Monica Rozenfeld is a freelance writer and works for a Jewish non-profit committed to innovation and best practices in Jewish education. She is the founder of TheJewSpot.org, her labor of love, interviewing the innovative and provocative of the tribe. Jonathan S. Woocher is Chief Ideas Officer of JESNA and heads its Lippman Kanfer Institute: An Action-oriented Think Tank for Innovation in Jewish Learning and Engagement. Dr. Woocher previously served on the faculty of Carleton College in Minnesota and Brandeis University and is the author of Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews. Lisa Colton is the founder and president of Darim Online, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping Jewish organizations and leaders thrive in the digital age. Lisa was the president of the board of directors of University of Vermont Hillel and currently chairs the Early Childhood Education Committee at Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia. Caren Levine is Director of the Learning Network at Darim Online. Caren is a doctoral candidate in educational technology at Teachers College, Columbia University and has over 20 years of experience in educational technology and Jewish education. Caren is the Lead Docent for ISTE in Second Life. In this article, the authors explore the broad implications of the impact of the technology revolution on Jewish education.
Over the past 30 years, new technologies have revolutionized our lives.
The array of advanced tools now available, from YouTube to cloud computing, iPhones to Twitter, Google to Kindle, and Smartboards, are creating a world of empowerment, connections, customization and cultural creativity almost unimaginable barely a generation ago. Virtually every area of human endeavor is being transformed before our eyes. And education is no exception.
Technology is, of course, already a feature on the landscape of Jewish education. Nonetheless, there is a strong sense among many involved in these developments that Jewish education is only beginning to scratch the surface of the potential boons and challenges inherent in today’s (and tomorrow’s) technological innovations.
Some new technologies have impacts that profoundly alter social realities and individual lives. Such was the case with the printing press, which helped fuel the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, resulting in a few hundred years of chaos as society established a new (and relatively stable) paradigm for social, economic, political and religious life. What we are seeing today with internet and other digital platforms is revolutionary on a similar scale, and we’ve just begun to experience the instability that comes with this paradigm shift.
This paradigm shift has important implications for Jewish education. We don’t know exactly what Jewish education will look like as these new innovations emerge fully and are put to use. But, it won’t look like what we know today.
It is already clear that technology is revolutionizing where, when, and how Jewish learning and teaching take place. Technology expands the boundaries of time and space, collapsing barriers that keep us from connecting to worlds and people beyond our immediate physical presence. Technology brings into play multiple senses and new creative skills. It encourages, invites, and facilitates new habits of communication. These capabilities demand that we re-imagine what education is and how it is conducted. The challenge for Jewish education, especially in traditional institutions like schools, is whether they can re-envision what they do to take advantage of what new technologies offer, while avoiding the potential “dark sides” of this powerful force.
Technology and Innovation: Sustaining and Disruptive
In his classic work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen distinguishes between two types of innovation: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining innovations are those that incrementally improve an existing product or service, thereby reinforcing its position in the marketplace. Sustaining innovations produce value by enhancing performance and enabling us to do important tasks increasingly better. Disruptive innovations, in contrast, change the nature of the game altogether. They enable us to do new things, or to do familiar things in radically new ways. Disruptive innovations often meet needs that were previously unrecognized or serve populations never before seen as relevant. When disruptive innovations are successful, they frequently displace or marginalize older approaches and technologies (think word processing replacing typewriters, or digital cameras replacing film).
New technologies are often at the heart of innovations, both sustaining and disruptive. The innovation is not the technology itself; it is how the technology is put to use to solve a problem or achieve a purpose. To maximize the impact of new technologies we must recognize and take advantage of both their sustaining and disruptive potential by employing them to do better what we have already been doing, but equally important, to do new things or involve new people in ways that were heretofore not possible.
