The Medium Is the Message

The tools we use shape the way we think

The medium is the message.

-Marshall McLuhan

I built a math fact practice website a few years ago. It’s still up, you can check it out if you like. I’m not a professional developer, it’s not anything too fancy. The basic idea is to adapt to the learner. The website tries to figure out which facts the student needs help with and gives them focused practice on those facts. When I’m teaching a class of 25 students, it’s hard to meet every student where they are. One advantage of technology is the ability to adapt a learning activity to each student with far less effort from the teacher.

As I tested and used the website with students I found disadvantages as well. One is “videogamification.” A typical student spends plenty of time playing video games on screens. Many spend a significant chunk of their school day playing video games as well, as those of us who are familiar with Slope and Subway Surfers can attest. In a video game, the goal is to beat the level as quickly as possible, not to learn along the way. Students bring those habits with them when screens come out in math class. In the case of my math fact website, some students would deliberately get early questions wrong in order to give themselves an easier path through the task. I tried lots of stuff to mitigate this, but I kept running into the same fundamental problem: students were trying to get through the task, not trying to learn. I ended up building a paper-and-pencil system for math fact practice to replace the website.

We could have an interesting debate here about the details. I could try to redesign the website. Maybe the benefits of personalization are worth the drawbacks of screens. I don’t want to get stuck in this specific example. Every time I’ve used screens with students, I have found videogamification to be an obstacle. It’s part of the medium. Those habits students have built elsewhere carry over to classroom technology, and that changes my decision-making when it comes to screens in school.

Technology Is Not Neutral

I’ve played a small role in the classroom technology backlash, and the backlash to the backlash is here. Among many others, Zach Groshell argues that it’s not the screen, it’s the instructional design underneath. Groshell compares the delivery of instruction, whether a screen or a human teacher, to a grocery truck. It’s not the truck that matters, it’s the food inside. “Again and again, people seem to care more about the carrier they can see than the design they cannot.” Groshell’s argument is that we shouldn’t care whether students learn from a screen or a human teacher; we should strive to deliver excellent instructional design to as many students as possible. The vehicle, to Groshell, is neutral.

I’ve named one counterexample: videogamification, the tendency for students to treat anything on a screen like a video game. And to be clear, students sometimes treat paper-and-pencil learning like that as well. My observation, based on my experience as a teacher, is that videogamification is an order of magnitude worse on screens than on paper.

That’s just one way the medium shapes the message. Another example with a broad base of research is in reading comprehension. A wide range of studies have found that comprehension is stronger when reading happens on paper compared with a screen. This is a fundamental property of the medium: humans skim and struggle to attend deeply when reading on screens.

Putting screens in front of students has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that the screen can look back at the student. Here’s Carl Hendrick sharing what that advantage affords online instruction:

Schooling fulfills the function of accountability. In the future, this will mean cameras on, and an AI monitoring student behavior, their latency, what websites they are looking at, their ability to focus and then producing a report for a human tutor. If you can get kids to concentrate on the apps, on the sequencing, phenomenal learning is going to happen.

If you spend time watching students learn on screens, this is totally unsurprising. It’s the logical endpoint of making screens the primary vehicle for instruction. Students are prone to rushing, to skimming, to finding the easy way out. If AI is the solution to our educational problems, of course we should have AI monitor students’ eye movements.

Carl isn’t wrong. Accountability is critical in education. One of my most important roles as a teacher is being a caring human in the room with students. That presence, our relationship, and my ability to hold students accountable for learning, are huge elements of what motivates students to learn. If (this is a big if) AI can monitor student “latency” and everything else, I have no doubt it will increase student learning in a tech-first environment. But the medium is the message. Accountability from artificial intelligence is different than accountability from a human. What message does that send to students? What kind of life does it prepare them for?

Will students in the AI-driven future learn about the panopticon?

Let’s Talk About Tradeoffs

I would love to have a serious, honest conversation about the tradeoffs here. Teaching is hard. I sure would like to see a way to scale the impact of the best teachers. Teacher quality is uneven; I know well that too many students spend their school day on busywork, whether it’s delivered from a screen or a packet. Is AI the solution? Maybe.

But the starting point of that conversation is to acknowledge that the medium is not neutral. The medium is the message. The tools we use shape us. I’ve felt it. Part of the reason I moved away from classroom technology was my realization that when there’s a screen in front of every student, I became a more passive observer in the classroom, deferring to the machine to manage instruction. That decision isn’t neutral.

There are serious, smart people doing work that acknowledges those tradeoffs. Dan Meyer is building an AI tool designed to help teachers launch discussions building on student thinking, recognizing that digital classrooms risk isolating students and that teachers benefit from tools to counteract that isolation. Daisy Christodoulou is building an AI tool to radically reduce the time teachers spend assessing student writing, while keeping a human in the loop. It even works on handwritten essays, so teachers can keep screens out of the classroom while still harnessing the power of today’s technology. These are great examples of real tools that wrestle with the affordances and liabilities of today’s technology.

The internet is full of big claims about what AI can do, yet the vast majority of those claims are hypothetical: what could be, where we might end up, what is possible. I am heading back to the classroom in exactly one month. I will be making decisions based on the real resources available to me, not hypotheticals on social media. Despite some big claims, the apps that Groshell and Hendrick are developing are not yet available to boring teachers in traditional schools like mine. We can’t yet evaluate the tradeoffs of using them with students.

I’m moving down from middle school math to elementary in August. While I’m still a strong skeptic of the role of technology in the classroom, I don’t think I will be tech-free. I’ll use a bit of student-facing technology here and there, for specific purposes or as I’m required to by my school. I’ll keep experimenting with new technology, and I’m optimistic that I’ll develop more and more tools that will make planning easier for me using large language models and more. I will think hard about the advantages and disadvantages at each step of the way. That’s all any teacher can do: be open to new ideas, be clear-eyed about tradeoffs, and do the best we can with the resources we have.

I have to call a spade a spade. With the digital tools I have access to right now, paper-and-pencil classroom teaching is almost always the better option. And the vision of education that some people are selling, where technology unlocks a brave new world of efficient learning, is smuggling something sinister under the hood.