘Clayton’ as a euphemism for pretending, or fakery. So the hero of my column was Clayton, a teacher who used computers extensively in his teaching, but at a quite shallow level, replicating traditional teaching with the aid of a computer, gaining a (fake) reputation as a trendy modern teacher using computers to enrich learning.
Sadly, the Claytons have multiplied in education systems all around the world in the years since then: sometimes cynically, but more often innocently as teachers and administrators strive to bolt new technologies onto traditional teaching practices, and find that very little changes.

Using a word processor to prepare a report has significant advantages over writing it by hand, but the task and the outcome are essentially the same, so any learning gains are small. But the cost of the computer is significant. We don’t get real gains in using computers in education until the power of the computer is used to move to a higher level of learning activity. And that’s hard to achieve because the whole system is determined to resist change. That’s what has fascinated me over the last twenty years – to contest between entrenched educational practice and the onrush of computing innovation that is changed just about every aspect of society – except for schools.