http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhAyX81zP2M

Say hello to Footbonaut, a new machine for training soccer players. (Click the video to see it in action.)

It’s a space-age beauty: built for the top German professional team Borussia Dortmund, it feeds balls from eight angles, and has 72 colored panels that light up to make targets. Reacting to a series of beeps and flashes, players receive and pass, over and over.

Footbonaut has been widely praised as the future of soccer training. Its inventor says it “allows you to work on any weaknesses and ensures that you play at pace but with precision.” and that after 15 minutes in the cage a player “will have received and passed on as many balls as he would in a normal week of training. Repetition and intensity are crucial if you want to conquer a particular skill, whether that be playing football, tennis or learning the piano.

So the question is, is it true? Is this a glimpse of the future of training?

No.

Here’s why: great soccer players are great because they can identify and anticipate an unfolding series of patterns — body language, movement, position — and do the right thing at the right time. In other words, soccer is not played in a standing position with beeps and flashes.

Plus, merely achieving intensity should not be confused with learning. As Aspire Academy coach (and all-around brilliant guy) Michael Bruyninckx points out, using sweating as a parameter is misleading, because exhaustion slows learning. Then there’s the fact that only one player can use it at a time (compare that to non-technological beauty of the tiki-taka drill, which involves the entire team).

So while Footbonaut hones useful skills, it doesn’t develop whole soccer players any more than writing haikus can develop a skilled novelist.

This speaks to the tricky nature of adding technology to the learning environment — whether it’s Footbonauts or iPads in classrooms. Technology is seductive, but it’s extremely rare that a machine can adequately duplicate the immersive intensity of a well-designed practice session in the real world.

In my experience, the recipe for high performance is always the same: technology makes a fine spice for learning, but you should never mistake it for the main course.