Rethinking Learning in an Age of Digital Fluency

Is being digitally tethered a new learning nexus?

Maggi Savin-Baden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317514411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"This is a book that I am going to have to own, and will work to find contexts in which to recommend. It cuts obliquely through so many important domains of evidence and scholarship that it cannot but be a valuable stimulus" -Hamish Macleod, University of Edinburgh

Digital connectivity is a phenomenon of the 21st century and while many have debated its impact on society, few have researched relationship between the changes taking place and the actual impact on learning. Rethinking Learning in an Age of Digital Fluency examines what kind of impact an increasingly connected environment is having on learning and what kind of culture it is creating within learning settings.

Engagement with digital media and navigating through digital spaces with ease is something that many young people appear to do well, although the tangible benefits of this are unclear. This book, therefore, will present an overview of current research and practice in the area of digital tethering, whilst examining how it could be used to harness new learning and engagement practices that are fit for the modern age. Questions that the book also addresses include:

• 
  
  

• Is being digital tethered a new learning nexus?

• 
  
  

• Are social networking sites spaces for co-production of knowledge and spaces of inclusive learning?

• 
  
  

• Are students who are digitally tethered creating new learning maps and pedagogies?

• 
  
  

• Does digital tethering enable students to use digital media to create new learning spaces?

This fascinating and at times controversial text engages with numerous aspects of digital learning amongst undergraduate students including mobile learning, individual and collaborative learning, viral networking, self-publication and identity dissemination. It will be of enormous interest to researchers and students in education and educational psychology.

1

USEFUL TETHERING?

Introduction

This book aims to explore the impact of digital tethering on learning in education, illustrate its benefits and distractions on student engagement, and delineate strategies for managing it to enhance digital learning and digital fluency across the education sector. It will be argued that digital connectivity is a phenomenon of the twenty-first century, and while many have debated its impact on society, few have researched its impact on learning. It will present an overview of current research and practice in this area thus far.

This chapter will begin by setting out the argument of the book as a whole, present different types of digital tethering and then examine contexts in which digital tethering is currently in evidence.

Digital tethering

This is defined as both a way of being and a set of practices that are associated with it. Being digitally tethered is generally associated with carrying, wearing or holding a device that enables one to be constantly and continually in touch with digital media of whatever kind. Practices associated with digital tethering include being ‘always on’, ‘always engaged’, texting at dinner, or driving illegally while ‘Facebooking’.

It remains unclear as to whether digital tethering and (too much) digital influence are resulting in learning and engagement imbalances. Students might be spending too much time in virtual spaces or distracting each other via messaging in lectures. Alternatively, young people might be over-influenced by virtual realties and immersive virtual worlds. The difficulty with all of these concerns and interesting virtual spaces is that we are largely unsure of their impact: we do not know whether too much fuss is being made about them or whether digital media really are affecting students’ engagement, learning and concentration. This chapter will explore how digital tethering could be seen as harnessing new learning and engagement practices that are fit for an age of digital fluency.

The argument …

With the increasing use of technology across home, work and school, most of us are digitally tethered. Across the media there has been considerable criticism about schoolchildren’s use of mobile devices, along with anecdotes across education about students being continually distracted by technology. Nevertheless, it is unclear if this is all unnecessary worry and media hype, or if the notion of technological determinism really does have some currency. Thus, there are questions to be asked about the value and impact of digital tethering, and it is vital that university staff consider these issues.

There are still many university staff and schoolteachers who are concerned about technological determinism: the idea that those who have grown up in the digital age are necessarily different from their predecessors and that their persistent ‘connectivity’ is damaging them. Buckingham argues:

From this perspective, technology is seen to emerge from a neutral process of scientific research and development rather than from the interplay of complex social, economic and political forces. Technology is then seen to have effects – to bring about social and psychological changes – irrespective of the way it is used, and of the social contexts and processes into which it enters … [T]he computer is seen as an autonomous force that is somehow independent of human society, and acts upon it from outside.

(Buckingham, 2007: 17–18)

Although there continue to be debates and discussion, more recent research suggests that young people (ages twelve to eighteen) and university students are aware of the impact and the dangers (as well as the value) of technology in their lives. Perhaps instead there needs to be an appreciation of ‘useful tethering’: tethering that can be harnessed for learning and engagement. This in turn will mean that staff will become new pedagogical designers who are ‘wizards of brinkmanship’ (Turkle, 2005: 21), creating and managing liquid and complex curricula for the twenty-first century.

Digital tethering would seem to offer students choices about how they use information, how they share it with others (or not), whether they learn together or apart, and how they support each other in ways that current classroom practices often prevent or discourage. Nevertheless, there is still negativity about digital tethering, despite research that defies this. This book argues that:

1. As yet, there is little research which enables us to understand the impact of being tethered both to technology and to people, educationally or sociologically.

2. Many of the opinions and arguments presented to date are unnecessarily negative and fail to examine the positive effects of being digitally tethered.

