Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Where does education come from? The shop. The shop where the applications come from, the tablet comes from. But not where the school comes from, nor the teachers. We might say that the technological corporations will become the institution, and the teachers and schools will become the software and hardware for distributing them.

Technology’s best trick is always to change the way we understand things to be. An invisible cloak? This does not mean that it is invisible, it just means that we can’t see it. The same trick with education, which is getting pushed and pummelled over a degree or too until it means “access”. Is it such a big difference, that while access used to be the ability to get into a school, it now means the ability to have an internet connection and a device for looking? Is it possible for me too to change my thinking about this, to consider that schools have for too long had control of education, that freeing it up might just give us something new?

But I find education about technology to be a little shallow, more of a review than a critique, more instruction than reflection, and I wonder if education through technology will be more of the same. Not surprising then, that RMIT is leading the way in Teacher re-education by introducing its new Behaviour Capability Framework; guidelines for the way one should present oneself as an RMIT employee. But can we really blame short-attention-spanned HR/PR practices for this? Surely we could have foreseen the moment that technology took on education and won?

We are all heading for the clouds. Up in the clouds is everything we do, deliberately and absentmindedly, and that everything is becoming us. We don’t need to know everything any more. We just need to know how to find it. We can review it, we can critique it and it’s not even possible any more to edit it. Soon it will be difficult to critique it too, as criticism turns itself ever-so-slightly and becomes a negative behaviour, and we will stop that, forgetting we ever had the power to do so. Technology’s second best trick, after all, is to quickly replicate itself, removing a feature here or there, that we quickly forget we ever had.

Education is heading toward becoming a search engine. Not, though, until search engines are superseded by the next big data retrieval system. Leaving us always a little behind in our capabilities. We need to know how to find things. Technology needs to know what we can find. So sadly, though we might dream of education breaking from its archaic bonds and becoming a revolutionary force, it’s unlikely to happen.

I don’t dream of that. Education breaking from its archaic bonds. I like technology. I like it because it babysits me when I am bored and at the boundaries of my physical environment. I like to read, and write, and think. Technology gives me crayons and scraps of paper, and when I am bored, something pink or flashing. It helps me to remember that I am a Lifelong Learner, and it tells me where and how to get my education. This education is very nice to me, it encourages me to start and doesn’t get strict with me when I stop. Oh, that’s okay. Pick it up when you feel like it. It lets me pick and choose and move on if I’m bored, and best of all it lets me feel like I am really smart. Not like education used to be. I found it difficult! Even, at times, a struggle!

But we have a good relationship now, technology and me, and I can be who I am. Who I am is a little limited, of course. I am a dilettante, a dabbler, a jack-of-all-trades. I now have a motivational quotation for everything. A bit like a specialist in HR/PR, I now have at my fingertips the wisdom of the world’s greatest thinkers. And what did Einstein say about that? Something inspirational, I’ll just go look it up.

I don’t have to rely on myself any more. I think that has made me a better person. Other people seem to have done and said things that where much smarter than I would. So it makes sense to draw upon their experience, instead of having to do whatever I am doing again. And again, till I get it right. And again, till I bloody understand it.

I like those tablets. I am hoping that they will soon make one that I can swallow. Pictures of cheap shoes will appear in my eyeballs, and my fingers will twitch to touch something, shooting sensory memory-like data back into my nerve endings which I will recognize only as inherent knowledge – my own wisdom, my own intuitions. Isn’t that where we’re going with tablets? Or have I got the technology industry confused with the medical industry? I’ll just check. Oh. It’s Moses. Not Pfizer. Anyway I like them, though I wish they would make them as small as my Smart Phone, so I can hang them both around my neck.

In FACT I want to be able to hook them together, my tablet and my Smart Phone. If you put them together, they would give you TWICE the screen size! That would be very, very cool. Perhaps I could get them to argue with each other about what I should do next. Though probably only if they were products from each of the two rival groups. Being Smart, though they would probably resort to trickery, an attempt to discredit each other’s information, until I was well and truly confused. What would I do then? I would put them on the ground, take a stick, stand it up, and choose the device it fell toward.

Education comes from the shop. It has always come from the shop. It’s not a small thing, to remember that. Shops are nothing new. All those pithy quotes by our world leaders are Shop Talk of old. Nothing new there, HR/PR people.