Distrusting Educational Technology

Critical Questions for Changing Times

Neil Selwyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134607761
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Distrusting Educational Technology critically explores the optimistic consensus that has arisen around the use of digital technology in education. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives, this book shows how apparently neutral forms of educational technology have actually served to align educational provision and practices with neo-liberal values, thereby eroding the nature of education as a public good and moving it instead toward the individualistic tendencies of twenty-first century capitalism.

Following a wide-ranging interrogation of the ideological dimensions of educational technology, this book examines in detail specific types of digital technology in use in education today, including virtual education, 'open' courses, digital games, and social media. It then concludes with specific recommendations for fairer forms of educational technology. An ideal read for anyone interested in the fast-changing nature of contemporary education, Distrusting Educational Technology comprises an ambitious and much-needed critique.

1

WHY DISTRUST EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY?

Introduction

In comparison to other major educational problems of our times, the need to ask critical questions of digital technology in education is not immediately apparent. It is perhaps unsurprising that little serious attention has been paid to digital technology within recent critiques of contemporary education. Most critically minded authors understandably concern themselves with interrogating and examining the more obvious educational controversies and conflicts of curricular reform, social reproduction, marketization, identity politics, inclusion, the universal right to schooling and so on. In contrast, many people presume digital technology to be one of the least problematic elements of contemporary education provision and practice. Indeed, digital technologies of all shapes and sizes are now woven deeply into the everyday fabric of education – from ‘virtual learning environments’ and interactive whiteboards to Google searches and Wikipedia entries. Tools and applications such as these represent some of the most familiar cultural resources and symbols within contemporary educational settings and, at first glance, do not appear to be of particular cause for concern. If anything, the use of digital technology has now become a rather unremarkable aspect of education provision and practice.

Yet the use of digital technology in education should now be seen as a significant issue for everyone with a stake in education. The day-to-day lives of learners and educators are saturated with digital technology use – both in terms of personal uses of digital devices and the more hidden uses of technological tools and systems by educational institutions. Digital technology continues to be an important educational priority for governments, politicians and policymakers – especially in terms of national efforts to engineer new and improved education systems with the capability to “out-educate and out-hustle the rest of the world” (Obama 2011). The use of digital technology in education is certainly of significance to commercial actors involved in the selling of technology to educational consumers – a global marketplace that is estimated conservatively to be worth in excess of $5 trillion per annum. Obscured by these interests perhaps, but no less significant, educational technology is also a growing concern for parents, journalists, employers and most other education ‘stakeholders’.

In short, digital technology should be seen as an integral part of the educational landscape, and as something that is shaped by the (in)actions of a wide range of different actors and interests. Indeed, as all but the most ardent technological determinist would acknowledge, digital technology is not something that simply comes down to us from ‘on high’ – fully formed and ready to use. Instead, any instance of digital technology use in education is shaped by a range of social interests – from designers and developers, financiers and marketers to technology-using educators and the educational institutions they work within (see Bromley 1997; Oliver 2011). While all acting upon different motivations and intentions, these groups share a common interest in stimulating and supporting the increased acceptance and use of digital technology in education. It is therefore understandable that educational technology tends to be promoted and publicized by actors from all sides of the ‘education community’ as a natural, necessary and largely neutral element of contemporary education. An orthodoxy appears to have developed in most parts of the world that digital technologies are an integral and inevitable feature of ‘modern’ forms of education, and therefore require little or no discussion. Certainly as far as many academic commentators are concerned, the only questions that need to be asked today of educational technology are technical and procedural in nature. How might we better ‘harness’ the educational potential of technology? How might technology use be more ‘effective’? What changes do new technologies demand of existing educational ideas and understandings?

