At last Tuesday’s Aspen panel discussion on education technology (see previous post), moderator Gary Huggins started the conversation with a familiar historical reminder: advocates of education technology have been forecasting “transformative change” since at least 1920 and the advent of the moving picture. Communications technology and media have been advancing steadily for the past century without accompanying changes in the education system. Why should we expect anything different now?

The panelists, Ted Mitchell from NewSchools Venture Fund and Fiona O’Carroll from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, alluded to a “perfect storm” of conditions that, they think, make this moment unique: the wide accessibility and affordability of internet-ready mobile devices, the growing consensus that incremental change is insufficient, and budget difficulties that will force districts to make strategic investments in cost-saving technologies.

I am not so sanguine about the situation, for a number of reasons – mostly, because I am not so convinced that proven, cost-saving technology solutions are ready for deployment quite yet. But I also think that there’s a case to be made that the premise of the question is off. Perhaps technology has been gradually and appropriately transforming education all along.

No, classrooms don’t look dramatically different than they did a century ago. But who can we blame? Once you build a school, it’s not too easy to “reimagine” the classroom when the physical space and walls are a certain size and furniture has already been bought. But even so, plenty of schools have put TVs and computers in classrooms, have functional and well-used computer labs, and have auditorium spaces capable of screening educational films. I, personally, benefited from plenty of those resources and found that they all enriched my education in meaningful ways that would not have been possible a century ago.

To use a different scenario, when I taught English in Brazil, technology was an absolutely invaluable asset. I built an entire high-quality curriculum, for free, with a satellite internet connection, PowerPoint, and instant-messaging software. Again, that’s something that would never have been possible even a decade beforehand.

In other words, one could reasonably suggest that out of all the things that are dysfunctional in public education, perhaps technology is the least of our worries. Perhaps problems like teacher and principal attrition are cause for much more concern. And given the disruptive impact of new technology, maybe it’s actually better to avoid getting too distracted by that stuff until we get the basics – like teacher recruitment and retention – right. Better instead to welcome innovations from the private sector – like Internet and PowerPoint – as they emerge, rather than try to force or hurry transformative changes all at once.

I know a lot of teachers who would basically sympathize with this “Stay the Course” vision of technology – as a gradually-evolving enhancement that we probably risk over-hyping rather than under-hyping. I myself am a bit more bullish. I think that there are some very exciting possibilities in ed-tech, and that there’s a great deal that philanthropy and government can do to encourage new technology and to integrate it more fully into school.

But there are many, many ways in which new technology can go wrong if we’re not careful. I’ll explore some of those scenarios in the next post, as a corollary to the “Wholesale Transformation” vision.

Note: This series is cross-posted at Edreformer.com