In education, we can use new technologies to enhance many of the things we have always done. The now ubiquitous Powerpoint slideshow that accompanies so many oral presentations or the rapidly expanding number of Smartboards in classrooms are useful sustaining innovations. Powerpoints, with their potential for presenting many different types of visual material quickly and efficiently, and Smartboards, with their ability to create, display, manipulate, and save many forms of information, represent vast improvements over blackboards, overhead projections, and other earlier technologies.
Many other innovative uses of technology can enhance, reinforce, and extend conventional educational practice. Much of the effort we see in Jewish education today to incorporate new technologies focuses on these “sustaining” possibilities. Computers, video, the internet, mobile communications devices, and all the ways in which these are used today, from email to podcasting, enable educators to design more engaging curricula, connect with students (and their families) more easily, draw on a wider range of resources, and in general create more interesting, vivid, varied, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for their students.
Pursuing these technology-powered sustaining innovations is not only desirable; it is essential if Jewish education is to thrive in the 21st century. The rule in the marketplace is “innovate, or die.” The marketplace in which Jewish education competes demands no less. The Jewish community has vastly under-invested in what is needed to effectively incorporate new technologies into Jewish educational practice – in the creative work that turns technologies into usable educational products (software, websites, curricula, videos, etc.) and in the training that enables educators to take advantage of these techniques and resources.
This, however, is only half the story. As much as Jewish education needs a steady flow of sustaining innovations that make use of today’s (and tomorrow’s) technologies, it also needs to come to grips with the disruptive forces that these new technologies have set loose. The greatest threat to all authoritarian regimes today comes not from armed uprisings, external enemies, or alternative ideologies. It comes from the internet and associated technologies (like Twitter) and from the radical opening up and democratization of communication that the internet has made possible. Some of this same power is now available to every learner, and will almost surely have the same impact on our “business models” for education.
The essence of the disruption wrought by these innovations lies in a single fact: learners can exercise control over their own learning as never before in human history. Empowered by contemporary technologies, learners have unprecedented access to information and almost unfettered ability to communicate with whomever they want, whenever they want, wherever they are, to learn or share whatever they wish. “Education” is no longer controlled by authorities who decide what content can be known and by whom, how, and when it will be transmitted. Learning is democratized, radically.
The innovations that embody this disruptive reality continue to flow into and transform education at an accelerating pace. Search engines, social networks, self-made media, all serve to call into question some of the cardinal “givens” of education, the basic assumptions (such as: “teachers have knowledge which they must transmit to students”) that have undergirded educational practice. Educational practice, including Jewish educational practice, will have to adjust to these innovations and, more importantly, to the new reality they help to define, or these disruptive innovations will almost surely render traditional education obsolete. Thus, we must not only invest in new products and training, but in redesigning our models, structures and systems to achieve the goals of Jewish education to embrace the new modes of organizing the learning process that today’s young people and young families seek and expect.
This shift of power to the learner may create a sense of insecurity among some teachers who feel the foundation of their profession shifting under their feet and worry that they cannot live up to the expectations of their learners to be both engaging and effective. (It will almost surely frighten educational institutions and their leaders as well). Yet, other teachers, we know, are welcoming and embracing this transformation as an additional means to do what they have always sought to: empower their students as learners.
Learner empowerment is, after all, part of the Jewish vision of education. The great revolution effected by the rabbis of the Talmudic era was to transform Torah from something that one heard, into something that one studied, wrestled with, and reshaped – and to do this not only for an elite caste, but, at least in principle, for everyone. The Jewish ideal of learning is a democratic one. Great teachers, we know, want their learners to be empowered.