3. Although research has been undertaken into the impact of multitasking (including being interrupted by texting), it is unclear what kind of impact, if any, digital tethering is having on formal and informal learning.

4. There is little research or understanding about the extent to which capabilities developed through digital tethering are transferred to or have an impact on formal learning settings.

5. There is an absence of educational policy or institutional positioning about the value (or not) and impact of digital tethering.

6. There is little recognition that what young people do with digital media (text, audio, video and graphics that are electronically transmitted over the internet or computer networks) and digital knowledge (an informed understanding of the power and impact of digital media) will have a considerable impact on work, society and lifewide learning.

7. As yet, it is unclear why some young people are highly tethered whilst others are not tethered at all.

8. It is unclear whether digital tethering is a problem, or whether it just allows for different forms of interrogation: students choose which games to play and decide if the media, such as apps, are any good.

The story so far

Engaging with digital media and slipping through digital spaces with ease are things that many (young) people appear to do well, although the benefits of such proficiency are unclear. Using mobile phones for communication, searching and catching up with missed programmes or popular YouTube clips is commonplace, and Eynon (2009) has reported that 82 per cent of learners in the UK live in internet-connected homes (rising to 84 per cent in 2014).

Despite the widespread use of digital media, there remains a strong determinist stance that has been promoted and popularized by Prensky (2001) and affirmed further by Tapscott (2008), whereby it is argued that those who have grown up in a digital age are necessarily different and that ‘connectivity’ is damaging to students. Similarly, Turkle (2005: 14) has argued: ‘The dramatic changes in computer education over the past decades leave us with serious questions about how we can teach our children to interrogate simulations in much the same spirit. The specific questions may be different, but the intent needs to be the same: to develop habits of readership appropriate to a culture of simulation.’ Her argument remained much the same in 2011 (Turkle, 2011a, 2011b). Despite these opinions, Rideout et al. (2010) have found that engagement with digital media has increased significantly across all groups and that highly educated households are beginning to engage more heavily with ‘popular’ media. However, their findings also indicate that:

The jump in media use that occurs when young people hit the 11- to 14-year-old age group is tremendous – an increase of more than three hours a day in time spent with media (total media use), and an increase of four hours a day in total media exposure … Differences in media use in relation to race and ethnicity are even more pronounced, and they hold up after controlling for other demographic factors such as age, parent education, or whether the child is from a single- or two-parent family. For example, Hispanic and Black youth average about 13 hours of media exposure daily (13:00 for Hispanics and 12:59 for Blacks), compared to just over 8½ hours (8:36) among Whites.

(Rideout et al., 2010: 5)

Furthermore, Ito et al. (2013) argue that the current literature suggests that young people who have sound learning support at home and are educationally privileged are the ones gaining the most from digital media in relation to career achievement and academic success. According to the EU Kids online study (Livingstone and Haddon, 2009), young people climb a relatively predictable ‘ladder of opportunity’ in terms of digital media use. Sefton-Green (2013) generated Figure 1.1 to provide a visual representation of these findings.

In terms of this ladder of opportunity, the work by Ito et al. (2010) suggests that young people require appropriate support in order to translate media engagements into academically oriented activities. It is also evident that there are class and race differences that have changed little over the past ten years. For example, Clark and Alters (2004) found that middle-class families believed that limiting access to television was a marker of good parenting. More recent surveys indicate that in lower-income households of African Americans and Latinos, children watch more television and play more video games than their middle-class, white and Asian counterparts (Rideout et al., 2010; Ferguson, 2006). Further, debates around young people’s use of digital technology have been likened to academic ‘moral panic’, with the suggestion that those in opposition are out of touch (Bennett et al., 2008). What still seems to be occurring is an unhelpful dualism, promoted by experts and in the media, in the sense that managed and ordered technology is somehow good, while messy, unmediated, chaotic and liquid technology is bad. Nevertheless, it remains unclear what kind of impact an increasingly connected environment is having on learning, and what kinds of cultures this is creating within learning settings. This is because to date the challenges of digital tethering remain troublesome and the research remains disparate and inchoate. Furthermore, few authors have dealt in depth with the complexities of the ways in which students’ identities are shifting and changing as digital media become more fluid and the users become more fluent. (This is discussed in detail in Chapter 7.)