Questions such as these are all well and good, yet offer a highly partial picture of education and technology when addressed in isolation. In contrast, this book seeks to explore a set of more awkward and difficult questions. So while most people tend to think of technology as a necessary and even neutral feature of education, this book starts from the premise that educational technology is certainly not uncontested terrain. Approached in these terms, educational technology is not a straightforward, value-free process involving an individual using a piece of technology in order to learn something. Instead, all of the actors outlined so far in this chapter should be seen as having good reason to ensure that their interests and values are supported and advanced through the use of digital technology in education. While undoubtedly of great potential benefit, it is clear that educational technology is a value-laden site of profound struggle that some people benefit more from than others – most notably in terms of power and profit.

Thus despite all the prevailing talk of enhanced equality and democracy, it must be remembered that the application of digital technology in educational settings is almost always an unequal affair. To put it in crude terms, educational technology could be observed to involve a hierarchy of actors and interests ranging from those who generally ‘do’ educational technology through to those who generally have educational technology ‘done’ to them. In other words, it is important to acknowledge the differences that persist throughout educational technology between those who produce and those who consume, those who are empowered and those who are exploited. These are all ‘outcomes’ that are rarely acknowledged and written about in the academic educational technology literature. Indeed, part of my own long-standing concern with educational technology – and certainly a motivation for writing this book – lies with the apparently uncontroversial, unproblematic and apolitical manner in which educational technology tends to be discussed by otherwise highly critical commentators. Why is it that so many critically minded academic writers and researchers have an apparent ‘blind spot’ for the politics of educational technology? More importantly, what can be done to politicize the field of educational technology and establish it as an area of serious academic debate and discussion? It is these issues that this book concerns itself with. This is what is meant by ‘distrusting educational technology’.

One of the key prompts to write this book, therefore, is the fact that those who tend to be most disadvantaged by educational technology are usually those who think least critically about it. These people are usually described in pejorative terms within technology discussions as ‘end users’, despite encompassing a large majority of the population (and certainly a large number of readers of this book). In this sense, the reluctance of a majority of people to critique their relationships with educational technology is certainly not confined to education. Langdon Winner (2004) described a phenomenon of ‘technological somnambulism’ that seems to pervade Western society – that is, the tendency for a majority of people to sleepwalk through their mediations with technology. As Matthewman (2011, p. 173) writes, contemporary society suffers from a ‘banal’ tendency to overlook the role of digital technology in everyday life:

We do not notice the obvious. Ubiquity creates invisibility. McLuhan famously compared us to fish that fail to see our water. Under such circumstances, as Heidegger said, we are only likely to notice our technologies when they stop working as anticipated.

Even though people may now consider themselves to be far more technologically sophisticated than might have been the case in the times of Heidegger or McLuhan, there has been little recent indication that the tendency to look past ‘the digital’ is diminishing. Given the recent mass fetishization of all things Apple, coupled with the apparent compulsion for people to spend every waking hour of their lives tweeting, posting and ‘liking’, it would seem that very few of us are overly concerned with developing critical knowledge of how we interact with digital technology. Winner (2004) sees this disinterest in the politics of technology as stemming from a number of factors. First is the ever-increasing separation between the minority who design, develop, make and sell ‘new’ technology and the mass of us who end up merely purchasing and using it. Second is a long-standing tendency within Western thought to view digital technologies as tools that largely are separate from the human condition and can therefore be used and then discarded without any long-term personal implications. A third – and perhaps most significant – reason relates to the ways in which digital technologies are believed commonly to create ‘new’ spaces and places in which people can interact and operate separately from their nontechnologically mediated ‘offline’ existences. As such, much of what goes on ‘through’ digital technology use is often somehow perceived as being situated away from the minutiae and messiness of the ‘real’ world. Given this dissonance, it is perhaps understandable that the majority of people tend to be concerned with the personally pleasurable aspects of their technology use, rather than fretting over how these technologies might be entwined with the wider economic, political, social and cultural conditions of everyday life.

