Graham Brown-Martin’s blog post on ‘The Napsterification of Learning’ is a bold, provocative and important contribution to the ongoing debate around the role that new technologies can and ought to play in education. It’s a short piece, and well worth reading in full, but the basic summary is this: technology can be ‘disruptive’; disrupting the way educational goods have traditionally been provided is a positive virtue; and the way this disruption will occur is through ‘Napsterification’, doing for education what Napster did for music – that is, cutting out the ‘middle men’ and connecting listeners directly with music. Technology, Brown-Martin believes, has the potential to revolutionise an outmoded ‘1950s’ style of teaching and learning by ‘disintermediating’ students’ access to knowledge in just the same way – though he leaves it tantalisingly open as to exactly who the middle men in question actually are.
Brown-Martin makes two points that are, I think, especially relevant to Tutor Connect and which are worth reflecting on a little more deeply. The first is the implicit suggestion that new technology should replace existing, traditional forms of teaching and learning, these being inappropriate for preparing young people for a twenty-first century world. This seems to me to be an unnecessarily strong claim, for two reasons. First of all, our best schools and universities – many of which have been teaching in the same way for decades (while integrating technology into its methods as they have seen fit) – are extremely good, and appear to do a fine job of equipping students with the intellectual tools they need to thrive in the labour market and in society more generally. This suggests that it is not the teaching methods themselves that are necessarily flawed, but rather their delivery in some particular cases. Second, the fact remains that technology cannot replace every aspect of a child’s education, even if we wanted it to: it cannot teach children how to interpret the body language of others, it cannot teach them how to speak in front of a large physical audience, and so on. These two points suggest to me, therefore, that we should conceive of technology as augmenting, rather than replacing, more traditional forms of education.
This is where Tutor Connect is seeking to add value. Rather than attempting to act as a rival to traditional schooling, Tutor Connect seeks to supplement it. Whether a student is struggling in a particular subject and is looking for extra help, or is excelling and wants to be stretched even further, Tutor Connect can perform that function. This flexibility is enhanced by what, to my mind, is Tutor Connect’s most exciting feature: that it eliminates the constraints that physical geography places on teaching and learning. If you’re in Basildon and want to learn maths from a highly-rated tutor in Baltimore, you can do exactly that. This suggests that we can view the ‘middle man’ highlighted by Brown-Martin not so much as a person, but instead as a physical place, which Tutor Connect allows us to bypass if we want to add to the learning we do at school or university.
The second feature of the blog post worth considering is the precise model that Napster offers. Napster, lest we forget, was guilty of copyright infringement on a massive scale – something which was not just illegal, but immoral. Brown-Martin’s claim that “savvy artists and labels” were less affected is, I’m afraid, besides the point. To be fair to him, I’m sure that Brown-Martin isn’t actually promoting this model as one to be aped in the education sector: ‘Napsterification’ is, after all, a punchy term that gets the point across well, and that’s why he uses it. But it’s worth thinking about the implications for Tutor Connect. One of the major driving forces behind Napster was a feeling that the record industry was running a ‘cartel’, conspiring to keep prices artificially high. Whether or not there’s any truth in those claims, we should place this in contrast with the Tutor Connect model, which is one of a completely transparent marketplace, where tutors set their own fees and customers choose them based on their past performance as judged by previous learners. This model retains some of the attractions of Napster, but does so in a fair and legal way.
Whether you agree or not with Brown-Martin’s underlying thesis, it’s undeniably great to see that there’s such a dynamic and vigorous debate going on. With so many people now thinking about how new technology can improve the ways we teach and learn, the future seems bright indeed.
