Teaching Contemporary Themes in Secondary Education: Technology, Culture and Communication

Jonathan Savage, Clive McGoun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415620307
• eBook ISBN: 9781136327377
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The media has a huge impact on how we view society and the world, and new technologies continue to transform the way in which we work and learn. It is therefore essential that young people can engage critically in their consumption of media and the internet and are able to make informed decisions about the technologies they use. This book explores

1
	Making connections

Key questions

■ How do your views about technology relate to the broader context of teaching and learning?

■ What happens when technology is used to re-imagine the process of teaching and learning?

■ Are there links between your development as a teacher and the development of the curriculum, including the role of technology within this?

■ What are the key areas for a pedagogy that uses technology that you want to develop?

Many readers of this book will either be starting out, or established, in their careers as teachers. The world of education is tangible and real. It is about knowledge, subjects and their associated cultures, different pedagogical approaches and assessment. It is structured by various curriculum frameworks and examination specifications. It creates a highly ordered system, within which our work is structured within timetables and particular physical spaces. Subjects are domains of, and dominated by, ‘experts’, and teachers are perceived as ‘gatekeepers’. It is a world where we, as teachers, find a sense of identity and community through a common purpose. For many of us, teaching was not a career we chose for money or fame; it was, in the true sense of the word, a vocation (a calling) to which we were drawn.

However, at times, the perceived certainty and solidity of some of these things can be thrown into confusion. Here is a personal reflection of one such time …

April 2011; the hottest April for 350 years. I was standing on Covehithe beach, just south of Southwold on the Suffolk coast, looking out to sea. The blue of the sky merges, seamlessly, into the blue of the water. The horizon is impossible to perceive. Against this backdrop, the shimmering outline of yacht can be seen, impossibly floating against the hazy blue background. For a moment, my eyes played tricks on my mind. Was it floating on water or air? It’s hard to tell. It has a ghost-like quality that evades perception and confounds my senses.

Our minds have strange ways of recollecting experiences and making connections. The experience recounted above came to my mind immediately I saw the title Adam Curtis had given to his new series on BBC2 (which began transmission in late May 2011 just before this book’s manuscript in its first draft was submitted to our publishers). Curtis named his series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (Guardian 2011). This title was not his own. It came from a poem written by Richard Brautigan (in the late 1960s). As you read it, see if you can spot the line that caused me to think of a hot, spring day spent on Covehithe beach:

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.

I like to think

(right now, please!)

of a cybernetic forest

filled with pines and electronics

where deer stroll peacefully

past computers

as if they were flowers

with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

(it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace.

(Brautigan 1968)

(‘… like pure water touching clear sky’ – this was the line from the poem that sent my thoughts back a month or so to Suffolk and the ‘floating’ yacht. But it also made me think in a different way about technology and the role it plays in education.)

Brautigan’s poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, presents an idyllic, pastoral scene. It can be interpreted in a number of ways. Within the first two stanzas, human beings, animals and technology coexist in mutual harmony within cybernetic meadows and forests. Perhaps Brautigan sees this as an illusion? His stanzas each begin with the phrase ‘I like to think’, which perhaps indicates a degree of hopefulness. The potential seamlessness of the union between technology and nature is hinted at in the first stanza (‘like pure water touching clear sky’). But, as the poem progresses, the gradual realisation of the illusion seems to become apparent (by the third stanza, ‘it has to be!’). But this does not prevent the poet from foreseeing, anticipating and hoping for a ‘cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors’ and at one with the world.

An alternative reading of the poem could be considerably darker. In this interpretation, perhaps Brautigan’s parenthesised comments can be read sarcastically? Technology is perceived as a powerful and increasingly pervasive force coming, by the third stanza, to dominate life and return us to a state of subservience, surveillance and irrelevance, being watched and controlled by ‘machines of loving grace’. The contrasts are stark and dark.

Brautigan’s poetic eloquence is a sharp contrast to my stumbling metaphor from Covehithe. However, I will pursue it for a little while longer because it speaks of an object (the yacht) positioned, apparently, in two worlds simultaneously (the sea and the sky). Technology is often perceived as other-worldly; we talk of ‘virtual worlds’ or ‘virtual reality’ to speak of a new space, one remote from the physical world around us. Some commentators speak of ‘augmented reality’, which does, by its very terminology, imply an extension beyond our immediate, perceived reality. Brautigan speaks of cybernetic meadows, forests and ecologies; imagined spaces outside our natural world. For all these reasons and many others, it is often understandably easy to divorce technology and its potential impacts from other human activities such as teaching or learning.

So, perhaps our aspiration as teachers is to seek to create that idyllic state where the worlds of education and technology merge, seamlessly, into each other. Like the water and sky in Brautigan’s poem, and my experience on Covehithe beach, we might hope that, within this state, it will be impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. And, within this state, the objects of our attention, the young people whose education we seek to facilitate, will truly be able to move freely. We will help them fly.

