technology

Selwyn, N. (2016). Is Technology Good for Education?. Wiley Professional, Reference & Trade (Wiley K&L).  https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780745696508

ONE

Digital Technology and Educational Change

Introduction

Digital technology is now an integral part of education. The past forty years have seen exponential increases in computer processing power accompanied by major technological developments such as the internet and mobile telephony. Smartphones, tablets and other computerized devices are now common means of interacting with people, consuming media, engaging with the core institutions in our societies and generally living out many aspects of everyday life. Google and Wikipedia are the first places that millions of people turn to when wanting to access information and find things out. These technologies alone have transformed the generation and communication of knowledge and, it follows, the ways in which learning and understanding take place. In all these ways, many important elements of education are now profoundly digital.

Of course, ‘education’ extends far beyond matters of learning and engaging with knowledge. In an organizational sense, digital technologies are now central to the ‘formal’ organization and governance of compulsory and post-compulsory education. Schools, colleges and universities operate along increasingly digital lines, while alternate forms of online education have emerged to complement and/ or compete with traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ institutions. Hundreds of millions of people are enrolled in online courses and other forms of virtual study. Billions of dollars are spent every year by state and federal governments on digital educational resources. National educational technology policies and initiatives are launched regularly by governments around the world, all striving to keep up with the demands of the digital age. What shall be referred to throughout this book as ‘digital education’ is entwined with matters of global economics and politics, as well as ongoing changes in what ‘counts’ as knowledge, skills and learning. All told, digital technology is an increasingly integral element of ‘education’ in the broadest sense.

On a day-to-day basis, however, the digital tends to be experienced as routine and unremarkable. Digital technologies are simply part of the way that we now ‘do’ education, as well as how education is ‘done’ to us. For many people, digital technologies have become a background feature of everyday education. Yet it is unwise to be blasé about the presence of digital technology in education settings. Beyond the immediate ‘education community’ of teachers, students, technology developers and other involved professionals, it is telling that policy-makers, industrialists and other influential actors usually frame digital technologies in education in dramatic terms of wide-scale change and reform. So rather than getting bogged down in prosaic discussions of how specific digital devices or applications might be used more effectively by teachers or schools, many people outside of education are keen to speculate in more ambitious terms. For instance, might digital technology do away with the need for teachers and schools altogether? Why should thousands of universities be funded to deliver different versions of what are essentially the same courses when the best professors can be beamed repeatedly to anywhere in the world? From this perspective, digital technology presents a fundamental challenge to everything that we have come to know as ‘education’ over the past hundred years or so. This book focuses on the ways in which this potential for radical change might actually be realized. To what extent is digital technology really changing education – and is this always in our best interests?’

To what extent is digital technology really changing education – and is this always in our best interests?’

Digital technology and education change

Most discussions about the uses of digital technologies in education are concerned with educational change. This is to be expected, as digital technologies tend to be associated with change across all areas of society. Very few people set out to use digital technology in order to do things in exactly the same ways as before. Instead, digital technologies are usually associated with doing things in cheaper, faster, more convenient, more exciting or more efficient ways. If not leading to changes for the better, then digital technologies tend to be implicated with detrimental change along the lines of ‘Google making us stupid’ or ‘text messaging making kids less literate’. Either way, it is common sense to align digital technologies with change and things being different. Indeed, digital technologies are perhaps best understood as ‘mediating’ non-digital processes and practices: making some new things possible while at the same time introducing new limitations and unintended consequences.

The potential of digital technologies to change education tends to be imagined along a spectrum ranging from modest improvement to wholesale revolution. At one level, digital technologies are celebrated as leading to distinct improvements in education. Often this relates to improving learning (e.g. making learning more social, ‘situated’ or ‘authentic’) or improving learners (e.g. getting them engaged, motivated or able to learn). Descriptions recur of technology ‘enhancing’, ‘enabling’, ‘assisting’, ‘supporting’ and ‘scaffolding’ learning. In a similar vein, digital technologies are also welcomed as expanding the capacity of teachers to teach, heightening the efficiency of educational institutions and increasing the relevance of education systems to the needs of society and economy. All told, a sense emerges of education being improved and upgraded while remaining essentially the same in terms of its institutions, organization and general ways of doing things.

