It’s not about the technology….or is it?

In our field a commonly heard phrase is “it’s not about the technology.” After a thought-provoking exchange on a webinar recently, I’m rethinking how I use that phrase.

First some background: in a world that often overvalues tech and undervalues teachers and relationships, it’s understandable that many people—including me—often feel the need to say that technology isn’t the most important factor in online learning. As policymakers and others outside education look at digital learning, they often lead with technology, thinking about how some new technology is the key to transforming education. I’ve not strayed from the view that we need to be clear that those views are wrong.

But in this recent webinar my co-panelist Rachel Goodwin talked about trucks—of all things—in a brief discussion about technology, and in that moment I realized I had a better analogy about technology than anything I’d used previously. Or I thought it was better. You can be the judge after finishing this post.

Bear with me as I give some relevant background. My wife and dog and I live in Durango, CO, which is a small town with high mountains all around. On many summer weekends we like to get out to remote trailheads to hike, which involves driving our four-wheel drive, high clearance pickup truck to get there.

I’m not into trucks, or cars for that matter. When it comes time to shift to four-wheel low to get through the rough patches, I usually look over at my wife to make sure I’m doing it correctly. I really don’t care about any elements of the truck other than it gets us where we want to go and can fit our gear.

But if we didn't have the truck, we couldn’t get where we wanted to go. The truck gets us to the start of the fun part of the day, hiking in the mountains. I used to drive a Corolla. Sometimes we would still get to the trailhead, with a lot more work. Sometimes we couldn’t get there at all.

You probably see the analogy here. We don’t want to talk about technology in digital learning as if it’s the most important thing, because it isn’t. But if we just say “it’s not about the technology” we’re leaving out the fact that the tech is, of course, mission critical for online and hybrid schools.

This isn’t an abstract observation, either. During the pandemic, I had several tech directors tell me that technology purchases made with classroom use in mind couldn’t handle the needs of remote learning. These issues remained as some of those districts have added online or hybrid schools.

Maybe the amended statement is: we don’t want digital learning to be about the technology, which means you need really good tech to ensure that you don’t have to think about it.