From the Head of School

The Benefits and Perils of New Technology

Moveable type printing was invented in the 1450s. The first book printed in Europe was the bible and the purpose of edifying the spirit. Next came pamphlets intending to persuade and refute. Textbooks took well over a hundred years to get going, and were not regularly used until the eighteen and the nineteenth century. It took at least three hundred years for this ‘new’ technology to become a regular part of education. As it did, rates of literacy rose, and books were increasingly used for all sorts of purposes - including, quite incredibly, entertainment. The eighteenth century is less remembered for its textbooks than for its novels. Novel reading induced a moral panic that it is difficult to imagine now. One commentator nicely summed up the feeling that the effects of reading were moral and physical health with the observation that, “Novel reading […] seems literally to affect the backbone; the posture of the novel reader is rarely upright; [it is] associated with sofa and softness; it is supine, erotic, luxurious” The personal computer was invented some time around 1980. By the end of the 1990s, most schools had a computer lab; not long after that and computer-use was routine in education. From 300 years for books to 30 years for computers. If our forebearers were spooked about the physical and moral effects of a technology that took centuries to become part of the fabric of our lives, how much more so are we who have our routines transformed inside a single generation. We cannot uninvent computers, just as there was no putting the book-genie back in the bottle of history all those hundreds of years ago. Printed material enriched our lives - it also came with costs. Over time we learnt to maximise the former and mitigate the latter. We have a far steeper learning curve with computers because in the twenty first century everything is so much faster. Because we can’t take computers away, we have an obligation to teach children to use them properly. We have to structure how they experience them, talking them through each stage. This is new to us as adults; we are often helping our children navigate problems that we never experienced ourselves at their age. ISA has a one to one chromebook programme. It has enriched learning possibilities massively. It can also be a distraction. We are learning how to maximise the former and mitigate the latter. This month we introduced a new web-filter that allowed us a lot tighter control of what students accessed and at what age. We can block games far more easily and monitor to provide feedback and advice. You can read about it here. Coming to terms with new technology is a constant of human history. In recent years, the pace of change has become bewildering . Most new things are a mixture of good and bad; an effective education makes the best of the world as it is so as to move it to where it should be.