One of the great struggles of contemporary Jewish education has been to create closer linkages between what happens in the classroom and what students experience in the world beyond the classroom. Today’s tools enable and perhaps even demand that teachers and student use them to transcend boundaries of time and space in ways that break down the self-contained micro-world of the classroom. The capacity of technology to connect us immediately and transparently to both people and content means that the constraints of the physical world need no longer limit our pedagogic imaginations. In one 45-minute time period, teachers have the ability to take their students to multiple worlds, through films, videoconferencing, the web, or podcasts. Is there reason to doubt that as technology evolves, these experiences will be increasingly vivid, increasingly “real”? And, if that time period is not enough, there is nothing to prevent the journey from moving beyond the classroom. With technology becoming increasingly portable, time and space fade as constraints on when and where we learn. And if teachers don’t open up the walls of the classroom, students, armed with their iPhones, will.
This change in how we see ourselves and others is both the product of and a further spur to an expansive vision for Jewish learning. It is hard to imagine that young people brought up to believe that the world is just a mouse click away will be satisfied with education that asks them to narrow their field of vision and the tools they use to learn. This is another reason why Jewish education cannot thrive if it is narrow either in its content or its methods. A very old song asked, “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” We might ask a similar question: “How will we keep Jews learning facts from worksheets and textbooks after they’ve seen the world?” They won’t, and they need not if we press harder to make the use of technology normative in our practice.
For us as Jews, a global people with a long history, technology’s ability to help us expand the boundaries of time and space is precious. Used wisely and creatively, technology enables us to give flesh to the bones of concepts like “Peoplehood” and “homeland” that may otherwise seem abstract and distant. We can experience the diversity and plenitude of Jewish creativity over millennia, and also feel an intimate connection with another Jew who may be living half a world away. Technology is our greatest ally in de-parochializing Jewish education; it shows us that what happens in one synagogue or one community is a microcosm of a much grander collective endeavor that spans continents and centuries.
Technology and Its Discontents: Concerns and Challenges
“Lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.” – Henry David Thoreau
Technology opens up new possibilities and directions for Jewish learning and teaching. It empowers contemporary learners in unprecedented ways. It greatly increases the potential for connection and communication. It expands the settings and media in and through which learning can take place. These represent a boon for Jewish education, promoting wider access, more engaging learning, and broader networks of conversation.
But technology is not an unmitigated blessing. The changes that technology brings to the practice of Jewish education have profound implications for its structure and culture as well. Some have argued that these changes threaten important values that have been integral to Jewish learning and teaching, in some cases for millennia. Further, by making new demands on the talents and skills of students, educators, and program organizers, technology may actually reduce the quantity and quality of learning taking place. Poorly used technology may be worse than no technology at all.
These concerns should not be dismissed lightly. They are worth careful consideration, not because they are likely to lead us to retreat from the expanded use of technology (if such were even possible), but because they may help us shape that use in ways that can diminish what some see as the unintended negative consequences of the embrace of technology. At least five such concerns have been articulated, each of which merits a response both in principle and in practice.
Concern #1. Technology substitutes virtual experiences for real ones.
Perhaps the most fundamental critique of the spread of technology, not only in Jewish education, but in society as a whole, is that the “virtual” worlds it creates deter us from experiencing the real world to its full extent. It’s easy to list (and lampoon) the “sins” of “virtualism” to which we have fallen prey: emailing colleagues down the hall instead of walking over to speak with them; “playing golf” on a Wii instead of on the golf course; spending hours surfing the web instead of devoting time to our families.
For education, the challenge lies not just in the fact that technology-based activities like surfing and texting can be distractions from the “serious business” of learning. Even the growing incorporation of virtual experiences into the learning process itself raises questions. For all the benefits that emanate from being able to connect students to peers thousands of miles away via video-conferencing or from virtual tours of ancient (or modern) Jerusalem, if these become substitutes for building face-to-face community in the classroom or sending young people to the real Israel, we may rightly question whether technology is enriching or diminishing the educational experience.
The response to this concern seems obvious: don’t let “virtual” experiences crowd out embodied ones. There is no need for an either/or here. Both kinds of experiences are “real”; they just have different strengths and limitations.
Concern #2. Technology undermines textual skills that are central to Jewish learning.