Another heightened level of change, however, sees digital technologies associated with the transformation of educational processes and practices. This refers to a marked renewal and ‘shaking up’ of the nature and form of ‘education’. This shift in language implies a set of fundamental changes, such as courses being delivered online rather than face-to-face, people learning through playing games rather than being taught directly, and so on. Tellingly, these changes are sometimes described in language borrowed from the worlds of computer engineering and the IT industry. For example, the vernacular of software development is often used to indicate significant improvements in functionality. Thus we hear talk of ‘School 2.0’ and ‘Education 3.0’. Continuing this theme, some commentators talk of ‘upgrading’, ‘hacking’ or ‘rebooting’ education. All of these descriptions imply a recoding and re-scripting of the rules of education. The purposes of education are being renewed, with digital technology acting as a catalyst and a facilitator of these changes.

More extreme still is the idea that digital technologies are leading to wholesale revolution in education – suggesting an overthrowing of the established order and vested interests. This severity of change is more pronounced than the straightforward idea of ‘transformation’, implying a contentious, violent and bloody form of change. Indeed, ‘revolution’ conveys a sense of conflict, clashes of interests and ideologies, the overthrowing of established elites, the challenging of the status quo and the redistribution of power and control. Some of the main targets of this upheaval are dominant institutions such as ‘the school’ and ‘the university’, formal examination and qualification systems, national curricula and suchlike. Digital technology is also seen to destabilize the ‘education establishment’ of teachers, unions and academics, as well as government agencies and state institutions. In contrast, digital technology is framed as empowering previously marginalized groups: in particular, advancing the interests of individuals over institutions, parents over professionals, private markets over public sector monopolies and outsiders over insiders. With these kinds of technology-driven radical change, very little in education is expected ever to be the same again.

A digital ‘fix’ for a ‘broken’ system?

These changes tend to be discussed in confident and compelling ways. Thinking carefully about the language that is used to describe education and digital technology is a theme that recurs throughout this book. One of the most significant aspects of ‘digital education’ is its discursive nature. In other words, the values and meanings that are attached to the idea of digital education could be seen as just as significant as any actual use of digital technology. This certainly chimes with the ways in which digital education often is experienced ‘on the ground’. There has been, for example, little rigorous evidence produced over the past forty years of technology leading to the sustained improvement of teaching and learning. Similarly, most education institutions and systems certainly do not appear to be in the throes of full-scale revolt or even partial transformation. Much of the rhetoric of digital education has proven frustratingly difficult to substantiate. We are perhaps better off treating these descriptions of digital ‘revolution’, ‘transformation’ and ‘improvement’ as evocative and aspirational stories, rather than sober, objective and accurate descriptions of actual ongoing changes in education. The primary significance of these stories is what they tell us about wider hopes, fears, desires and expectations surrounding contemporary education – particularly in fast-changing technological, economic, political and demographic times. ‘Digital education’ is a potent space for voicing hopes and fears of what education might become in the near future. We would do well, therefore, to treat any overly confident assertions of digital change in a circumspect and sceptical manner.

In this spirit, it is worth paying attention to the prominent argument that digital technology is a ready ‘fix’ for education systems that are outmoded, no longer fit for purpose and generally ‘broken’. Over the past decade or so, the idea of technological ‘disruption’ of outmoded industries and business models has become one of the most familiar – and overused – ways to describe digital innovation. The internet, for example, is now presumed to be having a farreaching disruptive effect on many areas of society, from the newspaper industry to high street retailing. It certainly seems reasonable to question how much longer people will be prepared to pay for daily newspapers that are printed on paper and sold from news-stands. It is also reasonable to question people’s continued willingness to traipse to stores in the hope of purchasing goods that they then are expected to transport home. These are generally accepted to be ‘traditional’ industries and markets in the midst of substantial upheaval.

For many people, the idea of digital renewal is equally applicable to education. The Economist magazine recently turned its attention towards the ‘reinvention of the university’ and concluded bluntly: ‘The internet, which has turned businesses from newspapers through music to book retailing upside down, will upend higher education.’1 Similarly, as media commentator Jeff Jarvis has proclaimed, ‘[E]ducation is one of the institutions most deserving of disruption – and with the greatest opportunities to come of it.’2 To the unfamiliar eye these can come across as highly provocative propositions. These statements constitute a direct challenge to the institutionalization of education – most notably in the form of universities and schools, as well as state-run education systems and the bureaucratic agencies and organizations that surround them.

The Economist and Jarvis are by no means alone in voicing this concern. It is now common to hear mention of education as being ‘broken’, or an outmoded and obsolete product of a bygone era. People speak with exasperation of the ‘industrial era classroom’, the ‘factory model’ school, ‘ivory tower’ universities, and so on. Such descriptions are intended to convey a sense of the mismanagement of education by monolithic institutions that are profoundly undemocratic and archaic. These are lumbering organizations where ownership, control and power are concentrated unfairly in the hands of elites – be they vice chancellors and university professors, or school district superintendents, tenured teachers and their unions. Like many large administrations and bureaucracies, these are institutions that are believed to be unresponsive, incompetent, untrustworthy, ungrateful, self-serving and greedy.3 As such, these are institutions that clearly ‘deserve’ to be swept away.

