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Page 1: The Failure of Success and the Success of Failure

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The Failure of Success and the Success of FailureJohn Tiffin aa Victoria University , WellingtonPublished online: 09 Jul 2006.

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The Failure of Success and the Success of FailureJohn Tiffin, Victoria University, Wellington

INTRODUCTIONOn one of the remote headwaters of the Amazon,a lonely place that looked like a setting from thefilm Fitzcarraldo, a river steamer chugged up tothe quayside of a small town and a modest teacherof mathematics stepped ashore A crowd hadgathered They beamed at him His bags weretaken, his hands were shaken Everywhere hewent people murmured with pride and love: 'MyProfessor' He could pay for nothing, even theshoeshine boys would not take his money: 'Notfrom you, my Teacher' Yet he had never been tothe town before They knew him only fromtelevision where he took part in an educationaltelevision (ETV) series called Joao Da SilvaIt was an educational soap opera about a youngman who came from Amazonas to Rio de Janeirowhere he met a girl The couple had little educationand because of this were poor, lost and suffered Inorder to survive they had to learn how to read andwrite, how to use the telephone, get a bankaccount, fill in forms, and in effect, acquire theskills they needed to live in a literate society Theaudience in the North of Brazil understood exactlywhat it felt like They too yearned to be free oftheir ignorance and to have the education theirenvironment had failed to give them Thatprofessor told me how at night he had walkedthe streets of that town and found them totallydeserted All he could hear were the cicadas andthe throb of the generator that gave electricity tothe town Everybody was watching his televisionseries Where a flickering blue light from a bar ora house indicated television, a crowd of peoplefollowed every action of their heroes, and in sodoing received an education for themselves

This was the realization of the dream we had foreducational television: a window to the world Amedium that took away all drudgery from learningand liberated from ignorance the forgotten

children at the ends of the world I have seen thefaces of the poor in Pernambuco light up withpride as they learned to read from the television Ihave received little gifts from desperately poorchildren who attended the television schools ofMexico because I was one of the television peopleWhen I helped to set up educational televisionin Ethiopia, I was mobbed by crowds of schoolchildren who wanted to shake my hands Some ofthem felt so strongly about what they were learningfrom television that they threw their teachers intothe streets I sat with bright-eyed school kids inGhana as they watched, as part of a science lesson,the magic moment when a man stepped onto themoon I was one of those who carried the torch foreducational television across the far corners of theearth in the belief that it would lighten the way fora new era in education

WHY DID ETV FAIL?

It must be over ten years now since I got a sad letterto say that the ETV experiment in Ghana was allover Today Brazilians talk of the cemeteries ofeducational television and I have visited the ruinsof ETV projects from the jungles of Amazonas tothe hills of Porto Alegre What happened to edu-cational television in Sierra Leone, Pernambuco,Argentina, Chile, Fernando Po, Uganda andEthiopia? The USA poured millions into giantinstructional broadcasting projects in El Salvadorand Nicaragua, but the revolution they got was notin education

The French approach was the most imaginativeTheir ETV experiment in Niger was so successfulthat television students far outshone their contem-poraries in the state schools This so infuriated theconventional teachers that they made the Ministryof Education close the television system downAnd what about the skeletons of ETV that lie in

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the cupboards of the Inner London EducationAuthority and Glasgow Corporation?

WHAT WENT WRONG?

