Reshaping International Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Universities in the Information Age

Paul G. Nixon, Vanessa P. Dennen, Rajash Rawal, Paul G. Nixon, Vanessa P. Dennen, Rajash Rawal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000343755
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume provides a broad examination of how technology and globalisation have influenced contemporary higher education institutions and how moves towards internationalisation within and between educational providers continue to be a force for change in this context.

Showcasing the varied responses to and utilisation of new technologies to support international teaching and learning endeavours at a range of higher education institutions, this book introduces content from around the world, emphasising the global importance of the internationalisation of education. Featuring contributions from some fresh young voices alongside the work of experienced and internationally renowned scholars this collection

• critically scrutinises the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the capacities and patterns of university education;
• assesses and refines the contention that ICTs are facilitating the (re-)shaping of university practices as well as challenging traditional educational models and learning strategies;
• provides a comprehensive portrait of the ways in which ICT use engages higher education providers, society, and individuals to facilitate potentially more democratic, globally focussed access to knowledge generation, creation, investigation, and consumption processes through internationally focussed education; and
• examines the differing pace and scope of change in international educational practice and context between and within countries and disciplines.

With an international range of carefully chosen contributors, this book is a must-read text for practitioners, academics, researchers, administrators, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future of the university in an information age.

Part I

Digital learning and new technologies in the internationalisation of higher education

Chapter 1

New technological capabilities and the societal, ethical, and legal tensions they create in today’s digital learning setting

Ray J. Amirault

Today’s 21st century educational professionals find themselves in a technologically challenging setting neither of their own making nor amenable to simple solutions. This is particularly true for those educators making use of advanced computer-based technology, a segment of educators that continues to encompass an ever-greater percentage of all educational modalities, and will, over time, make up the whole of the educational world. This text is designed to assist educational professionals in orienting their thinking to the many and varied issues at play in today’s educational setting introduced by advanced technologies, and to assist in equipping these professionals with the ability to intelligently examine such issues from an informed perspective. Such skills will permit educators to be aware of the educational benefits of various technologies while simultaneously minimizing the dangers the technologies may surreptitiously bring with them. As educators, the time has long passed when we can be simply content with the functionality of the educational tools we select for use: we must be cognizant of the full range of impacts these technologies are now introducing, particularly when these extend beyond the educational setting.

This task is not a trivial one. The topic is not strictly delimited by “digital literacy,” nor is it confined to a knowledge of specific technical or scientific principles. Rather, it is the combination of these elements, and more, that has resulted in today’s amalgam of growing societal, ethical, and legal issues connected to the use of advanced technology in the international educational setting, whether it be in a traditional classroom or at a distance through e-learning.

“Educational technology”—the most definition-resistant term in education today

Keeping track of the technologies that have been used in education from the dawn of history results in a rich and variegated output. Plutarch (AD 46–120) stated that Demosthenes (BC 384–322) placed beach pebbles in his mouth to improve his diction (Murphy, 2019). This, we can suppose, makes the pebble a contender for one of the earliest educational technologies. It can just as easily be argued that when someone used a stick or branch to make marks on the ground to communicate ideas, the stick/branch was serving as an educational technology. But even extending our view much further back in time, even ancient primitive tools could possibly be considered as educational technologies, depending on their use. Archaeologists in southern France uncovered tools that have been argon dated to 1.57 million years, giving some hint at how far back educational technology may reach (Jones, 2009), at least in a nominal sense.

In today’s setting, technological innovation and development have reached such a pace that the topic has now become resilient to codification. Forbes (Marr, 2018) listed their “Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2018” and while it cannot be said that this list contains only instructional technologies, it does, however, provide a small sense of what is occurring in today’s computationally complex innovation learning setting. A listing by the “ame Group” (The ame Group, 2019) constructed a list to include only educationally oriented disruptive innovations (and only in the case when these are applied within the educational setting) and proposed the following as current top technology innovations:

1. Virtual Reality
2. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
3. Cloud Computing
4. Social Media
5. Biometrics

Today’s reality is filled with the most exotic, complex, and powerful tools ever experienced within history. These listings are primarily based on a view of educational technology that focuses on devices used to facilitate educational outcomes. We briefly look at a more expansive view of educational technology later in this chapter.

What position do educational technologies assume within the technology innovation chain?

One can successfully posit that, throughout history, education has implemented, rather than invented, technology. Leaving aside the seeming Escher-like arguments that can be raised in response to this statement (e.g., “technologies could not have been invented unless someone had first been educated, which provided them the ability to create such inventions: this means that education is the true source of invention …, etc.”), we choose instead to speak of practical cases that are conducive to clear examination. Papyrus was invented to hold information; its use as an instructional tool came later. The same can be said of paper. Electricity was, of course, not invented, but discovered, as a harnessed source of energy long before any thought of its capability in powering the seemingly endless number of electronic devices in today’s educational environment could even have been remotely imagined. The radio was invented for the transmission of sound: its function for transmitting information, and therefore, knowledge, was later identified as fruitful for instruction. The “Magic Lantern,” once devised, was subsequently adopted for instructional use (cf. Kessler and Lenk, 2018) in locations such as the Chicago School System in the 19th century. We might make note that the Magic Lantern is an “outlier” in that it was an invention made specifically for education. The pencil and the ballpoint pen, both of which, we easily forget, were inventions. Most educators still have recourse to use ballpoint pens in the service of education. Few, however, could elucidate the scientific principles behind the ballpoint pen’s function. This is not surprising, given both education’s age as a subject and its goals as a field (e.g., the goal of the overarching field of education is not to develop experts in fluid mechanics).

