Education and New Technologies

Perils and Promises for Learners

Kieron Sheehy, Andrew Holliman, Kieron Sheehy, Andrew Holliman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317290254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

When should children begin their digital diet? Does the use of new technology hinder or enhance children's literacy development? Do new technologies give children new abilities or undermine their skills and identities? Are learners safe in modern online educational spaces?

Kieron Sheehy and Andrew Holliman have assembled expert contributors from around the world to discuss these questions and have divided the book into three parts:

• early engagement with new technologies: decisions, dangers and data
• new technology: supporting all learners or divisive tools
• global and cultural reflections on educational technology.

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Education and New Technologies focuses on aspects of education where the use of twenty-first-century technologies has been particularly controversial, contemplating the possible educational benefits alongside potential negative impacts on learners. Topics covered include:

• e-books and their influence on literacy skills
• games-based learning
• the impact of new technologies on abilities and disabilities
• learning analytics and the use of large-scale learner data
• cyberbullying
• intelligent technologies and the connected learner.

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A twenty-first-centurybook for twenty-first-centuryconcerns, Education and New Technologies presents up-to-date research and clear, engaging insight about the relationship between technology and how we learn.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Andrew Martin for inviting us to host a symposium on ‘The Promises and Perils of Technology in Educational Contexts’ at the 28th International Congress of Applied Psychology (Division 5: Educational, Instructional, and School Psychology) in Paris, July 2014. This seminar directly inspired our publication. We would also like to give special thanks to all those who were involved in the review of this work, including those students of psychology who provided student reviews of individual chapters: Katherine Boaden, Agnieszka Czarnecka, Lea Evers, Polly Hicks, Melissa Gray, Bindu Kizhakethil, Maggie Leese, Elizabeth Marsh, Hannah Nash, Mirabel Pelton, James Rowland, Kate Torrens and Szilvia Toth.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND A WORLD OF DIFFERENCES

Introducing the perils and promises for learners

Kieron Sheehy and Andrew Holliman

Welcome to Education and New Technologies: Perils and Promises for Learners.

It is unarguable that new technologies are creating profound changes within society. These technologies are becoming so integral to our lives and cultures that we might often fail to notice the changes that they have brought. One way of reflecting on the changes that have occurred is to conduct a thought experiment in which we try to see the world through the eye of someone from the relatively recent past.

A time traveller, let us call her Mary, from Europe in 1927 would be amazed by the things she would encounter in the early twenty-first century. Mary would find technologies can speak and guide people as they drive to their destinations, or label stars and planes as they move across the sky; and digital assistants that respond to varied verbal or written requests, turn on household devices, answer our questions, read our ‘mail’, augment our perceptions of the world, and offer a vast array of diversions and amusements. She would be amazed by how easily an unimaginably vast amount of information is routinely accessed, searched and transferred around the world using everyday technologies. Mary would quickly become aware that the people she meets in this new century are becoming connected to technologically mediated information for almost all their waking hours (and some sleepers might even be measuring the quality of their sleep through 24/7 health trackers). She would see how this connection begins in early childhood. For example, in the UK 33% of 3–4-year-olds and 92% of 12–15-year-olds (Ofcom 2013) access the Internet and across Europe the likelihood of children owning a smartphone increases by 58% for each year they grow older (Mascheroni and Ólafsson 2015). This access to technologically mediated experiences is increasing year on year as smartphones, tablets and other devices become evermore ubiquitous, so that ‘mobile communication has become a taken for granted condition of young people’s everyday lives’ (Mascheroni and Ólafsson 2015: 3). Although children’s access to smart technologies reflects and intersects with their social and economic situations, Mary could still conclude that children’s access to virtual spaces and online interactions is becoming part of daily experiences, and expectations, on a global level. Parents need answers to questions that would have been unknown in Mary’s time. For example, when should young children begin to use these new technologies, are these technologies beneficial to children’s development or are they harmful virtual pacifiers and electronic babysitters (Haughton, Aiken and Cheevers 2015), and are the social lives of children (and adults) damaged through ‘digital addiction’ (Kucirkova, Littleton and Kyparissiadis 2017)? The use of digital connected technologies appears to bring benefits but also to create potential problems.

In learning about the modern world, Mary would realise that much of the news and information she receives is actually scraped and generated by software, perhaps delivered by chatbots, rather than human beings. In experiencing modern social interactions, she would understand that our lives are increasingly enacted within technological spaces and shaped by the affordances of the social media and communication software that is being used. In relation to work and employment, Mary would be able to visit factories, warehouses and farms, where robots have replaced human labour or where technologically mediated jobs exist that could not have been imagined or understood in her own time. It would be obvious to our time traveller that ‘modern lives’ have been technologically transformed, or at least made more efficient in many respects, and that at the start of the new century human activities are very different from those in her own time.

However, if Mary visited a school she would probably feel very much at home, recognising many familiar structures and practices. The buildings would serve largely the same function, and she would find classroom spaces which have the form of desks, chairs and classroom (albeit perhaps electronic white) boards. The reading, handwriting and arithmetic activities the children carry out would be entirely comprehensible to her. The dizzying array of online and technologically mediated experiences which she would have encountered elsewhere would seem less obvious in modern settings explicitly designated for educational activities. This raises the question of why these institutions might appear to be slower in reflecting newer social practices, and whether this apparent lack of innovation could actually be protecting learners from technologies that might impair their learning experiences and development, or place them at personal risk. A clear illustration of this issue is the debate concerning smartphones and the effects of texting on the development of literacy skills. This example indicates how heated the ‘perils and promises’ debate can become, even for such an apparently everyday and seemingly innocuous practice.