Such arguments have understandably caught the attention of many people outside of education (as well as a fair number of people on the inside). As Martin Weller contends, the notion that ‘education isbroken’ has ‘become such an accepted standpoint that it is often stated as an irrefutable fact. . . . It is simply stated as a starting position, from which all else follows, a sine qua non of educational revolution.’4 At a push, such claims are sometimes specified in terms of a perceived lack of creativity in teaching approaches and curriculum content, entrenched problems with truancy rates, the so-called ‘school to prison pipeline’ and/or the financial unsustainability of higher education. Yet, regardless of these details, such prognoses tend to be advanced by interests outside of education wishing to promote alternative forms of education. This encompasses groups seeking the reform of education from the various perspectives of the free market, libertarianism, home-schooling, child-centred learning, and so on. While the motivations for making such claims might differ considerably, the logic is usually one of justifying some form of external intervention. As Weller observes, these are ‘manipulative’ accounts that imply that educators and education professionals cannot continue to be trusted. Instead, the presumed solution is for external agents to be allowed to make sweeping changes: ‘If something is diagnosed as broken, then the appropriate response is to fix it. The search then becomes for a solution, and very often those people who are determining education to be broken, also stand to profit from providing an alternative solution.’5

In many ways, such criticisms are difficult to wholly refute. The case can be easily made that the dominant educational institutions in our lives are ‘broken’. Let us take the recent plight of US education as one example.6 Here, despite spending more than most other countries on its schools (over $10,000 on each student per year), the United States languishes in the bottom half of international indictors when it comes to mathematics, science and reading ability. In addition to these indicators of stuttering learning quality, US schools can be criticized for their basic failure to see students through the system. Schools in the United States are notoriously porous. With an annual drop-out rate of 1.2 million students, the statistic is often cited of 7,000 students dropping out of US high schools for every day of the year (or one student for every twenty-six seconds). All told, it is reckoned that around one quarter of high school freshmen fail to graduate on time. Recently, much concern has been expressed over the 1,500 or so high schools across the country labelled as ‘drop-out factories’: that is, graduating less than 60 per cent of their students. Clearly not all schools are perfect, even in the world’s most advanced economies.

The situation is no better in post-compulsory education.7 On one hand, the United States spends more on higher education as a percentage of gross domestic product than almost any other nation: 2.6 per cent as opposed to 1.6 per cent in Australia and 1.3 per cent in the United Kingdom and Germany. On the other hand, drop-out rates are higher than in most other countries. Nearly half of US college students fail to graduate with a degree after six years at college or university. The privilege of university study burdens students with increasing levels of debt and everdwindling prospects of ‘graduate’-level employment. When presented in these terms, the product being offered by most universities is difficult to justify. As David Bromwich reflects:

[T]he price of a college education [is] so high that today on average it costs eleven times as much as it did in 1978. Underlying the anxiety about the worth of a college degree is a suspicion that old methods and the old knowledge will soon be eclipsed by technology. . . . A potent fear is that all but a few colleges and universities will soon be driven out of business.8

So, rather than patching up the same old institutions, systems and structures that we have always had, digital technology is associated increasingly with radical forms of educational innovation and upheaval. For many commentators, digital technologies are a means of shaking things up, sweeping away old regimes and reimagining and remaking education provision in forms fit for the twenty-first century. This may well sound like the type of extreme talk that appeals only to a radical fringe, but statements about digital ‘disruption’, ‘revolution’ and ‘reinvention’ are now beginning to pass into educational common sense. Yet as with all forms of common sense, rather than accepting these stories at face value, we would do well to take time to consider what is actually being argued for here. These are big ideas with big implications. Disruptive innovation’ and the digital fixing of education

It is useful to trace these popular sentiments about technology and education back to their origins in economics and business thinking. While it is not often mentioned by name, much of the recent educational talk about the disruption of education stems back to the writing of Clay Christensen on ‘disruptive innovation’. This describes the phenomenon of low-spec and relatively ordinary technologies being used to address emerging values, needs and desires not being catered for elsewhere. Often these simple applications and ideas might seem counter-intuitive or inferior in comparison to the current dominant, successful ways of doing things. Nevertheless, these disruptive innovations thrive on the basis of being able to successfully make products and services available to new populations previously not able to access them. Over time these niche ways of doing things with new populations take root and eventually expand into the established marketplace. This will then lower prices and force existing providers to change their ways or else go out of business.

