Decoding Technology Acceptance in Education

A Cultural Studies Contribution

Caroline Stockman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315397443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Tecnología educativa

The process of integrating technology into education often overlooks that technology is a sign; it is not a neutral message conveyor, but rather a material artefact placed into a context inevitably subject to culture. In an original and novel combination, Decoding Technology Acceptance in Education brings together two academic domains not previously pursued together, yet which diverge in many ways: cultural studies and technology acceptance studies.

Drawing on empirical data, Stockman demonstrates that teachers activate a meaning-making process through encoding and decoding signs around technology as an artefact of culture, and as a result their acceptance behaviour and decisions rely on the dynamics of the cultural whole to which they belong. In this study, technology acceptance is revisited as an issue of cultural negotiation; the common approach, which provides an instrumental view on technology as a neutral tool, is insufficient for the topic of technology acceptance. Rather than proposing yet another model of technology acceptance, Decoding Technology Acceptance in Education offers a renewed frame of mind and the conclusions it provides are of vital importance to the theoretical and practical advancement of technology acceptance studies, as well as to the practical integration of technology into education.

Providing original empirical evidence for the influence of culture on educational decision-making, the book raises awareness for the importance of cultural research in areas where it has been under-considered. This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of technology acceptance and technology use in education, as well as those interested in cultural studies.

1 Cultural studies

Through an eclectic but purposeful selection of themes, a Cultural Studies perspective comes forward which inspires a particular appreciation for the topic of technology acceptance in education. In this way, the chapter will serve as a positioning of this book in a domain which will be at once recognisable yet diffuse. More importantly, these themes begin to draw up a theoretical framework which is different to the traditional approach in technology acceptance research. It leads the way into a new framework for this topic, a new way of decoding technology acceptance in education.

1.1 A brief history

Trying to define Cultural Studies is “risky business” (Grossberg, 2010: 7). It is a difficult matter to reach a solid definition of culture, or the field of research surrounding it. Even debates in notation continue: culture or Culture, ‘cultural studies are’ or ‘Cultural Studies is’? There is not (yet) a fixed field of theory or practice (nor should there be one, perhaps). In the editorial statement for the journal Cultural Studies, it is aptly summarised as follows: “Those of us working in cultural studies find ourselves caught between the need to define and defend its specificity and the desire to resist closure” (Grossbergand Radway, 1995: iv).

One way to understand present-day Cultural Studies is through its early roots.

These lie partly in early anthropological work. Ruth Benedict’s publication Patterns of Culture in 1934 shows a revived aim for systematic understanding of culture in its title. ‘The pattern’ gives consistent (but not unchanging) meaning and purpose to people’s actions, providing a basis on which to evaluate new actions and thoughts. She advocated the idea that cultures are “articulated wholes” (p. 49) rather than a collection of traits with no consideration for the underlying web of meaning. In this sense, technology acceptance behaviour is subject to an arc of choices, as Benedict described it. A person may use it, not use it, use it in a different way than intended, and so on. This is aligned with a pattern which is existing and limiting, because it pre-defined its possibility against a framework of beliefs.

The anthropological publications were picked up by sociologists such as Talcott Parsons (1964), who redefined culture as the system of norms and values that regulate social action symbolically, in contrast to ‘the social system’ which describes units of social interaction, particularly focused on status and role. For example, technology acceptance studies may find that more men than women, more children than adults, more highly educated versus less highly educated people use a certain technology. It doesn’t go a long way in understanding why these social groups adhere to the use of technology more than others. In contrast, Toledo et al. (2015) investigated the acceptance of violent video games in relation to the acceptance of rape myths in a population of Hispanic high school students in Chicago. This relation was found to be gender dependent. That only makes sense when taking wider beliefs about the traditional gender roles and expectations, in this particular time and place, into account. It also shows how the technology in itself contributes to the meaning-making process (which will be revisited later on in this chapter). In his critical paper on the state of TA research at the time, Richard Bagozzi, a key theorist in that field, identified that these dynamics had been underrepresented (2007: 247). His paper shows a renegotiation of what matters in the research; not the mere social stimuli, but internalised, shared values and a bigger picture.

These theoretical shifts are illustrative in their impartiality of wording, which refers to a more fitting culturally relativist approach as opposed to earlier, normative views expressed, for example, by Matthew Arnold (1869). Today, his definition of culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said’ is still very much alive. But, as Stuart Hall (1997), one of Britain’s most prominent Cultural Studies thinkers, points out, this is only one aspect of the today’s threefold understanding of culture. Another understanding encompasses to the whole of human activities in music, art, architecture, literature, cooking, clothing, … surpassing the normative distinction of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Culture is ordinary, as Raymond Williams said in 1958. So something as everyday as technology and its related behaviour patterns are culture, too. In this vitally important article, Williams also influenced yet another understanding: culture as the shared meanings of a people, the distinctness of their reality and the signs they produce in that framework. Not just the visible layers of expression, but more significantly “a sense of culture as a common resource of meaning” (Williams, 1958: 91). Another foundational text for Cultural Studies published a year earlier: The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart, a critique of popular (mass media) culture and its relation to working class. He re-emphasises meaning, but also the focus on the lived experience, shaping social practice in everyday behaviour in a certain group of people, a time and place. The past as such is not the focal point. The past is only relevant in its present-day meaning-making effect, a gateway to understanding the present. For example, Schulte (2013) retraces the (now historical!) meaning-making of ‘the internet’ in order to decode its present-day cultural construction. Since Malinowski, a contemporary of Benedict, the main concern is living culture – the present, in other words. It is true that technology acceptance research is often focused on new technology, as business interests drive insight in current and future customer markets, and engineers need those immediate design lessons to take technology ‘to the next level’. However, product development can benefit greatly from revisiting older forms of technology and studying their uptake. For example, there are not many present-day studies on the acceptance process regarding language labs. It would be meaningful to investigate the narrative on this technology when they first became popular, which is now decades ago. Such understanding would shed new light on their present-day situation, which is strained due to new teaching and learning beliefs. Such monitoring of products throughout their lifecycle is key in business.

Similarly, Cultural Studies research is only concerned with the future in so far that it provides deeper insight into the present. In other words, it aims for a sort of “presentism” (During, 2007: 61). Understanding a person’s vision of the future may help to understand their actions today. This vision is made explicit through metaphors, visual abstractions, projections, expressed hopes and wishes, images of fear and utopias. In 1961, Bell wrote “Will Robots Teach Your Children?” This echoes the worry over the possibility of a dehumanised future, in relation to the development of ‘the teaching machines’ which gained popularity in the early 1960s – one notable example being that of B. F. Skinner.

All this closely relates to what E. B. Tylor had in mind when he wrote Primitive Culture in 1871. He viewed culture (singular, not plural) as pre-defined stages of development. By mapping historical developments, we would be able to understand a civilisation’s present-day position. There was a purpose to this, given that he wrote against the background of the industrial revolution, with the British Empire as a dominant global force. The study of culture is to him “a reformer’s science” (p. 410): to continue encouraging that development. The political project of Cultural Studies is still alive today. It aims to unravel the current situation, and by doing so, “make visible other trajectories into other futures” (Grossberg, 2010: 57). It is not about establishing predictive models, but rather about taking up a political (perhaps moral or ethical) responsibility on the way forward. Later on in this book, that imperative will become particularly pressing regarding educational technology.

Theoretical influences from structuralism in the 1970s shifted the focus of research from anthropological analysis towards semiotics. The typical interest in the disconnection between the message sent and the message received is a clear identifier of Cultural Studies research. Though the territory has expanded, the current focus on the dynamics of meaning continued to be forwarded by British research, in particular by Stuart Hall, who laid some of the foundations in his text Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973). Cultural Studies, more so than anthropology or sociology, is about meanings and meaning generation. For technology acceptance studies, this is a vital perspective. As Streeter (2010) or Schulte (2013) demonstrate, the meaning of the internet is not determined by some inherent utopian or dystopian trait. It is a cultural construction; an intricate, messy, ever changing, but nonetheless productive and powerful one.

Next to this, Marxist ideas replenished attention to power relations (for example in the ideology critiques by Louis Althusser, or thoughts on hegemony by Antonio Gramsci, or the idea of the cultural industry by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer). Today, Cultural Studies often distinguishes itself from other domains by this tendency to provide power critiques in their analyses. An example is Hall’s critique of the Thatcher government and how its complex articulation of power, for example through language, instated a wider sociopolitical culture (in: McRobbie, 2005: 3). Cultural Studies, from this respect, accepts the world as one of political motivations and influential movements. It takes those dynamics into account in its research, and consciously positions itself in that larger framework while doing so. Technology is never an isolated force. It is solidly part of society, with all its dynamics of power and meaning. Foucault’s work is certainly relevant here. Technology in education is not just about the technology. It’s about the demands of the educational system, the wider sociopolitical implications, the economy, the ‘norm’ and the ‘normal’. Deleuze (1992) reiterates this in Postscript on the Societies of Control. In his view, the current educational emphasis on employability would be a prime example. The crisis manifests itself in that it has been given the illusion of freedom under yoke of a new, pervasive system of domination: to be employable (in a capitalist society). Knowing how to work with technology is part of that. The motivation to use technology for learning and teaching acquires a new dimension, one that technology acceptance research cannot afford to miss.

Partly due to novelty of the subject, and partly due to its affinity with a general domain not clearly delineated, ‘digital cultural studies’ has not been unequivocally established. Unlike technology acceptance research, it has not known a long tradition with clear influences and phases (yet). The topic of digital culture, and its research within Cultural Studies, is simply described as a collection of ‘tendencies’ (Hand, 2008: 2; Miller, 2011). Of course, the shifting emphases of interdisciplinary studies don’t benefit clear delineations. Introductory handbooks and overviews of Cultural Studies typically struggle to give this subdomain its rightful place. Even recent and popular readers of Cultural Studies only devote somewhat limited attention to the topic, if not absent entirely. However, its nature and methodology are not different; the novelty of its topics is what creates a slight peculiarity, perhaps. Much like a newly identified field of ‘Digital Humanities’ has emerged in the more general domain of humanities research. It still carries that sense of ‘otherness’, where it should be a natural option in the wider field.

Digital Cultural Studies as a research domain “is often about the rather uneasy alliances” (Hand, 2008: 1) between digital and analogue objects, practices and processes, or the confrontation of technology and society in a broader sense. As always, Cultural Studies questions how technology is interpreted, how the meaning of certain pre-existing signs or practices can influence those interpretations, and how the underlying streams of influence shift and crash as culture changes. For example, many art galleries and museums consider placing at least part of their collection online. This raises questions of authenticity in experience of art, the meaning of going to Tate Britain and standing in front of Millais’s Ophelia. Art and “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”, as Walter Benjamin (1936) describes it almost nostalgically.

The topic of digital culture today found its origins in the conceptual designs of a computer by Alan Turing in the late 1930s, hypertext by Vannevar Bush in the mid-1940s (though the term ‘hypertext’ was coined in 1963 by Ted Nelson), and the idea of the internet partly developed in a series of memos by J.C.R. Licklider at MIT in the 1960s. As these new media claimed their place in society, medium theory and communication studies found them readily available for analysis. Marshall McLuhan was one of the first key thinkers in this respect. In his 1964 publication Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he draws attention to the nature of the medium as crucial to the meaning-making process in culture. Though McLuhan developed his theory as applicable to any medium or ‘extension of man’, such as clothing, for example, his work has echoed powerfully through digital culture research to date. When Wired magazine was first published in 1993, McLuhan was named as their patron saint (Meyrowitz, 2001: 9). More recent cornerstones of medium theory are provided by Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin (1999), Lisa Gitelman (2006), Henri Jenkins (2006) and of course Lev Manovich (2001). Next to issues in medium theory, a branch of research focuses specifically on wider effects of the digital age, as for example done by Manuel Castells (1996). His work is illustrative for the interest in, and critique of, power relations in Cultural Studies – as explained above. Power defines the limits of our horizon, because it normalises practices. We accept education as it is – although it can be anything. Reality is never fixed and it is always constructed. But often we do perceive it to be fixed, and ourselves as powerless against an invisible force which ‘makes it so’. But power is not infallible. Sometimes it fails the system which it aims to protect. It is the core effort of Cultural Studies to highlight those moments, and take a stance in its political re-design. That, indeed, is significant for this study – as this book will show.

1.2 Signs and mediation

Our cultural practices produce a symbolic realm of formal expressions. These can be words, pictures, sounds, gestures. They convey a message to others. To communicate, the exchange of signs becomes crucial. But signs do not refer to themselves – they signify particular meanings. In other words, the user of a sign system encodes a meaning into some kind of outward manifestation. In order to reach that layer of communication, a sign and their arrangements need to be decoded by the receiver – the sign unravelled for its meaning.

One sign in a school is the ‘marking’ of all people. For example, an existing UK secondary education provider for 11- to 18-year-olds provides a green ribbon for teachers to wear around their neck, with their electronic keycard attached to it. This card shows their picture, name, and particular job in the school. Students wear a similar ribbon in different colours according to the year they’re in. Visitors get a bright red ribbon, with the word ‘VISITOR’ clearly displayed on the paper card. This is not an isolated example; all schools use these visual and linguistic signs in marking every person clearly. There is no ‘rejection’ or ‘yes but’ reaction, because everyone is decoding the signs according to that same, established interpretation. An outsider coming into the school, perhaps a new visitor, may not understand the sign system completely (“What does a green ribbon mean?”).

In Stuart Hall’s much discussed text Encoding, Decoding (1973), he reviews this process. Encoding and decoding rely on a shared interpretation, for the message to be understood in the way it was intended. However, there is scope for reinterpretation or alternative understandings to emerge. According to him, there are three ways of understanding a message. The first, to accept it, confirm and agree with its meaning (‘yes’). The second, to confirm but not completely agree (‘yes but’) – a negotiated meaning. The third, to take an oppositional position. This is called ‘rejection’.

Interview extract 1

GLADYS: “I was in a school the other day and they didn’t have whiteboards, well not the interactive ones, and I just didn’t know … how to do it, to be honest. Or well, all my resources, I used to have flashcards and all the pictures and things, they’re just gone, you know. They’re so out of date”.

Gladys is a German teacher in a rurally located, girls-only independent boarding school. Surrounded by green fields and within walking distance of an idyllic English village, it provides a home and secondary education for approximately 400 girls from the age of 11 onwards. She is the oldest and most experienced teacher in the department. She decodes ‘flashcards and pictures’ as a sign of outdated teaching. Consequently, she rejects their use.

Yet depending on their use, PowerPoint slides are arguably not so dissimilar to flashcards and pictures. Lucille, a French teacher in a busy London college, illustrates this: “I always used to feel, when they [classroom visitors] came in, if I didn’t have anything up on the projector, if there was nothing up there, that I would be marked down, ‘oh she hasn’t prepared her lesson properly, she’s got nothing on the screen, there’s no PowerPoint, there’s no …’ I always used to feel like that”. Lucille used to work in a school with a pervasive observation culture. It is common practice for heads and management to come into classrooms and follow (part of) lessons, or school inspectors, teaching interns, colleagues, and so on. In Lucille’s view, having PowerPoint slides to project during a lesson will be decoded as good teaching. Not having this would imply she had not prepared her teaching properly and would therefore have a negative effect on her job evaluation. So her use of technology was led by a purposeful selection of signs to influence the outwardly perception. This shows how encoding/decoding is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Cultural studies
• 2 Technology acceptance studies
• 3 Renegotiating research beliefs
• 4 Mixing methods
• 5 Technology in UK education culture
• 6 Conclusions
• Index