Note: This article was originally published on February 7, 2012 on Technology Integration in Education, where I am Blogs Editor and Featured Blogger.
Technology people tend to be brand loyalists. It comes with the territory. We simply love our devices more, we are more addicted to them, and we tend to anthropomorphize them, elevating them to a status beyond what is probably healthy when considering inanimate objects.
This loyalty can veer dangerously close to religious fervor: Apple vs. PC is to the current century what Ford vs. Chevy was to the last.
For an individual, this is simply a harmless matter of personal preference. However, educators need to be concerned with the bigger picture. The major players in technology are now jostling be anointed the saviors of the modern education system, aggressively staking out and defending their territories.
I believe it is essential for educators at all levels to avoid picking a horse in this race. In both how we approach teaching technology skills, as well as in how we source equipment for our schools, it is essential that we rise above our personal preferences and critically examine the available options.
All private companies are concerned, first and foremost, with their own business model. This is true for textbooks, cafeteria food, and technology. I don't intend this to be a criticism, merely a recognition of their basic reason for being. One must expect these companies to operate in the best interests of their shareholders. Despite what their marketing divisions might say, they don't have a moral imperative to improve education, or anything else, besides their bottom line.
The Google Example
Google has been at it for a while, offering up a bounty for educators. Their business model of providing tools at no-cost, and making their money on advertising has obvious appeal for teachers and cash-strapped schools around the world.
Especially since the tools are great: the search engine, of course, but also Google Earth/Sky/Ocean/Mars, Sketchup, Youtube, Google Body (now spun off into an open source project), and dozens of others: all either groundbreaking, or at least extremely useful in the classroom.
Google Apps for Education is being adopted by all sorts of institutions and systems, all over the world, replacing expensive email systems and providing a free alternative to expensive software licences for Office-type software.
Recent announcements like Open Class (a complete, free, learning management system) as well as opening up Google Plus to young people are clear attempts to carve a larger piece of the educational market.
Ultimately, however, all of this innovation is designed to build loyalty to the Google brand and keep a stranglehold on their advertising revenue.
Although not directly related to education, offering their Android operating system free to all device makers is an expression of this basic strategy - create something useful that people would otherwise have to pay for and give it away, seemingly for free. In reality, we pay with our personal information, exposure to advertising, and by allowing Google to entrench itself deeper into our lives.
The Apple Example
Apple, of course, is another obvious example. Like Google, it offers truly great products that have the potential to change the very nature of education. But like Google, they do so for their own purposes.
Apple has always aggressively pursued educational marketshare, but the full-court press to sell schools on iPads before a comparable tablet was developed was obvious even to casual observers. Even before his death, the word of Steve Jobs took on a messianic quality. The recent expansion of iBooks and iTunes U, and the release of an iBooks authoring system, prompted the masses of acolytes to declare that, finally, Apple was here to "save education". Thank goodness!
Their business model differs from Google's, obviously. They play on brand identification and loyalty more successfully than probably any other modern company. They like to run a closed system. Despite the fact that they make the majority of their revenue on premium-priced hardware, their devices really don't play well with others, and they try to keep a tight reign over software and the app marketplace, jail-breakers notwithstanding.
This business model is extremely successful for Apple, but wasn't designed with education in mind. For example, Apple likes their devices associated and personalized to a particular individual and their cloud, iTunes, and app store account. To configure a set of 25 iPads to be shared as a common resource at a school, a class set to be signed out by a teacher for example, is more problematic. Not impossible (I hear the Apple enthusiasts wailing), but clearly they were not designed to be used in that way, even though this is how disruptive technology is typically introduced into the system.
The Problem With Loyalty
My point here is this: companies like Google and Apple, and host of others, offer us a wide range of software and hardware solutions which can be used to be improve the quality of the education we deliver. But they are not purely benevolent actors, like the family dog, deserving of trust and loyalty. They are in the self-serving business of selling you something.
Both business models raise important questions for educators - should we trade away our students' surfing habits, personal information and attention to the Google advertising machine? Should we be investing in fashionable and expensive Apple gear, when more affordable alternatives exist that could stretch education budgets further? What are the implications for our students? Educators are the ones who ought to have the best interests of the students in mind. To do so, we need to think critically before being sold.