When Muslims labeled Jews “the People of the Book” they captured a profound insight about Jewish education. Judaism is an overwhelmingly verbal tradition (“these words shall be in your heart”), and the study and interpretation of written text has been the central feature of Jewish education for centuries. In recent years, some observers have asked: Is the growing use of technology making text and the study of text less central to Jewish learning? Are students failing to gain the skills and dispositions required for close analysis of text and, ultimately, for adding their own insights to the accumulating body of interpretation that constitutes Jewish tradition? In an age of rapid-fire stimulation and short attention spans, will learners have the patience to work through complex material, to read and wrestle with foundational texts?
These are not far-fetched questions. Developing the skills to study Jewish texts in a serious way requires both time and effort. Developing the motivation in students to do so is probably an equal or greater challenge. The issue runs far deeper than technology, and it is not Jewish education alone that is affected by the current culture that de-values text study in favor of other, more “dynamic” modes of learning. Nonetheless, the spread of technology seems both to invite a culture clash and to serve as a potential barrier to continuing the long tradition of text study that has been the hallmark of Jewish learning.
However, the same technology that can lead students away from the text can also help them encounter it with greater facility and enthusiasm. Technology can help students enter the “sea” of Jewish learning armed with enhanced abilities to move from “island” to “island,” from text to commentary, commentary to cross-reference, cross-reference to contemporary interpretation. There are projects today like “Tagged Tanakh” that seek to use technological capabilities precisely to encourage and deepen textual learning. This does not mean we can be sanguine about technology’s potential deleterious impact, but it does challenge us, as we have in the past, to adapt our historical traditions of textual learning to the new tools available to us.
Concern #3. Technology diminishes the role and authority of the teacher and contributes to the illusion that learning can be entirely self-directed.
Judaism places extraordinary value on teachers. We owe our teachers the same respect that we give parents, rulers, even God. We bend over backwards to give our teachers and our teachers’ teachers credit for whatever wisdom we might presume to pass on. At the same time, the ideal relationship between teacher and student is one of intimacy as well as respect. The teacher is our “rebbe,” not just in the sense of “master,” but someone we look to as a role model, a source of values as well as knowledge.
Does technology threaten this relationship?
In truth, the role of teachers in both Jewish and general education has been changing since long before current technologies began to affect the classroom and beyond. Technology merely accelerates and will almost surely accelerate further the movement away from the teacher as an authoritative transmitter of knowledge (“the sage on the stage”) to the teacher as facilitator of student learning (“the guide on the side”). Increasingly, the role of teachers is not to dispense information, but to help learners find that information and make meaning from it.
From a pedagogic standpoint this is a healthy transformation, as long as it does not delude us into believing that teachers are superfluous or that the relationships learners have with teachers are unimportant. In fact, we would argue that the metaphor of a “guide on the side” understates the potential role and impact that teachers can have, even in a technology-infused learning environment. A better description might be the teacher as “mentor at the center,” helping to shape a powerful, authentic, and reflective learning experience for their students.
Concern #4. Using technology effectively requires skills, time to learn these skills, and resources to make use of them that most Jewish educators simply do not have.
Popular literature has made much of the supposed distinction between “digital immigrants” and “digital natives,” with most educators today – both teachers and, perhaps especially, institutional leaders – in the “immigrant” camp. The same applies, with possibly even more far-reaching effects, to community and national leaders, including funders, who often set the agenda and provide the resources for educational institutions, programs, and those who run and teach in them. The “immigrant/native” distinction may be exaggerated (and one that time will in any case erase), but the reality is that there are numerous practical barriers to Jewish education’s taking full advantage of the potential of contemporary technology. Some of these do reflect the fact that many (most?) of today’s Jewish teachers and administrators are not well trained in how to use the variety of tools available to enhance their work. Some are frankly uncomfortable with the entire domain, and especially with students who seem to be operating in alternate reality. Others want very much to take advantage of what technology can offer, but simply don’t know how. Regardless, there is a real gap here, and closing it will be difficult given the part-time nature of many educational positions, the relative paucity of professional development opportunities for Jewish educators generally, and the particular challenges inherent in adopting technologies that, as we have argued, profoundly change the ways in which Jewish learning and teaching are done.