Education vs. educational technology

It is usually surprising for educators to discover that their field, “education,” is a very new field when compared to other higher education fields within the university. The field of “education” emerged only in the late 1800s when universities began to separate specialist content domains apart from the instructional delivery of that content (Lagemann, 2000; Royce, 1966). Eventually, during the technological wave of the mid-20th century around the time of World War I, the field of “Educational Technology,” which focused on the use of technology in education, was spawned, arising out of the training requirements for military personnel during the war (Amirault and Branson, 2006). Regardless, even those today who specialize in educational technology are not typically experts in the development and construction of the technologies themselves, but in their application in learning settings to help achieve educational goals (e.g., they can skillfully use cellphones for learning in the educational setting, but are unlikely to be able to mechanically repair a cellphone). In a surprising twist, this clear demarcation between the skills of those who invent technologies and those who employ technologies for education holds exceedingly important implications that have historically been ignored but today have grown increasingly important as the nature and scope of innovations have greatly increased in sophistication.

This is not an attempt to argue that one must be a theoretical or applied scientist fully able to explain all scientific principles at work in order to successfully use technology for international educational purposes. Quite the opposite, in fact: many of the world’s greatest inventions would never have become considered “great” had not some instructional use for them later been developed after their creation by those generally incapable of explaining their detailed operation. But once a technology is applied in a learning environment, a “trojan horse” filled with a collection of potential coincidental effects may also be co-introduced with it. The more capable and sophisticated the technology, too, the greater the potential for such effects. This implies a symbiosis between inventor and implementer that is often both unforeseen and unpredictable. This reality—that inventions do not generally arise, but are rather later employed, in the educational context—generates a series of ongoing issues for the educational world:

• Which emerging technologies should and should not be employed as “educational” technologies?
• How do we control such technologies?
• Should we control them?
• How are they optimally implemented?
• What are the implications of employing these technologies in an educational setting?
• What are the social impacts of these technologies?
• Do these technologies migrate beyond their intended educational use into the personal world and space of their users, and to what extent?

More expansive views of educational technology

The term “educational technology,” as mentioned earlier, can often be viewed as the use of some apparatus to assist in learning. This is a defensible definition. In its broadest sense, however, such as espoused by Saettler (2005), it is noted that the word “technology” arises from the Greek techné, which more broadly encompasses knowledge (Amirault and Branson, 2006; Jones, 2005). The systemization of that knowledge—therefore an educational technology by Settler’s view—is, of course, not a new concept: more than two millennia ago, the Seven Liberal Arts divided subject matter into discrete domains of content to be learned (Abelson, 1906). Passed from Roman antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, the early medieval thinker Boethius played a key role in transmitting the Seven Liberal Arts to the then-nascent medieval European educational systems (Daileader, 2001; Marenbon, 2007). This structural composition of content was subsequently divided into segments named the Trivium and the Quadrivium, systemization models of learning emphasizing first theoretical knowledge, then application of that content later (Leff, 1992; North, 1992). Systemization of content reached its perigee with the advent of the Scholastic Method, where strict etymological rules and theological precepts were applied in exacting order to argue through the meaning of content rather than content’s mere expression (Daileader, 2001; DeWulf, 2003; Amirault and Visser, 2009). This then led to the great “summae” of organized information perhaps most greatly typified by Thomas Aquinas (Daileader, 2007) but then passed through mazes of Byzantine-like paths of history leading to the production of the great European encyclopedias which attempted to collect into one place all known information, for example, the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences, Des Arts Et Des Métiers (Diderot and Alembert, 1751), (Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts) of the 18th century. Systemization of knowledge also furthered the use of “textbooks,” an educational technology now often originally attributed to Charlemagne when he set up his Palatine School in Aix-la-Chapelle during the 9th century (Amirault, 2019). Visual teaching books, such as the Orbis Pictus developed by Comenius in the 17th century (Comenius and Hoole, 1887) and probably duplicated by innumerable, unknown teachers of the Late Middle Ages, also appeared in the lexicon of educational technologies, and even continue to this day, particularly in the area of language acquisition.

This entire period (4BC–1800AD), then, laid the applied foundations for educational technology, at least in the sense of its narrowly delineated definition. Yet even though major technological innovation did certainly take place during this period (e.g., the printing press with movable type, etc.), with the exception of the printing press, rarely did these innovations break out of the existing classroom-based educational technology framework before the advent of the computer-based technology breakthroughs of the mid-20th century, to which we now turn.

Impact of the computer revolution of the 20th century

Less than 30 years ago, as the so-called “personal” computer became commoditized, arguments about the proposed merits of advanced computer technology as educational tools abounded within the educational scholarly literature, with strongly held positions argued on both sides. Does the personal computer improve educational outcomes? In this author’s mind, this remains an open question. Open, but irrelevant. Advanced technology is today’s world, and educators must today possess the know-how to successfully implement that technology to achieve meaningful learning whether or not there are any inherent educational advantages in the new technology.

One principal issue, however, has remained essentially unchanged even in the transition to the 20th and 21st centuries: educators lineally succeeded the invention of a technology before being able to harness the technology for educational purposes. There is nothing inappropriate with this. Educators have historically always been content to let others invent, and then move on to make their own decisions as to what could be educationally leveraged, and how. Stated differently, educators are always situated at the later end of the technology lifespan continuum: e.g., the cellphone is created, creeps into mainstream use, and then the educational community finally understands how this technology can be used for educational purposes. None of this is inherently problematic, but it does form the basis for some of the issues described in this chapter.

What it does connote, however—and all the more so in today’s context where knowledge and technical innovation are increasing at ever-greater rates—is a lag between invention an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword to the series, Internationalization in Higher Education
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Digital learning and new technologies in the internationalisation of higher education
• PART II: Universities reshaping teaching and learning through ICT use in different national contexts
• Conclusion
• Index