More often than not, Christensen contends, well-established institutions will ignore new innovation as long as it falls outside of their existing ‘value networks’: that is, what is required to continue to compete successfully against current competitors. Instead, these institutions will focus most attention on what he calls ‘sustaining innovations’: things that have helped them historically succeed and sustain the attributes that have grown to be most valued in their market. Big organizations are understandably most interested in innovations that allow them to get ‘incrementally bigger, more powerful and more efficient’9 at the things that they already do. In the meantime, new innovators such as small ‘start-up’ firms and entrepreneurs will emerge – all able and willing to inhabit different value networks and cater for ‘non-consumers’ who could not otherwise access traditional forms of the service. Every so often, one of these alternative ways of doing things will expand until the point that they can invade and ‘disrupt’ the existing established marketplace. As Christensen puts it, ‘Eventually the quality becomes just good enough for the established customers to flock to it.’10 At this point, the new market and new value network become the norm, and the best that older institutions can do is attempt to play catch-up. Then, the disruption is complete.

A much-cited example of disruptive innovation in the digital age has been the impact of Wikipedia on the encyclopaedia business. Who could have predicted that the market for information reference books could be reshaped around values of community authorship, the wisdom of crowds rather than the word of individual experts, constantly changing content, online publishing rather than bound volumes, and all produced on a non-profit basis? More pointedly, who could have foreseen that after 2010 Encyclopaedia Britannica would cease to publish a print edition? Why, then, should education be any different?

The appeal of the digital fix

Many people anticipate the digital disruption of education over the next ten years or so along similar lines to the printed encyclopaedia business. One can certainly see why this might be a welcome proposition. First, there is much to be disgruntled about when it comes to the current state of education. Clearly, school and university systems are not ‘working’ as well as they might. Similarly, many students, teachers, parents and employers are undoubtedly being let down by their education systems. It would certainly seem that a strong case exists for rethinking education from the ground upwards. As Todd Hixon argued with regard to the US university system:

Higher Ed has a product that does not work, ridiculous costs, and an antiquated business model. For many years we accepted this because we see extraordinary value in education. Now, most middle and upper-middle class parents find they cannot give their children the education they enjoyed. Technology has recently put a spark to this fuel: on-line education works and dramatically improves costs and access. This is a big opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors.11

Second, the disruption thesis certainly goes a long way towards explaining the long-standing ‘no show’ of much educational technology innovation from the 1970s to the present day. As was implied earlier, one of the great conundrums of educational technology over the past forty years or so has been its relative lack of impact. Of course, technology-related changes to education have abounded at a superficial level. Yet for the most part, the essence of education has remained the same: punctuated by an entrenched ‘grammar’ of doing things that reinforces the notion of the expert ‘teacher’ and the regulation of time, space and place, alongside the routines of curriculum and pedagogy, and rituals of assessment and credentializing. Throughout this time it has been difficult to look beyond the diagnosis offered by educational historian Larry Cuban at the beginning of the 1990s when he observed bluntly that ‘computer meets classroom, classroom wins’.12 Looking at the persistence of the school classroom set-up with the teacher positioned front-of-stage, or the continued reliance in most universities on the large-scale lecture, it is easy to see why people frequently still feel driven to trot out variations on the cliché that ‘the classroom of today has changed little from the classroom of one hundred years ago’.

The disruptive innovation thesis offers a neat way around this inconvenient truth of the ‘no significant difference’ of educational technology. The idea of disruptive innovation offers the justification that most of these previous efforts were ‘sustaining innovations’ that stood little chance of altering the fundamental inefficiencies of the educational status quo. In contrast, the notion of digital disruption offers a new way of thinking about education and technology-driven change. Genuine disruption involves rethinking the very nature of education: its activities and relationships, as well as its core purposes and values. Genuine disruption is not about using technology to do the same things differently, but using technology to do fundamentally different things. This might involve engaging previously uninvolved or excluded people in educational activities, offering different products and services, striving for different outcomes, opening up new markets and finding new value. Genuine disruption requires interest groups and innovators from outside of the educational establishment to get involved in education provision. To evoke another common buzzword of recent times, digital technology is now finally beginning to act as a ‘game changer’.

The inevitable digital change of education – reasons to be cautious

These are understandably exciting claims, yet they are best approached with caution and even suspicion. Surely such changes cannot be totally inevitable or wholly beneficial? At this point we need to look past the blind spot that many people appear to have developed when it comes to technology and education. Instead we need to think more carefully and critically about education and the digital. As such, we need to acknowledge a number of home truths to take forward into subsequent chapters of this book.

