Debates in Computing and ICT Education

Sarah Younie, Pete Bradshaw, Sarah Younie, Pete Bradshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138891784
• eBook ISBN: 9781317486138
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Debates in ICT and Computing Education explores the major issues teachers encounter in their daily professional lives. It encourages critical reflection and aims to stimulate both novice and experienced teachers to think more deeply about their practice, and link research and evidence to what they have observed in schools. Chapters tackle established and contemporary issues enabling teachers to reach informed judgements and argue their point of view with deeper theoretical knowledge and understanding. Debates include teacherless classrooms; personalised learning; creativity; digital literacy; visual literacy; e-tools; learning platforms; and opportunities for lifelong learning.

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Part I

Curriculum developments

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Chapter 1

What can technology actually do?

Chris Shelton

Introduction

This chapter considers the debates around what digital technology can actually do for education. These centre around positive and negative claims for the impact of ICT on pupils which, in turn, lead to disputes about whether schools should make more or less use of technology for learning. A feature of these debates is that they can seem rather repetitive, because as new technologies become available, very similar arguments are used to make the case for or against their use as were used to debate the use of older technologies. So, repeatedly we hear different claims being made for ways in which the latest technologies can help or hinder schools, teachers and pupils. Sometimes we hear positive claims that they will raise GCSE results, lighten teacher workload, make learning more fun, and so on, and in short, that technology will transform education for the better in some way. At other times, we hear negative claims: that time using technology distracts from real learning, that investments in new gadgets are wasteful uses of the limited money in school budgets, or that technology just doesn’t work in the way it is supposed to.

This chapter summarises these debates and introduces some of the different ways that we can think about what technology might do for education. In turn, these different ways of thinking about technology have led to further debates that we will also consider, concerning how we should understand the relationship between technology and society.

The chapter starts by looking at some of the assumptions that underpin the contrasting claims for technology and suggests some alternative ways of thinking about these. Then we will discuss the concept of ‘affordance’ and how this can help teachers to identify where technology will be useful for them. In the final part of the chapter, we will consider the social and political aspects of technology use and the debates about how these might shape how technology is used in education.

Claims and counterclaims for the effect of technology

You do not have to look very far to find examples of the promises that have been made for technology. In fact, claims for technology’s potential to improve education can be traced back to the first half of the 20th century when first educational radio, then film and then television were expected to change schools and schooling dramatically. Today the technologies may have changed but the promises are similar, that new technology will improve the quality of pupils’ learning and, simultaneously, save time or money. The most obvious places to find such messages are in the advertisements created by technology companies. For example, while later adverts are much more nuanced, the first marketing campaign aimed at introducing the Apple iPad to educational markets was full of ambitious claims, including that the iPad will “transform” learning and that it holds “all the world’s learning in it” (Apple, 2011).

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Sometimes these marketing claims are made without foundation but sometimes they are supported by evidence collected in schools (e.g. Apple, 2014).

However, despite the large investments in new technologies made by schools, local authorities and governments, and the dedicated work of many pioneering teachers, it has long been argued that educational technology has not transformed teaching and learning in the way that many had anticipated (e.g. Cuban, 1986, 2001; Oppenheimer, 1997; Selwyn, 1999). For Cuban (2001), the claims that digital technology will transform teaching are merely ‘hype’ and he points to the lack of impact of previous technologies as an indicator that the latest innovations will not live up to their promises. Others go further and suggest that not only are some of the claims made for technology just myths, but also that this is due to a “technopositivist ideology” of compulsive enthusiasm for technology (Njenga and Fourie, 2010, p. 200).

While these responses suggest that the benefits of technology promised by some will not be delivered on, another argument suggests that technology will actually make things worse. Thus, Oppenheimer (2003) claims that far from transforming our schools for the better, technology has had a negative effect on learning through distracting pupils and diverting time and money from other more productive activities. In turn, this is reflected in newspapers and online news sites that regularly print stories such as “Too much technology ‘could lower school results’” (BBC, 2015).

Such claims are sometimes described as ‘booster’ or ‘doomster’ accounts of technology (e.g. Bigum, 1998) and have tended to have a high profile in debates about technology. However, although these claims present opposite sides of an argument, they have one thing in common: both sides of the debates described above assume that technology will make a difference to education. They assume that technology effects a change of some kind to schools or pupils. However, as we shall see, it is not at all clear that any technology can actually do this.

Technological determinism

Given that we can easily find arguments that technology has had a positive impact on education and opposing arguments that technology has had a negative effect on education, it might be tempting to discount both sides of the debate. However, these claims cannot just be ignored because they continue to be promoted and reappear in different forms with every new technology. Underlying the argument that technology has the potential to transform education is the assumption that technology can cause change, that it can determine what happens in the social world, in this case, in education. This idea is called ‘technological determinism’.

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A consequence of having a ‘technological determinist’ view is that if you believe that technology causes change, you would expect it to work consistently. While this is a useful assumption to promote for those marketing a technology (“it worked here so it will work for you”), it raises the question of how to explain why technology has not had the impact that was expected.