I was part of a British effort to bring the benefits oftelevision to the less fortunate parts of the worldIt was called Centre for Educational TelevisionOverseas (CETO), later to be subsumed intoCentre for Educational Development Overseas(CEDO), and finally to be swallowed up and indue course disappear in the bowels of the BritishCouncil In 1967-8, I worked with a colleague,Peter Combes, to develop ETV for the GhanaBroadcasting Corporation It was here that webegan to realize that something was wrong and thatit was more important to find out what was wrongthan to continue advising the Ghanaians on how toproduce ETV that added to their educationalproblems Between 1969 and 1972 we published aseries of articles in a journal called EducationalBroadcasting International (Tiffin and Combes,1969-1971) on problems in educational televisionWe looked at the unsuitability of television studiosand cameras as they then were, for education asdistinct from entertainment We realized that themedium was actually introducing didactic errorsBut perhaps our most important discovery was thataudiences were turning away from educationaltelevision, and that after the first flash of excite-ment and interest in the arrival of educational tele-vision, it slowly slipped into disuse At first wethought that this was largely a problem that arosefrom using television receivers designed forcountries like Britain and Germany in tropicalclimates such as Ghana and Nigeria Later werealized it was a more universal problem Wereceived letters from around the world whichshowed that our articles were touching a sore spotHowever, it is not within the traditions of televisionto accept that anything is wrong until the day thestation shuts down Appearances must be kept upThe more Peter Combes and I saw importance indiscovering what was wrong, the more we irritatedour colleagues in the organizations we worked for

An unwillingness to look at what is wrong and aconcern with the appearance of success are notconfined to television In education, being wrongis a state that applies to students not teachersStudents fail because they are stupid, not becausethey are badly taught In educational television,

two sets of bigotries were combined As theproblems in educational television becameincreasingly apparent, the educationalists beganto blame the television people and the televisionproducers began to blame the educationalists

THE MULTINATIONAL PROJECT INEDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

I spent most of the 1970s working for the Multi-national Project in Educational Technology of theOrganization of American States The project wasset up to make major changes in education in LatinAmerica with new technological approaches Itwas lead by Dr John Clayton and I remembervividly the hope he kindled when he said 'Get yourhands dirty Don't be afraid to make mistakes, it isthe only way we are going to learn'

The project had invested heavily in educationaltelevision and recognized that it was failing I wasgiven the resources for two years to discover whyeducational television was not working in LatinAmerica This involved case studies in the ten besteducational television systems in the continentThe results (Tiffin, 1978) were frankly depressingThe scale of the failure in educational televisionwas greater than we had imagined and so too wasthe degree, the number and the complexity of theproblems involved At last, however, we could seewhat was going wrong One of the most obviousproblems had always been the technology oftelevision itself In the early days of television itwas felt that if only schools could have video tapeit would solve the difficulties of matching schooltimetables to television timetables When tapecame along, the teachers got tangled in it butcassettes solved that one Black and white TV wasinsufficient, so we got colour Over the years thereliability of television technology has steadilyimproved, but it still has never acquired the robustdependability of, for example, aviation tech-nology The only fail-safe mechanism in edu-cational television has been the teacher

A major problem area that no one really wanted totalk about was that of management and planningIf people went into business the way they went intoeducational television, no bank would lend them acent Long-term costs were inevitably under-estimated There were no serious needs analysis orfeasibility studies The objectives in educationaltelevision were seen in terms of producing

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programmes as distinct from resolving educationalneeds and problems Setting up an educationaltelevision system took place in a popular euphoriaWhere there was a will to have educationaltelevision no one wanted to listen to consultantswho were 'Cassandras ' Hell bent on repeating themistakes of the past, those who led the setting upof new ETV systems were aided and abetted by thecompanies who sold the equipment, by the glossyimage of success that goes with big time televisionand by the failure of other educational televisionsystems to admit that anything was wrong I havefound educational television systems the worldover facing the same demons but unable to confessto their problems because they believed in theimage of other stations and thought they were theonly ones possessed All too often, ETVmanagement found itself locked into crisismanagement, seeking to stay afloat on a sea ofoptimism that they themselves had created

There was failure to allow for research and tointegrate with traditional educational systemsThe success of Sesame Street was perceived interms of the brilliance of its production ratherthan the outcome of the massive Research andDevelopment effort that generated the ideasbehind the programmes, and the fact that itattacked an educational need in an area that didnot bring it into conflict with traditionaleducational systems