FIGURE 1.1 Ladder of opportunity (adapted from Sefton-Green, 2013b)

Issues need to be explored, such as who is doing the tethering and harnessing and how much coercion is (or is not) involved. It is not clear whether digital tethering really is a problem, or whether it promotes and allows for a different form of interrogation: students and young people are highly critical of games, apps and hardware. Perhaps we are dealing with different ways/forms of ‘reading’ and ‘interrogating’ that we have not yet come to understand. Questions need to be asked about the value of digital tethering, so that rather than returning to a position of technological determinism, a view of ‘useful tethering’ needs to be harnessed to support learning and improve engagement. Criticism of digital tethering by such authors as Turkle (2011a) seems to ignore the need for young people to learn through exploration and problem-solving in informal settings. This very ‘messing around’ seems to be important to the development of autonomy, self-direction and problem-solving in young people, but to date research findings have tended to focus on the time they expend online, rather than examine in depth the lifewide capabilities they are developing. For example:

The Kaiser Family Foundation study found that young Americans spend on average 6.5 hours with media per day: almost 4 hours a day with TV programming or recorded videos, approximately 1.75 hours per day listening to music or the radio, roughly one hour a day using the computer for nonschool purposes, and about 50 minutes a day playing video games (Rideout, Roberts, and Foehr 2005). Pew’s 2007 survey found that daily 63 percent of teens go online, 36 percent send text messages, 35 percent talk on a mobile phone, 29 percent send IMs, and 23 percent send messages through social network sites … With respect to gender distinctions, the same Pew survey found that a significantly greater proportion of teenage girls than boys owned mobile phones and communicated daily via text messaging, talking on mobile phones, talking on landlines, sending IMs, and messaging through a social network site (Lenhart et al. 2008). The Kaiser survey found that girls spent significantly more time than boys listening to music and significantly less time than boys playing video games (Rideout, Roberts, and Foehr 2005).

(Ito et al., 2010: 32–33)

It would seem, then, that the challenge of understanding digital tethering and its impact on learning lies in an examination of what is really going on in these hidden spaces and in exploring the cost and value of digital tethering on student learning and engagement.

There has been increasing interest in learner identity and learner engagement over the last twenty years (as will be discussed further in Chapter 8), and Furlong and Davies (2012) argue that young people’s engagement with new technologies is fundamentally bound up in their own identity. Identity play and exploration are evident not only through representations on social networking sites but also in the ways in which people accessorize themselves technologically, whether through Apple products, diamond-studded phone cases or personal microchip implants. Digital tethering is linked (or even central) to identity and to the way in which people operate in these diverse digital spaces. Further, Ito et al. (2010: 14–18) argue for the term ‘genres of participation’ to describe different and often diverse ways of engaging with new media. What they mean is that by shifting the focus away from the individual and towards broader networks of social relationships, it is possible to recognize, study and acknowledge that people learn in all contexts of activity, because they are members of shared cultural systems. Thus genres of participation within new media are delineated as a means of describing and analysing everyday learning and media engagement. What is important is that they make a distinction between friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation:

• Friendship-driven genres of participation are seen as those emerging from (largely) age-related friendship groups, so that the media practices within this category emerge from local, face-to-face friendships.

• Interest-driven genres are those that have developed from specific activities and therefore the interest is more important than the friendship.

Whilst this is an interesting distinction, it is perhaps a little dualistic, and it would seem there are other genres that could be usefully included: for example, school-driven, subject-driven or family-driven genres of participation. It is important to recognize that there are several different types of digital tethering, relating to identity, interests, engagement and participation in relation to people’s contexts and cultural settings.

Types of digital tethering

Whilst digital tethering is defined broadly as the constant interaction and engagement with digital technology – the sense of being ‘always on’, ‘always engaged’ – it is also important to consider the ways in which such tethering manifests itself in diverse ways. Further, it is helpful to make distinctions between students’ digital tethering as part of their formal educational process and when they do all manner of other things through digital tethering beyond their narrow role as students. Digital tethering, it may be said, is strongly located in students’ lives informally; but now it is finding its way into formal educational settings, too. It is not yet clear to what extent students should be digitally tethered in formal settings, whether this is a distraction, or indeed whether it has any place in such settings at all (with many arguing that it does not).

Tethered to technology

In this type of tethering the focus is on the importance of the technology to the individual, the need always to be on, rather than on the necessity of being tethered to other people. Being tethered to technology is characterized by needing to be able to search for information, access websites and emails, and always having access to others who might be able to retrieve information, even if being connected to others is not the central focus of the tethering. Much of the focus here is on the ability to gain knowledge and research information through the media; to be continually tethered to knowledge and evidence. Not being connected often results in a sense of anxiety, a requirement to buy airtime in remote places, moving a phone or computer around to get the best signal, and becoming angry or frustrated about any lack of connection.

Tethered to people

The focus here is on the need always to be connected to people; the technology is merely the mechanism that enables that connection. This is usually achieved through social networking sites or messaging systems, such as Kik and Whatsapp. People who are constantly tethered to others engage in: maintaining contact with family and friends; casual entertainment that they watch or share with friends (often on the move); arranging meetings; sharing photos; and accessing web-based information for use within their friendship groups or to find activities that are undertaken with others. However, being tethered to other people is often about ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Useful tethering?
• 2 The landscape of learning
• 3 Piracy and pedagogies
• 4 Learning on the move? Liquidity and meshwork
• 5 Being digitally tethered
• 6 Learning together alone
• 7 Digital fluency
• 8 Tethered identities?
• 9 Digital surveillance and tethered integrity
• 10 Wizards and brinkmanship
• Glossary
• References
• Index