This sense of ‘sleepwalking’ is certainly reflected in the apolitical manner in which educational technology has been understood and discussed by academic commentators over the past 30 years or so. Even within the specialized academic fields of ‘technology-enhanced learning’ and ‘educational technology’ those writers and researchers who devote much of their time engaging with the topic tend to do so in constrained ways. From the outset, then, it is my intention that this will not be a book that will be similarly compromised and curtailed. Instead, this book will examine educational technology in a profoundly political light – approaching digital technology as part of the complex ways that social, economic and political tensions are ‘mediated’ in educational settings. As such, this is a book that aims to unpack the issues, arguments and assumptions that underpin four recent forms of digital technology use in education that otherwise tend to be considered as largely benign and wholly beneficial: virtual, open, games and social technologies. In particular the book seeks to problematize these technological forms in order to uncover their latent ideological content. A number of questions are therefore pursued with regard to examining the ideological nature of these dominant aspects of the current educational technology orthodoxy. Just why have these forms of technology use been selected and promoted in the ways that they are? Whose technologies are these? Who selected them? Why are they being organized and provided in the ways that they are? What interests are benefiting from this use? What linkages are there between these forms of educational technology and wider societal (re)arrangements and organization?

On one hand, then, this book seeks to problematize what is being presented to us as ‘educational technology’ and ask whether there might be alternate ways of making fairer use of digital technologies in education. As Sonia Livingstone reasons, there are perhaps only three lines of questioning worth pursuing when considering digital technology use in this manner – that is, “what's really going on, how can this be explained, and how could things be otherwise?” (Livingstone 2012, p. 19). These questions certainly underpin much of this book's analysis. Yet the overriding concern in doing so is not to attempt valiantly to ‘improve’ educational technology per se. Instead, this book is concerned first and foremost with unpacking and problematizing the inherently political nature of what is seen usually as a profoundly apolitical aspect of contemporary education provision and practice. In this way, it should be possible to develop more concrete and complete understandings of the linkages between political and economic power and the forms of technology-based education that are being experienced by ‘end users’ around the world.

What We (don't) Talk About When We Talk About ‘Educational Technology’

Before all these grand ambitions can be realized, it is perhaps helpful to first consider some fundamental matters of definition. In particular, what are we referring to when we talk about ‘educational technology’? Moreover, why should it be approached in problematic terms? In addressing these basic questions, it is worth reminding ourselves that the development of increasingly ‘powerful’ digital technologies has undoubtedly been one of the defining features of the past 30 years. Indeed, the scale and pace of recent digital innovation – in particular the growth of computing, the internet and mobile telephony – have prompted many commentators to position digital technology as a key driver of societal development around the world (Castells 2006). One of the striking characteristics of many recent accounts and analyses has been the transformative (and often optimistic) ways in which the changes associated with digital technology are imagined. Many popular and academic perceptions of digital technology appear, for example, to be animated by common discourses of progress and the allure of ‘the new’, coupled with a belief that our current digitally inflected era represents a “pervasive sense of leaving the past behind” (Murdock 2004, p. 20). In particular, many discussions are informed by a belief that digital technologies herald distinctively new and improved social arrangements in comparison to preceding ‘predigital’ times. This sense of improved change has been described as a ‘digital remediation’ of everyday life and social processes (see Bolter & Grusin 1999), where digital technologies are reconfiguring social processes and practices for the better. This is not to say that ‘new’ digital forms are believed to be usurping all social practices and processes that have gone before, but rather that digitally based activities are able to borrow from, refashion and often surpass their earlier predigital equivalents. For many commentators, therefore, the ready answer to alleviating contemporary social problems is now assumed to involve some form of digital technology. As Steve Woolgar (2002, p. 3) reflects, “The implication is that something new, different, and (usually) better is happening”.

