Ed-Tech and Teachers : What's The Future?
What's the relationship between Education Technology and Teachers? The most common sense answer is that education technology is the new mode and the teachers are the old mode, linked somewhat in an asymmetric relationship like the one between the weavers and textile factories. The former is just an inefficient form of doing things which technology can do much better, or at least, be able to do much better when it becomes smarter eventually. Others take a kinder view of teachers and teaching. They actually contend ed-tech will be good for teachers. The advent of ed-tech, in this view, is the panacea for the 'cost disease' of education, because, as the economist William Baumol has affirmed, education is one of those trades where the 'productivity' of the Professor does not go up much, though their salaries keep going up. This problem is at the heart of the runaway costs of education in the developed world, particularly in the US, where college fees beat inf...