One approach to explaining the lack of impact of technology in education has been to identify factors that might militate against the successful use of technology. As technology has been promoted as a solution to perceived problems or as a force for change, when that change has not appeared, this may be attributed to ‘barriers’ to its progress. Such ‘barriers’ are well documented in research in schools; for example, Bingimlas’ (2009) literature review identifies a number of barriers and categorises these as ‘school-level’ or ‘teacher-level’ barriers. School-level barriers are said to be “lack of time”, “lack of effective training”, “lack of accessibility” and “lack of technical support” (p. 239), while teacher-level factors are identified as “lack of teacher confidence”, “lack of teacher competence” and “resistance to change and negative attitudes” (p. 237). Bingimlas further acknowledges the complex relationships between these factors.

However, while each of these ‘barriers’ will clearly affect how a technology is used (or not used), the implication of this discourse is that if the barriers can be overcome, then technology will be able to do what was promised. At its worst, this can lead to teachers or schools being blamed for obstructing progress. But this view of technology as an agent of change has frequently been challenged (e.g. Oliver, 2011) for suggesting that technology has the power to cause social change (in this case educational ‘transformation’). Others have argued that technology itself does nothing – it will only be once individuals adopt the technology that any change will happen and that this change will depend on what they choose to do with the technology.

Social determinism or instrumentalism – is technology just a tool?

While technological determinist arguments are common (particular from those promoting a particular device or software), an alternative view of technology is that it has no inherent effect (either positive or negative) on education, and any educational changes are entirely due to what the user does with that technology. This is the opposite view to technological determinism and is more commonly held amongst teachers. It is often expressed by the phrase “technology is just a tool” and implies that technology is neutral and can be used in whatever way the user (in this case, the teacher or student) wishes. This can be described as a ‘social determinist’ or ‘instrumentalist’ view where the social context determines the impact of the technology (Feenberg, 2002).

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The social determinist view provides one way of explaining the variation in impact of technology in education. If the technology is a neutral tool, then any educational impact depends on how well the user adopts the new technology, and poor use will lead to little or no measurable impact on learning. As Feenberg has noted, “Education is not a pill, and relationships between cause and effect are notoriously difficult to establish” (Feenberg, 2009, p. viii).

This is confirmed in the Education Endowment Foundation’s meta-analysis reviewing the impact of digital technology on learning (Higgins et al., 2012) which notes that although research linking technology and attainments has tended to find “consistent but small positive associations with educational outcomes”, this does not imply a causal link between technology and learning. They suggest that “it seems probable that more effective schools and teachers are more likely to use digital technologies more effectively than other schools.” (p. 3). The report concludes that is not whether technology is used but how technology is used that makes a difference to learning.

A similar conclusion might be drawn from the 2015 OECD study, ‘Students, Computers and Learning’. On publication, this study was reported widely as suggesting that technology was ineffective, for example: “Computers ‘do not improve’ pupil results, says OECD” (BBC, 2015) and “Overexposure to computers and the Internet causes educational outcomes to drop, study finds” (Wall Street Journal, 2015). Indeed, the report showed “no appreciable improvements in student achievement” in countries that had invested heavily in ICT. However, the conclusions of the reports’ authors are more nuanced, and one explanation suggested was that “we have not yet become good enough at the kind of pedagogies that make the most of technology” (p. 3).

However, while these studies provide evidence that the way in which technology used is of crucial importance, they do not suggest that technology is a ‘neutral tool’. In fact, several challenges have been put forward to dispute this view of technology as ‘neutral’. One is that this places “far too much faith in people’s abilities to exercise foresight and restraint” (Burbules and Callister, 2000, p. 9) and that it ignores the unintended consequences of using technology. In his book Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Edward Tenner (1996) provides copious examples from medicine, sport, the workplace and the environment of times when the introduction of technology led to unexpected ‘revenge effects’. In these cases, well-meaning actions had unpredictable consequences; for example, uses of technology intended to reduce workload had the effect of increasing it.

A second problem for both technological determinist and instrumentalist views are that they ‘reify’ technology by considering ‘technology’ to be a “single material thing with a homogeneous, undifferentiated character” (Chandler, 1995, p. 4). In fact, technology is not a single thing but rather a term for a wide range of different devices and software. Some technologies, for example the digital projector, have been widely adopted in a range of educational settings, while others, such as virtual reality, have proved far less pervasive. It would be hard to justify a claim that both these technologies have had the same effect on education or that they can be used in equivalent ways. If not all technologies are the same, then they cannot be entirely neutral – they must need to be used in different ways to get the most out of them.

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Affordances

This term was coined by a psychologist, James Gibson, in 1979 to refer to the possibilities for action available to an individual in a particular environment: “The affordances of the environment a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Debates in Computing and ICT Education
• Debates in Subject Teaching Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• General Introduction
• Notes on Contributors
• PART I Curriculum Developments
• PART II Whole School Learning Environments
• PART III Classroom Applications
• Index