The inevitable rise of the machines...
20 years ago this summer I needed to earn some money before moving away to go to university. In my town that left me with two choices; factory work, or a new exciting workplace of the future - a telephone call centre.
I phoned up and, after a typing test, was offered a position as a call handler. I wasn't overly pleased with this as the factory (situated below the call centre) looked a lot more fun to work in. However it did mean an extra 20p an hour!
The call centre specialised in holiday brochure distribution. One minute you would be sending out bulk orders of Thompson brochures to a travel agent in Rotherham, the next a brochure to someone who'd read an advert about coach holidays to Devon in the Daily Mail. This was all powered by cutting edge technology. You would receive a phone call and the display on your phone would indicate which company you were representing and the script for the conversation would appear on the computer monitor in front of you.
Most calls were for major companies and you soon learned the script well. However just occasionally you would get a call from one of the more niche clients and it would all go, well, a bit wrong. I still remember a seemingly meaningless jumble of letters appearing on my screen for a short lived New Zealand travel company we were dealing with. Suddenly you find yourself unable to pronounce the name of the company you are supposedly working for much to the amazement of the person on the other end of the phone. Kuoni was one that always tripped up new starters, difficult company name, destinations you'd not heard of. Dun Laoghaire (pronounced Dun Leary) was a notorious obstacle in our Ferry brochure script.
The point of all this is, if you are looking to run a simple process a script is a really good way to do this. With a few hours training anyone vaguely competent could be taken off the street and taught how to answer calls for 50 different types of company. Once you knew the system you didn't even need to see the script until it popped up on your screen. By the end of my third summer working there I was taking calls for drugs companies selling anti-smoking pills, that had a cringe worthy first step where we had to congratulate the caller on a "positive first step in their journey to be smoke-free" and 30 seconds later be talking about the importance of washing machine servicing.
Now remember, that was 20 years ago. Since then the machines have well and truly risen. Every major website you visit will have analytics software behind it seeing how long you spend on each page, the links you clicked on, the adverts you were shown, how you got there and where you live. Those telephone scripts are tweaked to see which exact combination of words get the best results. We even have "help me now" chat screens on websites that are sometimes bots, sometimes real humans sat in their own living rooms answering questions. Every answer is recorded, every possible improvement to the company bottom line is sought out,.
This "channel migration" of moving customer (kids) away from specialists to generalists, and ideally machines, is the bread and butter of the types of industry most of the academy chain bosses have made their money in.
So when I see professionals like teachers saying it can't happen to them, they can't be replaced by a script or a computer, if I have to disagree. As Daryn Simon points out in his recent blog it is already happening.
The current direction of travel with the Schools Minister, the major academy chains and the "research" community seems to point towards a view that education is the process of "making children cleverer". The way this is done is by giving them information and measuring their ability to retrieve information. If they can't then they haven't learned anything.
This view is ideally suited to scripting and computerisation. Pretty much every basic self quizzing app has the ability to present information, test you on it and repeat the testing until it is confident you aren't just guessing and actually know the answer. When they are able to show that test results on this system are not significantly boosted by having the information presented by a qualified teacher then qualified teachers will no longer be required. If qualified teachers are better (for now) then the next question will be how large can we make the classes.
Oh sure it will lead to a narrowed curriculum and further reinforce the view that what can't be measured doesn't matter but we are well down that road already.
The role of the teacher as the expert, able to go off on tangents and enjoy discussing their subject is under attack. Strangely the strongest voices defending the "teacher as expert" model also seem to be the ones promoting the narrow definition of knowledge that will be used to justify its destruction.
Accept the definition, lose the battle.
I phoned up and, after a typing test, was offered a position as a call handler. I wasn't overly pleased with this as the factory (situated below the call centre) looked a lot more fun to work in. However it did mean an extra 20p an hour!
The call centre specialised in holiday brochure distribution. One minute you would be sending out bulk orders of Thompson brochures to a travel agent in Rotherham, the next a brochure to someone who'd read an advert about coach holidays to Devon in the Daily Mail. This was all powered by cutting edge technology. You would receive a phone call and the display on your phone would indicate which company you were representing and the script for the conversation would appear on the computer monitor in front of you.
Most calls were for major companies and you soon learned the script well. However just occasionally you would get a call from one of the more niche clients and it would all go, well, a bit wrong. I still remember a seemingly meaningless jumble of letters appearing on my screen for a short lived New Zealand travel company we were dealing with. Suddenly you find yourself unable to pronounce the name of the company you are supposedly working for much to the amazement of the person on the other end of the phone. Kuoni was one that always tripped up new starters, difficult company name, destinations you'd not heard of. Dun Laoghaire (pronounced Dun Leary) was a notorious obstacle in our Ferry brochure script.
The point of all this is, if you are looking to run a simple process a script is a really good way to do this. With a few hours training anyone vaguely competent could be taken off the street and taught how to answer calls for 50 different types of company. Once you knew the system you didn't even need to see the script until it popped up on your screen. By the end of my third summer working there I was taking calls for drugs companies selling anti-smoking pills, that had a cringe worthy first step where we had to congratulate the caller on a "positive first step in their journey to be smoke-free" and 30 seconds later be talking about the importance of washing machine servicing.
Now remember, that was 20 years ago. Since then the machines have well and truly risen. Every major website you visit will have analytics software behind it seeing how long you spend on each page, the links you clicked on, the adverts you were shown, how you got there and where you live. Those telephone scripts are tweaked to see which exact combination of words get the best results. We even have "help me now" chat screens on websites that are sometimes bots, sometimes real humans sat in their own living rooms answering questions. Every answer is recorded, every possible improvement to the company bottom line is sought out,.
This "channel migration" of moving customer (kids) away from specialists to generalists, and ideally machines, is the bread and butter of the types of industry most of the academy chain bosses have made their money in.
So when I see professionals like teachers saying it can't happen to them, they can't be replaced by a script or a computer, if I have to disagree. As Daryn Simon points out in his recent blog it is already happening.
The current direction of travel with the Schools Minister, the major academy chains and the "research" community seems to point towards a view that education is the process of "making children cleverer". The way this is done is by giving them information and measuring their ability to retrieve information. If they can't then they haven't learned anything.
This view is ideally suited to scripting and computerisation. Pretty much every basic self quizzing app has the ability to present information, test you on it and repeat the testing until it is confident you aren't just guessing and actually know the answer. When they are able to show that test results on this system are not significantly boosted by having the information presented by a qualified teacher then qualified teachers will no longer be required. If qualified teachers are better (for now) then the next question will be how large can we make the classes.
Oh sure it will lead to a narrowed curriculum and further reinforce the view that what can't be measured doesn't matter but we are well down that road already.
The role of the teacher as the expert, able to go off on tangents and enjoy discussing their subject is under attack. Strangely the strongest voices defending the "teacher as expert" model also seem to be the ones promoting the narrow definition of knowledge that will be used to justify its destruction.
Accept the definition, lose the battle.
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