I discovered one of the most profoundly disturbingmistakes made by educational television byaccident while I was doing a survey of the tele-scuelas that lay along the road from Mexico City toPuebla I should explain that telescuelas wererural schools which depended on television fortheir instruction They were set up by smallcommunities to provide secondary school edu-cation for their children The community boughtand maintained a television set and paid the salaryof a para-teacher who was responsible for theorganization and management of the school andthe children, but was not expected to have anyreal subject knowledge Teaching was done bytelevision The syllabus was the same as that of theconventional secondary school system andstudents who went to the telescuelas took thenational examinations It was the pride of thetelescuelas that the results from their studentswere comparable to the results of the students whowent to conventional schools

About an hour out of Mexico City, I drove over ashoulder of Mount Popocatepetl and found thefirst telescuela To my amazement I discoveredthat their television receiver had no image, onlysound The para-teacher pointed to the famousmountain We were in the reception shadow itcast The telescuela had never had a picture in allits existence All they ever got was the audio partof the programmes The para-teacher shruggedphilosophically: 'You see', he explained, 'wewanted our children to have secondary schooleducation and the only way was to be part of thetelevision school system so we got the televisionreceiver' Then he brightened and said: 'The goodthing is that our school has very excellent examresults Much better than the schools who have gotthe pictures' Further down the road, I visitedseveral other telescuelas and heard the same storyA few days later, I arrived in Puebla at the sametime as the results of the national secondary schoolsexaminations became available All the para-teachers from the telescuelas in the area weregathered for the occasion, including my friendswho lived in the shadow of Mount PopocatepetlThey came across to me and proudly showed theirresults Once again, they were among the topschools nationally

I asked for copies of the examination papers andtook them away to my hotel For the next twodays, I studied them carefully, asking myself thequestion: In order to teach someone to answerthese questions, would it be essential to usepictures? Apart from the diagrams in geometryand and the maps in geography, both of whichwere available in the textbooks that were provided,the answer was no Since than I have never beenable to look at the tests and examinations used bytelevision or video systems without asking myselfwhether pictures were needed to answer them,and I have come to the conclusion that thephenomenon I noted in Mexico is far from beingunique What is particularly perturbing is thepossibility that the vision in television can bedetrimental Peter Combes and I carried outexperiments which suggest that when criticalinstructional content is carried by the sound trackin a television programme, then the visual track isdistracting and the students would be better offwith radio By critical instructional content, Imean that which enables a student to successfullycomplete test items used to measure and evaluatethe instruction

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THE FUTURE OF ETV?

In 1981,1 found myself doing yet another survey ofthe problems in educational telelvision This timeit was for the Corporation of Public Broadcastingin the USA and was in fact a survey of the off-airutilization, by tertiary educational institutions inthe United States, of the new breed of educationaltelevision epitomized by Carl Sagan's seriesCosmos (Tiffin and Combes, 1983) Broadcasttelevision and cable television were used to deliverprogrammes for instruction to video cassetterecorders and to attract people to take the coursesThe rights to copy the series off-air or off-cable foruse by teachers had become big business I foundthat once again instructional television had becomepopular in the States Community colleges anduniversity extension systems had taken to the air totry and deal with a ground swell of educationaldemand from mature students wishing to upgradetheir education on a part-time basis There wassome bitter-sweet irony in the survey for me Ifound that an ETV series I had made 16 yearspreviously and which I had tried to forget as theworst thing I had ever done, was still in constantuse and that every attempt to take if off-air had ledto howls of rage from teachers I keep finding theseappalling programmes that teachers adopt andtenaciously hang on to like ancient text books; thesuccess of our failures

I also found that despite all the problems, therehad been a steady increase in the use of televisionfor education I suppose I should really say video,because undoubtedly the shift to video has been amajor factor Even so, one of the principal resultsof the research was a recognition that the tech-nology was still in its early days The moment weseriously recognize the need for pictures ininstruction we will start to demand high definitionand large screen images The old television screenneeds to turn into something like a blackboard thatthe teacher can interact with and something like aworking library that he or she can refer to

