Reflections in the noodle soup (Part 4)
In which we discuss the lessons we can learn about digital innovation and making big changes in education over a steaming bowl of ramen.
This is the final part in a series taking a deep dive into a new multi-billion dollar digital initiative currently being piloted and due to be rolled out nationwide in Japanese schools from 2024.
In Part 1 we looked at what’s happening and the troubled history of other one-device-per-child initiatives.
In Part 2 we panned back to look at the context of modern Japan and the contradiction at the heart of Japan’s relationship with technology.
In Part 3 we zoomed into the classroom to look at Japanese pedagogy and how the digital textbooks will – or won’t – change a traditional model of teaching.
This time we’re going to turn our attention to an alternative vision for digital learning before asking what’s the real motivation behind Japan’s big tech innovation. We’ll also finally look at why Japan’s GIGA schools might overturn two decades of failed one-device-per-child initiatives.
Two sides of the same coin?
In August I wrote a particularly snarky article about a loose idea floated by Pearson’s CEO, Andy Bird, to use NFTs to tap into the second-hand market for college textbooks. By the time I’d published a publicist had already confirmed that there were no firm plans. It was a fun story for silly season and I assumed that would be that.
However, on 31 August 2022 Andy Bird was interviewed on Bloomerg for a full six minutes about blockchain, NFTs and the metaverse. Suddenly we had a lot more detail behind the reportedly throwaway comment. You can – and should – watch the whole thing here.
I don’t mean to single out Bird or Pearson, but it’s worth comparing a more techno-evangelist vision for digital with the utilitarian design of the GIGA schools initiative. Bird’s frothy optimism is not uncommon in the field of education thought leaders – as we’ll see, this is a well-trod path.
So, without further ado, here are some key details according to Bird:
Think of a modern digital textbook comprising various learning modules, so where in the past you had chapters and illustrations and pictures, in the future those chapters are broken down into different learning modules and the creator of those learning modules could, in theory, mint that learning module as an NFT and therefore not only get paid by Pearson – as an author there’s a really interesting angle in terms of user generated content – but the author or the creator of that content – it could be a video or text in the form of audio – would then be able to participate as that learning module is utilised down the blockchain as it were and the blockchain acts as that transparent ledger and makes sure that everyone gets paid an appropriate amount of money.
Is it unfair to say that Bird’s describing the royalties system here? You know, the system used by Pearson, and virtually every other modern publisher… Although, ironically, in the case of digital content, where the industry has tended to choose to pay fees for complete ownership of assets that can be repurposed and repackaged.
If Pearson were really interested in blockchain technology, wouldn’t they be looking for applications within their large and successful certifications business? A transparent and shareable ledger to record academic achievement might actually be a plausible use case.
Bird continues to riff on the theme of money:
If you think of the textbook as being the vinyl record and then the etext as being the CD and then in music of course you had MP3 players and now you have the likes of Spotify and Tidal and others where you pay a subscription for access to 40 million songs. In the world of education, up until recently, we’ve been stuck in the [era of] the CD and I think the great opportunity is that yeah you can still buy the vinyl record you can still buy your textbook, but the great opportunity is is how we utilise technology.
CEOs often compare their business to another more glamorous business in a different sector. It’s worth assessing whether that comparison is helpful.
Are the businesses cited successful? Spotify launched in 2006 and is projected to finally turn a profit in 2022. In 2019, Tidal posted an operating loss of $55.3m.
Does the comparison hold? Spotify and Tidal give users access to an all-you-can-eat menu of music across a range of genres and record labels. Pearson Plus, Pearson’s version of Spotify for textbooks, serves up only Pearson books. In the words of Henry Ford: “You can have any colour you like so long as it’s black.” Like X, but for Y is an appealingly simple proposition, but often brushes over key details about what makes X distinctive in the first place.
Do the claimed benefits hold? Bird makes a good deal about fair payment for creators and publishers. Spotify famously pays artists a teensy amount of money per play. In fact, Tidal was set up to offer artists an alternative streaming royalty model. Tidal is also perhaps the most appropriate business comparison, too, as it doesn’t have an ad-funded free model. (There’s an uproar about EdTech companies’ use of student data at the moment, which makes ad-funded seem inadvisable at best.)
Nevertheless, it should be clear that Bird’s concern around innovation for the most part is fiscal. And to be fair to Bird, this is an interview on a programme for investors, and investors may be concerned that 20% of Pearson’s revenue comes from the beleaguered higher education market. He’s telling this audience that although the company may continue to sell fewer college textbooks, it’s actively exploring innovations to recoup more money from the market.
