On tools and Kahoots

Note: This post was written in March last year, but was left unfinished and unpublished due to university deadlines getting in the way. 

Norwegians have a preoccupation with everything and anything that comes out of Norway to achieve any measure of success in the wider world. Usually this is just amusing to those who pay attention to Norwegian news, but sometimes it helps to bring attention to developments one may otherwise have missed. This happened recently to me, when I read this article in Aftenposten about the educational software 'platform' Kahoot!. It reminded me of the application, which I had previously read about and investigated. It appeared to me to be the kind of narrow tech with wide application that I love.

I've had plans for writing about the view of educational technology as tools, and why it is important to keep this view. In my post about Duolingo, I mentioned the danger of thinking of any technology as a panacea for any given job or field. These things are related. In the view of education technology as tools, any technological tool is seen as equivalent. There is no difference in 'quality' or overall 'usefulness' between an app like Duolingo or Kahoot, and something as simple as a whiteboard. They are specific tools for specific purposes, and their usefulness is decided solely by how and what for they are used. As it happens, Kahoot! provides an excellent illustrative example of this view, and of the dangers of talking about technological solutions as panacea.

Kahoot! describes itself as a 'free game-based platform' which 'makes it easy to create, play, and share fun learning games in minutes'. I could go into their word choices here in some depth, talk about how it advertises itself as a 'platform' which is 'game-based' rather than stating, simply, that it is a tool for making games for learning purposes. Likely, this wording is a marketing choice. Notably, the wording obscures its primary use-cases. Software platform professionals would probably not consider Kahoot! an actual platform; it does one thing, and although it does it very well and provides a host of customisation and manipulation options, it still does only one thing: It provides a means for creating small, educational interactive games with embedded multimodal information, primarily for use in a lecture-like setting.

This isn't underselling it. Not at all. It is simply a more useful and accurate way to describe and talk about the software. And crucially, it allows you to avoid the trap of thinking of Kahoot! as the one-size-fits-all solution to all your teaching woes. Because that is not how it works. That's not how any of this works.

A traditional approach to education technology has been one of figuring out ways to 'do things better'. To perform an existing function in a better way, to replace wholesale what already exists. Sometimes, this is what you want to do. For example, a common function throughout the education sector is keeping track of absences. From a managerial point of view, and also in some respects from a pedagogical point of view, this is an important function. Technological solutions here may, and probably should, take the form of drop-in replacements for existing systems for absence records. However, very often this isn't what you want to do. The performed functions of education just as often develop as a result of the technological limitations and possibilities in the field as they do from the pedagogical guidebooks. For an illustrative example, consider that teaching before the invention of the chalk and blackboard was primarily one-on-one, because one-to-many lectures weren't practical. Think about it: A simple tool lead to a complete paradigm shift in the field of education. This isn't happening as much anymore.

Teaching has become set in its ways, due to a sort of professional inertia. New developments in the field are guided by its existing functions, rather than its goals, and those that aren't (or aren't developed especially for the field) are jammed into its existing systems. Little thought is spared for what new functions could be invented. Little thought is spared for what functions new technologies could not just replace, but make redundant. And as long as education software is thought of as 'platforms' that merely enable or enhance what is already done by educators, this will not change.

So what can Kahoot! do to change this? Well, in its current default application it merely enhances the traditional lecture-revision cycle. This, of course, is useful in itself. However, when you think of it as a simple tool in the educator's toolbox, your options widen considerably. It would be perfectly legitimate to use it how others do, but you have options. A couple of them are pointed out by the company itself in its Academy Guide:

• Challenge students to create videos, animations, images or even code their own artwork for the kahoot
• It's well known in the field of pedagogy that teaching is a powerful way to learn. You can use Kahoot! to make this kind of learning far more accessible. What if you turned the learning objectives away from "read all this, learn it, then get tested", over to "students, this is the subject, now teach it as best as you can"? It sounds absurd, but Kahoot! (and certain other tools) makes it possible. You can make a kahoot the end product of a subject. Students reach their learning objective by creating their own test of those same learning objectives. The teacher's role changes from The Authority to the one who guides the students in their own learning, who does quality control on their final product.
• Maximise learning opportunities by adding instructional images, diagrams, charts, or YouTube videos - either the ones you've found or something you've created
• There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Many educators have created lectures and other informative and instructional material covering nearly any conceivable subjects. Often these are freely available online. Simply using this material in a regular classroom setting can often be a bit jarring. Work has to go into integrating it seamlessly into the educational experience. Kahoot! offers one way of making this easier.

This is just scratching the surface of what you can do. Kahoot! isn't a platform, meant to be implemented in The One Way. It's a tool. Just like all other education technologies are tools. Some are better than others. Kahoot! does appear to be one of them.