A call to Technical Support

Hello. I’m calling because my printer has stopped working.

Well, it doesn’t work any more.

What I mean to say is, when I click on Print, my computer thinks it’s printed, but the printer just sits there.

Yes, of course it’s plugged in.

Yes, it’s switched on.

I haven’t done anything. My computer and printer were moved from the second floor to the first floor, and now it doesn’t work.

Yes, it is connected to the computer.

What do you mean, it’s not a problem? It’s a problem for me.

Not listed on your sheet? Look, can’t you get someone down to look at it? You’re on the 6th floor, right?

Manchester? That’s 200 miles away.

Yes, I know, you said that already. So what is on your sheet?

Only printer problems that affect more than 50 people will be considered? Excellent, because if my document isn’t printed that could affect everyone in the Local Authority [mainly because I’ll sent a ranting email to everyone in my Contacts list complaining about the rubbish technical support around here and then go on a mad rampage destroying every printer I come across].

You can see the problem now on your screen then? Ah, excellent. It’s working now. Thanks very much. Yes, you too.

Note: this is a true story. The call was only successful once I’d stretched the facts a bit. It’s important to have checklists and flowcharts for people to follow, but if there are ridiculous rules in place — like it’s a problem only if more than 50 people are affected — then callers have a perverse incentive to describe their issue, no matter how trivial in the total scheme of things, as something that will affect at least 50 people. In my case, it may well have done: I was trying to print a guide to online safety I’d written for headteachers, so I could photocopy it and distribute it at a forthcoming headteachers’ conference.

Yes, I could have, and would have, found another printer from which to print. But I did actually want my own printer to work!

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I have just spent an hour — wasted an hour as it turns out — looking for a particular article. I have kept every single article I have ever written. I have also been goimng through loads of old papers and either shredding them, throwing them away, or scanning and then shredding them.

One of these papers was a print-out of an email from a much loved and respected HMI (school inspectors) telling me that he absolutely agreed with an article I’d written in which I had argued that at conferences, a daily newsletter or bulletin was a really great feature of conferences, and ought to be retained, or brought back.

I have been searching for that article, which is on my computer somewhere, to no avail. So I will try to reimagine what I must have been thinking when I wrote it.

I know there are lots of reasons for labouring for issuing digital updates, but in a world where you can’t even buy anything without someone asking you if you want to be kept updated by email, there is something rather special about having updates on paper.

There is also the advantage that I know I can read it without being mugged for it.

Anyway, I won’t press the case, because I know that train has left the station, or whatever the most apt metaphor is.

But I still wish I’d have indexed my stuff better.

One of the bits of conventional wisdom we keep hearing is “It’s no about the technology; it’s about the pedagogy.” This is only a half-truth: you need both.

I can understand the thinking behind such statements:

• What’s the point of having great technology if you use it for tasks that could be better executed without it? A good example of this was when a teacher told me that he had decided he was going to modernise his lessons by using computers. We didn’t have a bank of laptops in the school, but we did have a room with stand-alone computers. He asked me if he could have one of them in every desk in his classroom. I wasn’t sure where he thought they would be plugged into, or why he couldn’t take the pupils into the computer lab, but I didn’t address those questions. Instead, I asked him what he wanted to use the computers for. He told me that instead of giving the pupils a printed worksheet, he would give each of them a usb stick with the worksheet on it, so they could look at it on the screen instead.

• Good technology will only go some way to compensate for poor pedagogy.

• What’s the point of investing in technology if you don’t know what you want to do with it? Fair enough. It would be good to have at least some idea of what you might use it for if it is not to a huge waste of money. However, it’s this point that I should like to discuss further.

While it’s true that having a purpose in mind when you buy technology is a good idea, it is also true that until you acquire the technology you don’t know what else you might use it for, or how much you might use it.

For example, I had an ipod for years, but didn’t listen to podcasts as much as I’d have liked to or how much I envisaged when I bought it.

Another example: I understand that when text messaging was made possible, it wasn’t envisgaed that it would become a ubiqitous means of communication.

However, I recently bought myself a pair of bluetooth headphones, and since then I’ve experienced a veritable efflorescence of my listening. For example, I’ve been listening to documents on my Kindle Fire, listening to podcasts, audio books and radio programs. It’s embarrassingly obvious (embarrassing because I didn’t see it), but it turns out the problem was that I couldn’t listen and do various domestic tasks at the same time first thing in the morning without either waking everyone up or getting tangled up in headphone wires.

Another example: I didn’t know, when I first bought a smartphone, that I would not only use it for emails and web searching, but also for running through m presentations, reading books or note-taking.

This is why I’m a great believer in trying things out, whether it’s new software, new hardware or a new teaching approach. If you can, try and get an innovation fund going. When I worked in a Local Authority, I set aside £1,000 each year (around £2000 in today’s money) for buying stuff and trying it out. We bought a visualiser, an electronic voting system and a tablet laptop when these devices were in their infancy. We did so not because it was a case of toys for the boys (half my team were female anyway) but in order to be able to advise schools and other departments in the LA whether they were worth investing in and what they could be used for.

“It’s not about the technology” sounds logical, but in my experience it is certainly not the whole story.

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A book I’ve started reading is (Un)educated: My Life as a Teacher, and Why You Should Never Become One, by Francis Foster. Some of it is laugh-out loud funny, but some of it, about his reference being spiked, made me angry because I know someone who couldn’t get another job until the headteacher was ill. With him away, the deputy head wrote her an HONEST reference.

Something similar happened to me. I was head of Computing for just over a year before I saw my dream job advertised. The headteacher was annoyed that I was applying for another job so soon, but I felt the opportunity was too good to miss. I applied and got it.

During the time I was at the school, I vastly expanded the Computing department, so successfully that we had to take on extra staff. Results improved, usage amongst staff went right up, and an Ofsted inspection six weeks after I’d started concluded that I was doing a great job. I mention all this not to boast, but to place in context what transpired.

After I’d been working at my new job for a couple of weeks, my boss, G, suggested I went to the council office to look at the reference I’d been given. I said, “Why?” He said it was because we had the right to see our references, and thought that if people didn’t take advantage of that facility it would be withdrawn. Reasonable enough, I thought. So I trotted along to the council office, asked to see my reference from my previous employment, and gasped in horror and disbelief as I read it:

“Terry Freedman has worked in this school since —.”

When I returned I said to G,” How come you gave me the job, given that that reference made it sound like my biggest achievement was turning up every day?” He replied that he mused that anybody getting a reference like that must be so good that the headteacher didn’t want him to go! So, a bit of an own-goal on the part of that headteacher, and a big disappointment to me, because I liked him but now felt that my liking had been misplaced.

Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad, is published by Bloomsbury. It’s about the invention of linotype, and its consequences. Linotype changed the way newspaper articles were printed — from people arranging individual letters to creating a block — a line of type, hence the name Linotype.The invention led to thicker newspapers and more magazines.