However, Bird does make time for one frothy use-case not centred around making bank. As he says to the presenter:
I’m in Los Angeles, you’re in San Francisco, and we could both be together in the same classroom in the metaverse, we can participate in experiments, we could go up to the whiteboard and annotate each other’s notes, we could both at the click of a button be transported to Ancient Greece and be in a Greek theatre watching a Greek play, or immediately transported into the deep Amazon jungle, or inside a cell structure, or if you’re a medical student look at procedures and be able to practice surgical procedures without having to use, you know, real bodies as it were. So many many applications and for an urban K through 12 the ability to open the eyes and open the world to students who previously have never had the opportunity to go and visit these places in the world and to have some of those experiences I think the metaverse is a really really interesting use of technology to enable that.
(While Bird’s selling a vision of what the metaverse could be, it’s worth watching this interview with no-legs-Nick-Clegg to see what the metaverse currently is.)
Perhaps unknown to Bird (because it pre-dates him by quite some time), his vision contains echoes of long-ago debates about what digital for education should be.
Back in the mid-2000s – let’s say 2006, certainly pre-crash – I attended a panel discussion about digital in the classroom. On one side was Owen White, a digital director at Pearson, and on the other was Ewan McIntosh, a language teacher and edublogger. McIntosh had made much hay about his use of the video game Myst in his language classes, where he would get students to describe the action on-screen in French. He wanted to know why publishers were producing such basic digital content when students were used to rich immersive environments in their home entertainment. White was forced into arguing the business case – publishers simply couldn’t afford to produce this kind of content. (For reference, Myst’s development budget was estimated to be $5-10m in 1996 money.)
When Bird talks about immersive experiential learning, he’s describing an affordance. Yes, conceptually, you could do all those things with virtual reality... But you’d need a budget comparable to a AAA video game to develop the content and significant investment in hardware, connectivity, and other infrastructure. Even though technology has become comparatively cheaper over time, you’d still be looking at eye-watering investment.
Despite investing $3.3 billion, there’s no indication they’re bringing immersive 3D into the classroom. So what’s all this got to do with the GIGA schools in Japan?
Cast your mind back to the war so recently declared by Japan’s Digital Minister on floppy disks and fax machines mentioned in Part 1. Both Japan and Pearson are concerned about being left behind by not embracing change and innovation.
While Pearson might be more concerned about using technology to extract shareholder value from a shrinking market, Japan is more concerned about the longer-term effect on society of ignoring digital innovation. Japan’s policy makers talk a good game about affordances, but having looked at the way digital textbooks are intended to be used in the classroom can we really claim that a pedagogical revolution is the goal? Perhaps we should infer that the true goal is something unspoken.
Revolution or evolution?
In Part 1 we took a brief look at Sugatra Mitra’s Hole in the Wall experiment and the One Laptop Per Child initiative. Both were high-profile, both were heavily promoted by tech evangelists, and both were dropped into less economically developed countries to provide a “disruptive” model of education.
These experiments failed to live up to their own hype. And these past failures are why I think there may be a lot of buzz about Japan’s digital pivot over the coming years. There is money in tech and a success, even if modest, is likely to reawaken some of the old conversations. It may even revive some of the old utopian disruptive visions, particularly if people pay attention to the broad strokes of Japan’s policy rather than the details. This is why we’ve spent so much time digging into the context that surrounds the introduction of digital to Japanese classrooms.
Anyway, here’s a silly meme I made to illustrate my concern.
There’s a philosophical detail that sets apart the approach of the failed digital initiatives and Japan’s softly-softly approach: the question of whether teachers are something to be disrupted or empowered.
The wild utopianism of Sugatra Mitra’s Hole in the Wall drinks the Kool-Aid of the Amazon school of business, where bricks-and-mortar institutions are things to be undercut and done away with. Provide children with access to technology and freedom and they will learn. The same philosophy, which had become mainstream in edutech circles at the time, was embedded in the One Laptop Per Child initiatives.
Instead, the GIGA schools take practices that are already working in the classroom and incrementally adjust them through the addition of digital. To call back to my August post, it’s about utility. The hope is that digital in the classroom will change learning for the better, but without risking practices that have led Japan to be a consistently high-ranker in international comparative testing.
The great contradiction at the heart of Japan’s reputation for cutting-edge technology is that it has tended to stick with things that work, rather than seek to continuously improve and upgrade over time. Outside the sphere of education, Japan is seeking a digital reset. A bonfire of old technology, it’s thought, will force Japan’s salarymen to step out of the 80s.
Forget that pager, here’s WhatsApp!
Never mind your floppy disk, dump your junk on the cloud!
Bin that 8-track, here’s Spotify! (But maybe hold on to that vinyl because hey actually it’s kind of retro cool and here’s a flat white and some beard wax and you’re a hipster now and welcome to Harajuku.)
Is there a risk that Japan is following a different track in education, using tried-and-tested rather than moving with the times?
It depends on whether you see technology available as completely revolutionary or simply a means of doing something more efficiently. The fax and the digital systems it’s being replaced by are doing much the same thing – communication, sharing information – just more efficiently. Modern digital storage media can hold vastly more data than floppy disks and cloud-based technology means data can be accessed from anywhere. (New technology comes with down-sides too. It should be obvious that in these cases significant care and attention needs to be given to security.)