But, like Brautigan, our metaphor is an illusion. This seamless technological and educational idyll is unobtainable in the reality of day-to-day life. But it does represent an important metaphor that we would ask you, at the very opening of our book, to consider. The worlds of education and technology are closely, even intimately, related conceptually, philosophically and experientially in the perceived and lived realities of our lives today. Seeking to understand their relationship more fully is essential if we are to function effectively as teachers.

Reflective task

Take a few moments to consider your own view about how technology relates to the processes of teaching and learning. To what extent are these two ‘worlds’ distinct? In your current teaching, how have you sought to integrate them together and explore any potential points of contact?

We will explore this point further through recounting a story located in a very different part of the world from rural Suffolk – the Kalkaji slum in New Delhi.

Case study 1.1 Holes in the wall

The first computer kiosk was set up in 1999 in the Kalkaji slum in New Delhi, India. For a number of years, Dr Sugata Mitra, then Director of Research at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Systems in India, had been thinking about how computer-based education could serve India’s poor. He had a hunch that poor children with little education could teach themselves the basics of computer literacy and, in doing so, open a window to knowledge about the world. To test his idea he embedded a computer with a high-speed Internet connection into a wall (hence, often referred to as ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’) that divided the institute where he and his team worked from a slum area, strewn with rubbish and used by local street kids. He left the computer on, monitored its use remotely, and installed a video camera in a nearby tree to watch what happened.

What he saw were the ways in which the slum children who hung around in the car park intuitively picked up the skills they needed to use the machine. They self-organised and began teaching themselves what they needed to know with unending curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. The fact that the programs they discovered were all in English was not a problem: they learned the English they needed and even substituted their own words for icons (such as the hourglass that indicates some kind of loading process is taking place) when no words were indicated. Within a few days the children, who were mostly aged 6–10 and who did not attend school, had learned how to browse the Web, play games, create documents and paint pictures. For any parent with children of the same age this would not now appear such a surprising result. Children seem to ‘take to’ computers in ways that continue to surprise older generations. However, the implications of this social experiment are much more suggestive given its context. This is what Mitra said in an interview in 2000:

I’m saying that, in situations where we cannot intervene very frequently, you can multiply the effectiveness of 10 teachers by 100- or 1,000-fold if you give children access to the Internet. … This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind alley. That’s just so that you don’t waste time.

(Judge 2000)

This concept of ‘minimal intervention’ suggests that children can actually teach themselves many of the things that teachers normally assume is their job to teach. Self-directed learning replaces teacher-centric education and frees a teacher’s time to support pupils in more individual, personalised ways. The social implications of this are staggering in a world where, despite commitments to universal primary education, some 68 million primary school-age children are currently not enrolled (UNESCO 2011). Mitra’s ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ is suggestive of the kind of radical transformation that the use of technology could bring to education. That education can improve where there are fewer teachers, not more, is a powerful message. It is not surprising that he was awarded the Best Social Innovation in 2000 by the British Institute for Social Inventions, nor that the ideas behind his experiment have spread. Research into Hole-in-the-Wall computers, now referred to as ‘minimally invasive education learning stations’, has continued throughout the past ten years and now centres on the ways in which the emergence and development of group social processes aid individual learning. Much of it shows that children learn more through interaction with others, particularly their peers, than in the more passive, receptive activities that dominate formal schooling (Dangwal and Kapur 2009).

In a presentation for TED,¹ Mitra explains how he took the experiment one step further and then exported the idea to the UK. On one trip to a Hole-in-the-Wall computer in India, Mitra asked a young girl to stand behind a group working on the computer and praise what they were doing. He calculated that they achieved 25 per cent more with this positive praise/feedback. The idea of showing off your abilities to an empathetic other, Mitra suggested, was like demonstrating your skills to your Grannie and your Grannie responding, ‘That’s amazing. I couldn’t have done that at your age.’

That insight led to the recruitment of over 200 volunteers in the UK who connect once a week to schools in India via Skype. Their task is to encourage and praise the achievements of the youngsters they interact with. It constitutes a coaching and feedback mechanism that integrates with the youngsters’ schooling and which is designed to provide a boost to learning. While not all of the volunteers are grandmothers, the initiative is known after its method The Granny Cloud’.

Mitra further fine-tuned his experiments in Gateshead, UK, where he worked with 32 children and asked them to work in groups of four using one computer per group. They could change groups, wander between groups and even peer over the shoulder at a group’s work and take it back to their group and claim it as theirs. He then gave the groups six GCSE questions to answer. They used everything they could, including Google, Newsgroups, Wikipedia and Ask Jeeves. The quickest group answered the questions in 20 minutes and the slowest in 45 minutes. The average score achieved was 76 per cent. The classroom teacher of the groups Mitra was working with was suspicious that what the children had achieved was fingertip knowledge, discovering information that would subsequently be lost. In order to test the hypothesis that no deep learning had taken place during the task, Mitra tested the students with a paper-based exam two months later in which no computers or collaboration were allowed. The avera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Making connections
• 2. Adapting to radical change
• 3. Towards participation
• 4. Choosing and using digital technologies
• 5. Making, sharing and connecting with digital networked technologies
• 6. The impact of digital networked technologies on teaching and learning
• 7. Moving forwards and conclusion
• Index