I realized that the 'television generation' isgradually taking charge of education; that, as oldteachers who instinctively disliked televisionbecause it was not part of their own educationretire, they give way to young teachers who wereborn and reared in the presence of television andare at ease in using it for instruction Then again,the growing application of instructional design inthe United States has led to vastly improved

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planning in the use of technology in education andthis, allied to rigorous American managementskills, has improved the organizational use ofeducational television

CONCLUSIONS

I like to think of the use of moving pictures foreducation as being somewhat like the use ofaeroplanes for transportation The ballyhoo whichaccompanied the first flights and the first attemptsto set up air routes was inevitably followed bycrashes and failures of the early companiesHowever, phoenix-like, these early attempts gaverise to the modern aviation industry I believe thatwe have a long way to go before moving picturesbecome as fundamental a part of education asaviation is of transport The shapes the technologywill take are still not clear and we have not yetbegun to come to grips with the adaptation ofinstructional techniques and the content ofcurricula to the possibilities that moving pictures,in alliance with developments in computer andcommunications technology, open to us

The technologies of aviation, road transport andmedicine have developed because mistakes killedand it was important to know what went wrong sothat it could be rectified Nobody has managed toestablish that television kills directly, so that thedangers inherent in our failure to get to grips withthe mistakes we are making in the relationshipbetween television and teaching are not investi-gated While education has been failing to adapttelevision to its needs, television and video haveentered our homes willy-nilly and, in a manner wenever dreamed of nor even now comprehend, havetaken over a large part of the education of ourchildren and of ourselves Neil Postman's hypo-thesis (Postman, 1985) that this is an education forbarbarianism cannot be lightly dismissed

In the nineteenth century, Europeans brought theBible and syphilis to the Pacific In this century, weintroduced educational television to the childrenof Samoa and video nasties to the youth of thePacific Power lines have now come to many of thelonely towns in Amazonas to drive the sawmillsand the mines People there still gather at nightto watch television, but no longer to learn fromit Like the rest of us, they sit slack-eyed andpassive in front of the Dynasties and Dallaseswhile violence now roams the quiet streets

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The importance of being wrong is when werecognize we are wrong, learn from it and right thewrong in time to arrest tragedy

REFERENCES

Postman, N (1985) Amusing ourselves to deathpublic discourse in the age of show business VikingPenguin, USA

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1969) Receiverreliability Educational Broadcasting Inter-national, December

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1970a) Classroomteacher Educational Broadcasting International,March

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1970b) Report onGhana schools television Ibid, June

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1970c) Televisionversus education? Ibid, June

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1971a) The didacticerror Educational Broadcasting International,June

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1971b) Who's in chargehere? Ibid, September

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1971c) Looking atobjects, Ibid, December, (concluded in March1972)

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1978) Problemstructures in educational television in LatinAmerica Revista de Technologia Educativa, 4 (2)

Tiffin, J and Combes, P (1983) A study of theutilisation of 'Cosmos' by the off-air licencees, VolsI and II Prepared for the Corporation for PublicBroadcasting

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Professor Tiffin holds the David Beattie Chair ofCommunications at Victoria University ofWellington, in New Zealand He has been aconsultant in the application of communicationstechnology to education for the governments ofthe United Kingdom, Brazil, Ethiopa and Ghanaas well as a number of international organizationsHe has worked as a television producer, presenterand scriptwriter, as a school director, a companydirector, an inventor, and an author Prior totaking up the Chair he was manager of theLearning Division of the New Zealand softwarecompany, Progeni His current research is in thedesign of distance independent learning for ISDNenvironments

Address for correspondence: Professor John Tiffin,Victoria University of Wellington, Private Bag,Wellington, New Zealand

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