There has been a concern amongst many educators and parents that the popularity of text messaging has been responsible for a marked deterioration in literacy abilities (Paton 2011). This is a longstanding issue, reflected across the years in popular newspaper headings:

•‘I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language’ (Humphrys 2007: Para 1, Daily Mail).

•‘TXT BAD 4 UR BRAIN? Text messaging can dent your reading abilities, say scientists’ (Waugh 2012: Para 1, Daily Mail).

In contrast to these warnings and declarations of opposition are the results of research studies that suggest a much more positive picture. For example, controlled and longitudinal research (Wood, Kemp, Waldron and Hart 2014) indicates that the use of textese slang (on smartphones) might have, at worst, a neutral effect on literacy and can actually benefit children’s spelling attainment. When early research in this area was reported in the media, it was often framed as being in marked contrast to established common-sense beliefs and practice, for example:

News media reports of a positive impact of text usage on aspects of literacy development often evoked vociferous comments from educators and the general public. For example:

•‘you wouldn’t be saying that if you’d tried to mark written work littered with “text speak” because they have no idea how to write properly’ (Anon. 2011: Comments, Daily Mail).

•‘Yeah and they’ll soon be needing ops on the NHS for rsi conditions in their late teens. Anything to avoid learning to read and write by reading books and being taught to write. What a stupid article!’ (Anon. 2011: Comments, Daily Mail).

•‘Total rubbish ! the decline is there and will get worse, texting will only speed up the decline. The parents are not wrong they see it daily from their children not from some cockeyed research over 10 years!!’ (Anon. 2011: Comments, Daily Mail).

It is against this social backdrop that the educational uses of technologies are being judged, and perhaps this backdrop might influence how or why new technologies are implemented (or not) in society’s ‘designated’ learning environments. Since these heated early public debates, the research evidence has grown and a body of evidence now suggests that texting has a positive impact on spelling, that a learner’s amount of texting correlates with their overall language skills and that use of textese is positively related to children’s grammar performance (Alvermann and Harrison 2016; van Dijk et al. 2016). Although the textese debate may be partly resolved, in terms of research, this does not mean that new technologies are necessarily becoming perceived as offering or providing positive benefits for all learners. Understanding the perils and promises of new technologies is a complex real-life issue, which makes it difficult for those who are concerned with supporting learners, and indeed learners themselves, to make informed decisions about how best to use them. For example, let us look at smartphones again. These devices have become so popular in the last decade that it feels wrong to describe them being a ‘new’ technology, and they only appear to be new when discussed within an educational context. They are essentially powerful pocket computers, capable of running a wide array of software. It might seem obvious therefore that giving learners access to their own pocket computers would reap educational benefits. However, there is a widespread belief that the presence of mobile phones in schools damages learners’ academic achievements, and consequently many schools ban their use. In contrast to the textese debate, there is some support for this belief. Researchers sampled the academic performance of over 130,000 teenagers in UK schools before and after the introduction of a smartphone ban (Beland and Murphy 2016). They found a significant improvement in student performance in schools once smartphones were banned, with bans having the most benefit for previously low-achieving students and none for previously high-achieving students. Beland and Murphy argue that this effect occurs because of students’ differential ability to be distracted from their studies by smartphones. In considering the results of studies such as this, it is important to consider how the effects of the technology are evaluated. For example, the tests on which the smartphone usage is evaluated can be handwritten pencil and paper summative assessments of largely memorised content. Mary might be familiar with the format of these long-established forms of examinations. Could it be that new technologies which might help learners are being assessed through, or being used in service of, outmoded educational practices? This is not a new idea. The educational visionary Seymour Papert used a parable to explain his argument concerning the ways in which the merits of computing technologies were being assessed in educational settings:

The parable is about a brilliant engineer around 1800 who invented the jet engine. Since he was dedicated to improving transportation, he took his invention to the people most involved with transportation, namely the makers of stagecoaches. He said, ‘Look, I’ve got this thing. Find out how to use it.’ So the makers of stagecoaches looked at it and they said, ‘Well, let’s tie it on to a stagecoach and see if it helps the horses.’ So they tied the jet engine on the stagecoach and of course it shattered the stagecoach to pieces. So that wasn’t any good … However, somebody got a brilliant idea, ‘We’ll make a tiny little jet engine. And we will put that on the stagecoach, and it won’t shatter it to pieces. Besides, its price is affordable.’ In fact, very careful statistics managed to show that this did have a minor effect on the performance of the horses … I hate to say it, but I think that this is a very accurate portrayal of what is being done with computers in schools.

(Papert 1996: Paras 3–5)

Though it was written over two decades ago, one could propose that this argument still holds true and may help explain the divide between many learners’ experiences of technologies in their formal education and their social and work lives.

The current situation is that educators and learners are living in an increasingly technologically mediated world. Yet judging the relative perils and promises of new technologies for learning is not an easy task. As illustrated in the examples of texting and mobile phones, there are controversies that result from widely accepted ‘common-sense’ views on the dangers that such technologies might bring, research evidence that is nuanced in terms of indicating possible benefits for learners in different sit...