Ed tech promoters need to understand how most of us learn
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When Bill Gates was still a teenager, he would sneak out of his family’s house before dawn and ride his bike to a building on the campus of the University of Washington. He had discovered that the university’s huge supercomputers were idle between the hours of three and six in the morning, allowing the budding computer enthusiast to teach himself how to program—night after night, until the sun came up.
At a young age, Gates was already an autodidact, someone compelled to learn for himself what he needed to know. Over the course of his life, Gates has maintained this habit: He dropped out of college after two years, but he has continued his education through incessant reading and conversing. Michael Specter, a New Yorker writer who profiled Gates for the magazine, has saidthat the Microsoft founder “is one of these autodidacts who reads, reads, reads. He reads hundreds of books about immunology and biochemistry and biology, and asks a lot of questions, and because he’s Bill Gates [he] can get to talk to whoever he wants.”
Gates is particularly interested in these topics because of his philanthropic work combating disease in developing countries. Another arm of his philanthropy, of course, involves the promotion of technology in education. Many of Gates’s fellow leaders in the ed tech world are also members of the autodidact club. Computer scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, academics—they are a self-selected group of individuals who have schooled themselves in a fast-changing field for which there is no settled syllabus, no well-established curriculum. In turn, their preferences and proclivities have shaped the educational technologies that the rest of us use, as well as the expectations we hold about what ed tech can and should do.
Bill Gates (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)
This is no surprise: we all rely on our own experiences in forming our ideas of how learning works. But the experiences of ed tech creators and promoters are notably influential—and notably unusual. Most people are not autodidacts. In order to learn effectively, they need guidance provided by Ed tech promoters need to understand how most of us learn | The Hechinger Report:
