Education and Technology – the conjunction of two non-neutral instruments!

Posted on | January 28, 2006 | 3 Comments

The relationship between education and technology is complex and certain traits that they share can, when brought together, lead as readily to delight as to disaster. Both can be used to enhance life or to blight it.

Education should certainly be about transformation, about extending human horizons, and about realizing personal and social potential. We know, however, that education has too often been used to maintain the status quo, to affirm social station and to protect and reinforce the prevailing economic condition without reference to the interests of the individual.

Technology, too, should be about transformation. We have used tools since the dawn of humanity to make our world a better place in which to live. Equally, we know that we have used technology to kill, to control, to damage our world and to render passive those at the sharp end (often literally) of the technology.

It is clear that neither education nor technology is a neutral instrument. It is clearer still that, when we bring education and technology together, we had better be very clear as to our purpose in their conjunction. We have to know what we want to achieve from education, and we have to know how we believe technology can be exploited [how less a neutral term can one find?] to the benefit of those being educated. To bring them together without a clear understanding of our reasons for doing so runs the risk of, at best, a set of arbitrary and unforeseen outcomes, or, at worst, a situation in which the technology itself defines how, and what, learning might take place.

The risk of technological determinism, where the technology shapes what we do rather than where we shape what the technology does, is greatest when we are considering the benefits or otherwise of some of the most powerful technologies yet devised, namely the information and communication technologies (ICT). That these technologies are now pervasive is merely to state the obvious. They are so deeply embedded in our cultural, social and economic structures that almost anything we do now brings us into contact, knowingly or otherwise, with ICT. The very omnipresence of ICT can lead to a general acceptance that it simply “is” and that we should accept without question the position and the power of these technologies in our lives.

And yet, despite the pervasiveness of ICT, there is still a deep-seated and general ambivalence about the benefits and utility of the technology, an ambivalence that is reflected strongly in the education community itself. This, in itself, might be no bad thing, but amongst teachers and others involved in education, views about the place of ICT seem to be scattered along a complex continuum that starts at total indifference and ends in fervent evangelism. It cannot be a simple continuum because somewhere in that gamut we have to be able to locate, on the one hand, antipathy, scepticism, fear and loathing, and on the other hand, delight, gullibility, zeal and obsession.

Why should this be so? The reasons, of course, are as complicated as the continuum itself and are a reflection of the complexity of the views held generally in society. The ideal attitude to ICT in schools should be typified by a combination of the constructive and the sceptical. The doubting optimist is the ideal. Indifference or hostility is, I believe, damaging to the future of our education system in Scotland. Equally, however, the unquestioning evangelist can cause detriment to education – the attitude that ICT is, by its very nature, a good thing for teaching and learning is to fall precisely into the trap of technological determinism.

Teachers do not necessarily see challenges in every opportunity – they often simply see the problems, and rightly so! The uneven application of ICT in our schools over the past 20 years and more has done little to persuade the hard-working teacher that it offers something that can transform the way they teach and learning can happen. As a result, where ICT has been implemented, it has too often been used simply to support existing practices. As Stephen Heppell has noted on more than one occasion:
“…we continually make the error of subjugating technology to our present practice rather than allowing it to free us from the tyranny of past mistakes…”
Unfortunately, too few teachers have yet been given the conditions and the levels of support that would allow them to begin to explore the “dark side of change” that many believe ICT will inevitably foster. What are these conditions?

The first is connectedness. Kit, broadband, tools for collaboration, stuff. Authentication? Knowing to whom you are connected is rather important.
The second condition is time and trust: the time to play, explore, and the trust of headteachers and managers that teachers will put their time to effective use. Free of an irrelevant curricular straightjacket.

The third condition is security and safety: teachers, as you would expect, take the safety of their students very seriously indeed.

The final condition, and for me possibly the most important, is universality. Every single teacher and student must be part of this vision – if it is done piecemeal it is not being done at all, in reality.

Scotland is as good a place as any to start this process, and the Scottish Schools Digital Network (SSDN) is an attempt to do just this at a truly national level.

With these conditions starting to be met in Scotland, we have the opportunity to bring education and technology together in a truly transformational union. We must avoid any possibility of technological determinism, but not as simple as saying “learning must come first” – the relationship of education and technology, and especially the information technologies is a dialectic.

Category: education, politics, technology

Comments

3 Responses to “Education and Technology – the conjunction of two non-neutral instruments!”

John Connell: the blog » Blog Archive » Feynman and the non-neutrality of science
September 24th, 2006 @ 7:48 pm

[...] Feynman’s interest here is in the moral choice that has to made in order to use science for good or ill. In other words, science (as I have mentioned before in relation to other human devices such as education and technology) is not a neutral instrument either. It can be used, has been used, for the good of humanity or of the world we live in, and against the interests of humanity and of our world. [...]
John Connell: the blog » Blog Archive » Thought Leadership…
October 17th, 2006 @ 7:13 am

[...] Gerry White has made it clear that he doesn’t regard the Global Summit as a conference in the normal sense: the aim is to stimulate discussion with real depth and breadth across a range of critical issues around our ‘technology connected futures’! And the use of the plural ‘futures’ is important (as it is in my role title) because we need to recognise that there is no single, identifiable future for that conjunction of education and technology that is an issue that is very close to my own heart. [...]
John Connell: the blog » Blog Archive » Human Capital and Human Capacity
March 1st, 2007 @ 2:59 pm

[...] Of course, there has always been an instrumental view of education – but it seems to me, looking around the world, that the instrumentality is different in kind today. A key factor in its current manifestation is, of course, the expanding role for technology in teaching and learning, as well as in the administration and management of education. As I have discussed before, neither education nor technology is a neutral instrument – each can be used for good or ill, and certainly each can be used to serve particular agendas, whether educational or economic or political in nature. [...]