Blind loyalty obscures your true range of choices. Affordable choices. Innovative choices.
"Apple people" are typically willing to pay a high financial premium to use an Apple device. Mac computers can be many hundreds of dollars more than a PC with precisely the same specs. Many iPad users will steadfastly refuse to even look at an Android tablet, even though there are now some on the market which can compete performance-wise, and a whole category of devices designed to beat them on price.
Apple enthusiasts will argue that there is all kinds of added value to using their products, the quality of the equipment and customer service, and whatnot. There may even be something to that.
However, I defy anyone to give an example of an educational task using an Apple product that couldn't also be achieved with a more moderately priced PC device. The true differences between the hardware are, increasingly, small ones.
Individuals certainly have the right to spend their hard-earned money however they want, following whatever whim of fashion they desire. But those representing the school system in some way ought to carefully consider the cost-benefit analysis. Perhaps, in the final analysis, schools receive enough value to justify Apple's premium-priced services. Perhaps not.
But I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of schools who purchased iPads this year simply because they were the cool new trend, without carefully thinking through what they would even be used for. I happen to work at such a school.
I don't intend to pick on Apple alone. The same phenomenon is happening with Microsoft software, and has been for some time. Schools still devote vast amounts of money paying licences for "industry-standard" Office software, even though OpenOffice and Google Docs perform essentially the same functions for free. PowerPoint devotees are not always open to trying the dozens of free web-based alternatives, from Prezi and beyond.
The explosion of open-source and ad-sourced applications mean that there is a good chance that there is a "free" alternative to any expensive software package you can name. Are there sound arguments for teaching "industry-standard" applications over the free alternatives? Perhaps.
But any time you are reject those alternatives out-of-hand, in favor of expensive established brands, there is a good chance you are being overcharged, and missing where the real innovation is happening besides.
Why try to pick a winner? What winner?
Three years ago, you might be excused for thinking RIM's Blackberry was the final word in portable computing. Today, not so much. Once upon a time, Windows was far-and-away the dominant operating system. Today, the post-operating system world is right around the corner. Apple has transformed itself from a boutique brand and is now dominating the device market. But that is already changing as the market evolves. In technology, especially, no company finds itself on the top of the heap for long. Things can change more quickly than the typical purchasing cycle. Committing to one technology, financially or psychologically, might leave schools playing catch up later.
Skills shouldn't be platform specific.
Both students and teachers should be taught the skills necessary to take advantage of technology, regardless of the name on the box.
A quick example: as you might have gathered, I have never been an Apple guy, really. I've got an iPod, but I've never owned a Apple computer. I grew up using PC's, and since I am of "a certain age", I only ever encountered PC's in my own schooling.
My current employer has both Apple and PC gear, but next year I'm headed to dedicated Apple school. I recognize that my PC-centric background is something of a disadvantage, and there will be a learning curve as I adjust to my new iLife. I suspect that the teachers and students I'll meet next year, exposed exclusively to the Mac workflow will face similar issues when transitioning to new schools or workplaces.
I posit that from a purely educational and training perspective, it would be an advantage to expose people to the gambit of available technologies and adopt a more generic approach to IT education.
It certainly helps that many applications these days are web-based, cross-platform tools. Of course, with more and more schools adopting the bring-your-own-device model, schools will look to create infrastructure that can accommodate different sorts of devices. These are all positive steps, as far as I'm concerned.
I am no enemy of capitalism. Please do not read this as a diatribe against private business, who offer us no end of interesting and useful products to enjoy and exploit. But they are what they are - and defenders of the sacred trust of education they most certainly are not.
Fundamentally, they have no interest in improving education, except insofar as innovative and useful products are easier to sell. Being anointed the "savior of education" is certainly great for business. But educators are better positioned to be selflessly looking out for the best interests of our students, and the system at large.
To do that, we need to be the kind of critical consumers that are antithetical to the idea of brand loyalty.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 01:59AM 