Given these general trends, it is not surprising that the past 30 years have seen increasing enthusiasms for computerized, online and increasingly mobile forms of teaching and learning. Given the apparent transformatory power of contemporary digital technologies, it is understandable that these technologies are now seen by most commentators as being an essential and largely unquestionable element of contemporary educational arrangements. Indeed, the controversies that raged throughout the 1980s and 1990s over whether learning about digital technology should be a core component of education (the so-called issue of ‘computer literacy’) have long since been resolved. Now there is widespread acceptance that digital technologies should play an integral role in all aspects of learning throughout the life course. Thus widespread support now exists for the integration of computers into school, college and university contexts, as well as the online delivery of opportunities for study and training. There is also much enthusiasm for the digitally supported ‘informal’ modes of learning that are stimulated by general interests, pursuits and hobbies outside of the formal curriculum. In short, digital technology is now seen as an utterly integral but wholly unremarkable component of educational conditions and arrangements around the world.

At this point, it is important to note that ‘educational technology’ is not a single, homogenous entity. Instead, ‘educational technology’ is deceptively neat shorthand for a diverse array of socio-technical devices, activities and practices. Above and beyond the multitude of technological devices and artefacts themselves, ‘educational technology’ refers to a wide-ranging field of activities and practices – that is, what is done with these technologies in the name of education. Perhaps less obviously, ‘educational technology’ also refers to a commercial field of technology development, production and marketing, as well as a thriving field of academic study and scholarship. While all of these areas of activity are concerned with the use of technology in educational settings, they are so in very different ways, often for very different reasons. As such, ‘educational technology’ needs to be understood as a knot of social, political, economic and cultural agendas that is riddled with complications, contradictions and conflicts. It therefore makes little sense to talk of ‘educational technology’ as a neat single entity, just as it makes little sense to talk of ‘society’ in singular, monolithic terms. One of the first tasks in this book's development of a distrust of educational technology is to establish a sufficiently nuanced understanding of what ‘educational technology’ is in all its forms.

Taking this multifaceted approach certainly runs counter to the ways in which educational technology tends to be discussed in popular, political and academic circles. Despite its obvious complexity, educational technology tends to be perceived in alarmingly one-dimensional terms. This is the case even with the continually renewed range of products and devices that constitute the material face of educational technology. In fact, most discussions of ‘educational technology’ focus only on the most popular and prominent ‘classroom’ forms of digital technology. Instead, it is important to recognise from the outset that educational uses of digital technology range from the personal use of internet-connected portable devices such as tablet computers and ‘smartphones’ to multimedia immersive simulation environments for the military and medical professions. It is also important to note that educational applications of digital technology are not confined only to schools and universities. These technological devices are used throughout educational systems to support a diversity of forms of educational provision, from kindergartens to work-based training and community settings. We therefore need to remain mindful of this diversity throughout our subsequent discussions.

It is also worth moving beyond the limited, one-dimensional manner in which educational technology outcomes tend to be understood and portrayed. Indeed, in most popular, political and academic discussions, digital technologies tend to be associated with similar sets of potentially far-reaching shifts either in terms of individual learning and/or the organization and governance of educational provision. For instance, most digital technologies over the past 30 years have been accompanied by promises of widened participation in education, increased motivation and engagement, better levels of ‘attainment’, enhanced convenience of use and more ‘efficient’ and ‘effective’ provision of educational opportunities. Indeed, the field of education and technology is beset by exaggerated expectations over the capacity of the latest ‘new’ technology to change education for the better, regardless of context or circumstance. Typical of this thinking, for example, was Rupert Murdoch's assertion that current forms of internet technology offer the potential to “ensure the poor child in Manila has the same chance as the rich child in Manhattan… the key to our future is to unlock this potential” (cited in Willsher 2011, n.p.).

High-profile public proclamations of this sort typify the general belief amongst many powerful interests that digit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Distrust Educational Technology?
• 2 Understanding Educational Technology as Ideology
• 3 Distrusting ‘Virtual’ Technologies in Education
• 4 Distrusting ‘Open’ Technologies in Education
• 5 Distrusting ‘Games’ Technologies in Education
• 6 Distrusting ‘Social’ Technologies in Education
• 7 Educational Technology: Continuities, Contradictions and Conflicts
• 8 Educational Technology: Is There an Alternative?
• References
• Index