These are systemic problems, not the fault of individual educators. So too is the underdeveloped state of applications of technology for Jewish education. Developing really outstanding and readily usable tools and resources to support learning requires significant investments of time, talent, and money. Jewish education has limited supplies of all of these, and a limited market to justify commercial investment. As a result, Jewish education frequently operates in “catch-up” mode when it comes to cutting edge implementations of technology for learning and teaching. There are a handful of exceptional examples, but they are relatively few and often lack the resources to fulfill their full potential.
These realities should temper any excesses of enthusiasm over the prospect of a rapid technology-driven revolution in Jewish education. There is a lot of work to do on the ground before the benefits lauded in this paper are realized on a broad scale. But these are practical challenges, addressable through a combination of measured steps in professional training and application development and the increased investment needed to support these. The pace at which these steps are taken may be frustratingly slow for those who champion technology’s transformative potential, but given the state of our society and the inevitability of technology’s continued penetration of every sector of human endeavor, Jewish education and educators will be carried along with the tide of change taking place. We can do much more to accelerate that process, and there is at least a reasonable chance that as more and more “digital natives” ascend to positions of influence within Jewish education and Jewish philanthropy, we will. Jewish education is not yet quite ready for the digital revolution, but the truth is: ready or not, it’s here.
Concern #5. Technology encourages and facilitates ethically questionable behavior.
Stan Lee reminded us that “with great power comes great responsibility.” As tools for communication have become more powerful, more personal, and more pervasive, we’ve learned that there’s a real risk of their misuse – to embarrass, to deceive, to damage. Education offers its own set of opportunities to approach or cross ethical boundaries. The web is a vast storehouse of information, and it doesn’t require downloading a finished paper from one of the sites that provide such a service to indulge in just a bit of hard-to-detect plagiarism.
Added to these are the broader ethical questions that come with today’s technology. For Jewish education, in which values play such a prominent role, questions about the privacy of communication, about lashon hara, about mocking or shaming another publicly, about creating false identities, or false images (“photoshopping”), cannot be peripheral. If we embrace technology to enrich our teaching and learning, don’t we also have to try to ensure that students learn how to use that technology in ethically sensitive and responsible ways? Surely, the answer is yes.
This concern and the others we have cited remind us that the benefits of technology are not free – not free monetarily, and also not free in terms of exempting us from having to think deeply about the implications of the new toys and tools we have been given. It makes no sense to exaggerate the concerns – in each case there are responses that can minimize the potential damage – but neither should we proceed naively or willfully to ignore them.
Conclusion
Experts estimate that the next 50 or so years will be marked by constant and rapid change as technologies evolve and social, cultural, economic and political systems respond to these changes and to each other. We cannot, from where we stand now, predict what the world will look like in 50 years, let alone the field of Jewish education. But we can know that it will very likely look radically different than it does today.
For those of us interested in Jewish education, these 50 years represent two generations to work with here, just in these decades of “change”. The students of today are the parents of tomorrow, and it is only their grandchildren (if the experts are correct) who will experience a new, perhaps calmer, status quo. In the meantime, we are naïve if we think there is a clear answer just around the corner, waiting to be discovered. And we’re foolish if we think today’s status quo will continue to be successful and help us meet our communal goals. We have in the end no choice but to embrace a culture of change and the technologies that are part of it. If we do so, we can take advantage of this opportunity of rapid evolution to create a richer and more successful ecosystem of Jewish education.
* This paper is adapted from the “core narrative” that is part of JESNA’s special website devoted to technology and Jewish education, www.jesna.org/je3.