Balancing digital and analogue technologies in learning design
Do you remember any of your school reports and what your teachers said about you? I was recently reminded of mine by a family member, who told me that the quality of my handwriting was something that was flagged a lot (and it’s still pretty bad!).
This vividly brought to mind how things have changed, and how clear, easy to decipher handwriting as a relatively dominant means of communication then, seems much less important now.
I can confidently say that the gulf between the words I handwrite versus type on a digital device is pretty huge. Thankfully for me and everyone else - my handwriting isn’t how people have to interpret what I’m saying.
All this led me to think about the continuum of technologies that are, or have been used in the design of experiences that we hope will lead to learning.
Are we unthinkingly defaulting to digital?
This past year I’ve been working with a number of education providers on what can broadly be described as digital transformation. People will have different definitions of this, but I find this type of definition to be one of the most commonly held:
Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers.
Taken from The Enterprisers Project
That idea of digital technology colonising every area of an organisation - is an interesting one. When distilled into a definition like this, there’s no detailed “why”. Why might you want to be top to toe with digital technology?
The danger is that it leads you to be very unthinking - and as such, when faced with design choices and decisions of various kinds you default to digital technology rather than weighing up evidence and different factors before coming to what you hope is the best decision.
How I see this manifested sometimes is a desire to remove non-digital technology from learning experiences. The replacement of books, notebooks and paper and other types of technology for digital technology equivalents.
When I undertake work as a designer - I consider design to be about details and decisions that you can justify - which isn’t to say you’re always right or certain, but that you can articulate the “why” behind your course of action.
When we consider what technologies to use or recommend - too often we can unthinkingly choose digital technologies over other technologies, without a thoughtful process taking place. Now of course in some cases there are macro factors at play that govern and guide those discussions and decisions, but that’s not always the case.
Digital vs analogue: A question of affordances
I wonder what we’d think if an online course or programme provider started to intentionally post out reading materials, books or resources in the future? Might we think they’ve become like those people who started buying cassette tapes again? Or imagine if in online learning design - learners were actively encouraged to write and draw by hand or print out materials to read?
There are lots of rational well-thought through reasons why you wouldn’t choose to do that, and digital technology can offer a range of fantastic affordances - but there’s also probably a degree of chronological snobbery too.
As an aside I also think we’ll come to a stage in the near future when the environmental impact of digital will come to the fore - but “go paperless, save trees” seems to be the winner for now.
When designing learning experiences, so-called generative learning strategies can be an incredibly helpful way of developing understanding. These include things like summarising, mapping, drawing amongst other things - some of which may benefit from the affordances of technologies we can too easily preclude for digital cousins.
We also know that there can be a difference in how we engage with content on digital devices as opposed to print - but is that something that we weigh up in design anymore? Might the affordances of print in some instances lead us to choose that over digital formats?
In education, we’re fortunate to have a wealth of digital technology that in many cases provides us with great affordances for teaching and study, but we also have other technologies that have affordances for those things too. So we should allow ourselves to ask the question, what’s the relationship between technology (in the broadest sense) and learning, and how might that guide our design decisions as we seek to provide learning experiences that bring about a positive change.