Rather than the revolutionary transformation envisioned in the early 2000s, the GIGA schools treats digital as an evolution of tried and tested teaching practices. The use case for digital is clear, because – by and large – it already works with the way teachers work. There are proposed efficiencies for teachers around reduced planning and time saved writing on boards, so they can focus more on teaching. And teachers will need training on the new technology, of course. (Japan has a particular systemic strength here, which we’ll come to shortly.)
Japan’s investment in digital in schools is an investment for the medium term. Rather than transforming classroom practice, I think it’s reasonable to infer that its unspoken aim is to reinforce the use of modern technology in society. It’s intended to raise a new generation of digital natives, conversant with technology and its different uses, who will steer the country back to its reputed position for technological innovation.
The money question
There is a good reason we spent so much time earlier discussing Pearson’s vision for blockchain and business models. The transition to digital upends the long-established model of investment and sales for print-based publishers. If Japan’s new generation of digital textbooks is to be successful and self-sustaining, its publishers will need to be able to make money.
Print and digital textbooks are produced by private publishers in Japan, but the government sets the price of the materials. MEXT reviews and approves the textbooks and school boards decide which textbooks to buy. As we’ve seen, legislation requires schools to provide textbooks and the state will fund the purchase.
The current model is well-established. It provides publishers with a degree of certainty around money in the market within a competitive environment that encourages investment. But will it hold for digital?
For the time being, the question has been kicked down the road. Schools must still buy textbooks, which will subsidise the digital development.
Japan’s digital presently focuses around assets (e.g. images, video, animation, audio, interactive activities) and platform functionality (e.g. being able to annotate pages, project at the front of class, etc.). How many assets users can expect from the digital textbooks, and how sophisticated these assets are, will depend on the financial model in the medium term.
For now at least, publishers will be incentivised to invest and innovate if they believe they can turn their digital offer into a competitive advantage. And for now, funding for digital development is confirmed for the pilot period.
Only time will tell whether a funding model can be found that encourages healthy competition and innovation without killing the market. Or whether the transition lowers the barriers for entry to non-traditional competitors.
Will it work?
I’ve said already I think there’s a good chance MEXT’s digital innovation will be successful – not necessarily in seeding the next generation of technological innovation, but in terms of bedding in and being adopted. We’ve covered the context in detail, but there are three more things to highlight as enablers for success.
The first is communications. It’s surprisingly rare that significant reforms are well-communicated to parents, teachers, and other stakeholders in the education system. Sometimes the communication is almost provocatively one-sided, which we sometimes saw in the 2015 curriculum reforms in England and Wales spearheaded by Michael Gove. (For readers in the UK, we can roll our eyes as we remember that Dominic Cummings was at the Department for Education at the time.) And sometimes there’s virtually no communication and teachers turn up at the start of term to find the curriculum has changed and there’s a new set of books to teach from (or, worse, there will be – but they’re not here just yet).
MEXT has been open about the data received from the digital pilot and both positive and negative findings have been reported in the media. The stakes are high – the government has, after all, spent a vast amount on the initiative – but there’s an air of consultation and resulting improvement. Even the most skeptical of stakeholders can’t complain that the old system is being scrapped for something unrecognisable.
The second is the timeframe. Moving to national rollout for English in 2024, Mathematics in 2025, with other subjects to be announced in subsequent years will sound unthinkably slow to some readers. Especially for something that doesn’t appear to require a fundamental rethink of the curriculum or the way classroom teaching works.
One down-side to this slow-and-steady approach may be the technology lifecycle. How long does MEXT expect the devices to remain operational? What’s the refresh cycle? By the time Maths is rolled out, most of these devices will be fives years old… One of the advantages of the big-bang approach to technology adoption is that every device is of the same age and there there should be no difference in functionality or operation. Incremental upgrades may change this.
However, the timeframe is a recognition that a country’s education system is a shipping tanker rather than a speedboat. It takes time to change course – and time allows for…
The third factor: Japan’s culture of self-organised professional development. The longstanding tradition of lesson study operates at school, district and national level. It is teacher-led, focuses on experimentation, reflection and sharing of effective practice. You can read more about lesson study here.
Teachers are employed by the local district, rather than individual schools, and are moved between schools within the district every 2 to 6 years, depending on their career stage. While not without its drawbacks (it’s not uncommon for teachers to find they’re now teaching in a school miles from where they live), this provides another means through which knowledge and expertise can be distributed at a grass roots level.
By running a large sustained pilot, MEXT is building familiarity, competence and confidence with a large cohort of teachers. This cohort can then take on the job of developing practice with those new to the digital textbooks at national roll-out. And by building familiarity, competence and confidence in teachers of one subject, MEXT has its next generation of advocates and trainers come the roll-out of subsequent subjects.
Gradually, over time, increment by increment, this shipping tanker will turn.