First and foremost, we need to recognize that all these claims of ‘fixing’, ‘disrupting’ and ‘game changing’ are being made for a reason. These are not value-free extrapolations of neutral technological innovation. Instead, any confident claim of imminent digital change is usually linked to wider agendas, beliefs and interests about education reform and broader societal change. Second – and to sharpen the focus of this initial observation – we need to recognize the corporate, commercial and economically driven nature of much of the prevailing talk of disruption and deinstitutionalization. The presence of corporate interests and commercial values in education is not necessarily a bad thing. Yet history suggests that business ideals, market values and the pursuit of profit often do not translate smoothly into education.

Third, history also reminds us that nothing is certain when it comes to technological change. From tackling drug addiction through to reducing highway accidents, there is rarely a neat, quick ‘technical fix’ for any societal problem.13 This is particularly the case with education. Larry Cuban neatly demonstrated this in his book Teachers and Machines, which provided an expert review of the classroom failure of twentieth-century ‘killer apps’. From the filmstrip of the 1910s through to educational radio of the 1930s and instructional television of the 1960s, the muchanticipated ‘impact’ of these technologies was almost always the same. Cuban details a ‘strikingly uniform pattern of occasional teacher use’ with the ‘best ideas somehow los[ing] their vitality’, resulting only in an ‘anemic version of the original dream’.14 While many educational changes arose from the use of these technologies, these were often not the changes that reformers and policy-makers were hoping for.

Finally, we need to remember that neither technological change nor educational change is a matter of ‘common sense’. Indeed, alarm bells should start to ring as soon as anything is presented as being inevitable. Technological change is a complex process, and education is nowhere near as straightforward as these discourses of disruption would suggest. Any digital ‘solution’ in education is almost always accompanied by a number of unintended consequences, secondary effects and longer-term shifts. These are all issues that require much more scrutiny and critique.

Conclusions

This chapter has developed two broad contentions. First, digital education is undeniably a ‘big deal’. Substantial changes are afoot that no-one in education can afford to ignore. Second, however, is the need to remain as dispassionate and circumspect as possible, and set about asking suitably critical questions. Despite all the chatter and noise to the contrary, this is an area where few things are certain and where there rarely are simple answers or predetermined narratives waiting to unfold. The ideas of digital improvement/transformation/disruption of education clearly require problematizing: that is, taking a step back from them and not taking them at face value. From now onwards we need to be inherently sceptical of the claims made about technology and education. This involves asking difficult questions of how digital technologies are actually finding a place in educational settings and educational contexts.

As Sonia Livingstone puts it, problematizing the place of technology in education involves three basic lines of inquiry: What is really going on? How can this be explained? How could things be otherwise?15 Continuing in the spirit of asking straightforward but challenging questions of technology and education, we might want to add some more specific concerns:

What is actually new here?

What are the unintended consequences or secondorder effects?

What are the potential gains? What are the potential losses?

What underlying values and agendas are implicit?

In whose interests does this work? Who benefits in what ways?

What are the social problems that digital technology is being presented as a solution to?

How responsive to a ‘digital fix’ are these problems likely to be?

As the remainder of this book goes on to demonstrate, questions such as these make for insightful and involved discussions of the implications that digital technologies actually have for education. If we genuinely are concerned with improving education in the near future, then we now need to start asking these questions in earnest.

Notes

1. The Economist (2014) ‘Creative destruction’, The Economist, 28 June (www.economist.com/news/leaders/21605906-cost-crisis-changing-labour-markets-and-new-technology-will-turn-old-institution-its).

2. Jeff Jarvis (2009) What would Google do? New York: Harper-Collins, p. 201.

3. Stephen Downes (2010) ‘Deinstitutionalizing education’, Huffington Post, 2 November (www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-downes/deinstitutionalizing-educ_b_777132.html).

4. Martin Weller (2015) ‘MOOCs and the Silicon Valley narrative’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1(5) (jime.open.ac.uk/jms/article/view/jime.am/558).

5. Martin Weller (2015)

6. DoSomething.org (2015) ‘High school dropout rates’ (www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-high-school-dropout-rates).

7. John Etchemendy (2013) ‘Are our colleges and universities failing us?’, Higher Education Reporter, 27 December (higheredreporter. carnegie.org/are-our-colleges-and-universities-failing-us/).

8. David Bromwich (2014) ‘The hi-tech mess of higher education’, New York Review of Books, 14 August (www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/aug/14/hi-tech-mess-higher-education/).

9. Jeff Howe (2013) ‘Clayton Christensen wants to transform