Apps, Technology and Younger Learners

International evidence for teaching

Natalia Kucirkova, Garry Falloon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317402466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the challenges, potential and theoretical possibilities of apps and considers the processes of change for education and home learning environments. Drawing together a diverse team of international contributors, it addresses the specific features, context of use and content of apps to uncover the importance of these tools for young children's learning.

Apps, Technology and Younger Learners focuses on ways that apps support early years and primary school learning, connect various learning spaces and engage children in a range of edutainment and knowledge-building activities. In each chapter, the current state of knowledge and key research questions in the field for future study are identified, with clear messages provided at the end of each chapter.

Focusing on empirical studies and strong theoretical frameworks, this book covers four key parts:

• 
  
  

• Understanding the learning potential of children's apps;

• 
  
  

• Key app challenges;

• 
  
  

• Empirical evidence;

• 
  
  

• Future avenues.

This book is an essential guide for educators, post-graduate students, researchers and all those interested in the advantages or challenges that may result from integrating apps into early education.

Part I
Understanding the learning potential of children’s apps

In Chapter 1, Prof Roger Säljö opens the book with an illuminating historical account backgrounding the uniqueness of humankind’s ability to develop symbolic technological tools and systems designed to enhance and extend thinking and learning processes. Insightfully, he laments on the apparent failure of successive rounds of technological innovation to trigger promised transformations to education systems worldwide, citing Larry Cuban’s argument that computers in schools were often ‘oversold and underused’. However, Roger’s appraisal of mobile devices and their apps, the most recent round of technological innovation to hit our education institutions, reveals something of a different picture. Through well-crafted analysis and reference to empirical work, Roger outlines how these devices, which have become so seamlessly integrated into virtually every aspect of our lives, offer unrivalled potential to support learning across ages, cultures and places. However, as history has signalled in the past, Roger warns that mobile devices and apps face an uphill battle to make any real impact on education systems, which are increasingly being subjected to ideological whims that push them backwards towards compliant, standardised models of learning and assessment.

In Chapter 2, Jenny Radesky and Barry Zuckerman provide another larger con ceptual orientation in apps research: they consider apps from a developmental perspective. Drawing on the main developmental theories and extant research, Radesky and Zuckerman evaluate the potential and impact of play-based learning with apps, with a specific focus on the key domains in children’s development (including cognitive and social–emotional development) and how they relate to children’s social, creative and digital play. Developmental perspectives are often overlooked in qualitatitve research and Chapter 2 provides the necessary explanation for supporting learning opportunities and avoiding stereotyped presentation of the educational potential of apps. Corresponding to the rationale of many traditional developmental theories, the chapter presents theoretical frameworks in a sequence, finishing with a suggestion for future research topics.

In Chapter 3, Kathleen Roskos extends Roger Säljö’s argument in her analysis of the potentials and limitations of literacy apps. Roskos thus maps the process of learning to a specific domain: that of using ebooks in literacy learning, which, in the age of increasing accountability, face challenges gaining traction in classrooms, as teachers struggle to develop effective instructional methods that take full advantage of the new capabilities they offer. Roskos points out that teachers should not ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’, but instead combine the best of traditional literacy teaching practices with the unique and powerful features and capability of ebooks. To assist the development of motivating and engaging literacy learning opportunities, Roskos offers a valuable framework of practical principles formulated to ‘blend the best of both worlds’, useful for guiding educators attempting to integrate ebooks into their literacy learning programmes.

Overall, Part I provides some key orientation regarding the potential of apps for the learning and play of pre- and primary-school aged children. This represents a solid foundation for considering the empirical work with apps represented in subsequent chapters of the book.

1
Apps and Learning

A sociocultural perspective

Roger Säljö

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, COMMUNICATION AND LEARNING, UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG, GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN

In a short period, apps have become part of our lives in activities such as shopping, banking, gaming and social networking. Apps are essential elements of contemporary lifestyles relying on increasingly portable devices, especially smart phones, and constant online presence. Apps (and the touch screen) serve as sites where children at an early age learn to engage in symbol manipulation, and they provide entry points to digital literacy practices. In the chapter, the uses of apps in educational settings are discussed. The develop ment of apps for instructional purposes is intense. Apps have affordances that are important for learning in many areas, and they are also significant in the sense that children come to school with media habits contingent on extensive use of such tools. But to play a productive role for teaching and learning, apps (and other digital tools) have to be integrated into well-designed instructional activities relevant to curricular goals.

Keywords: Apps, apps and learning, learning, digital tools and learning, digital literacy

Introduction

Humans have an impressive talent for learning. We are able to cumulate experiences and insights in ways that have no counterpart among other species. Through our ability to communicate by means of a symbolic language, we are also able to share knowledge and information with each other in ways that must be considered as unique. For instance, we can learn about nature and significant historical events through stories that other people tell us, and, even more remarkably, we can read about such events in books, newspapers and magazines. We do not have to be present at the site of an event to know a lot about it; we learn through virtual experiences.

An important ingredient of this talent for learning and sharing of knowledge is technology. Scientists may tell us that our DNA is very close to that of our closest relatives among the primates (chimpanzees), but our next of kin in a biological sense do not read and write, they have no printing press or libraries, nor do they make or watch television programs or surf the Internet to find out what is happening in the world. Only humans have such resources and engage in practices that involve collaboration, information sharing and community building between large numbers of individuals, many of whom do not know each other personally. And technology plays a vital role in all such activities.

In most theories of learning, and cognition more generally, of the past century, technology plays little or no role. Even though they are different in most respects, representatives of behaviorist, cognitivist and neuroscience perspectives study learning at the level of the individual as changes in behaviors, as the acquisition of new concepts or cognitive schemata or in terms of changes in synaptic connections and/or neurobiological processes in the brain. Knowledge, skill and human capacities are seen as residing within the individual, and the locus of learning, accord ingly, must be sought there, in behaviors, minds or brains. An alternative perspective, and the one that will be pursued here, is to view humans as tool-makers and tool-users, and as capable of collaborating with – and through – technologies, artefacts designed for specific purposes. And these tools are significant for the manners in which we think, learn and communicate; we design the world we live in, and our ways of learning and thinking adapt to these designed environments.

Thus, learning and cognitive capacities more generally are not purely intracranial phenomena; rather what we construe as mental processes, when inspected more closely, rely on ‘mergers and coalitions’ (Clark, 2003, p. 3) with technologies, or what in the Vygotskian tradition is referred to as cultural tools (Vygotsky, 1978). For instance, and as an illustration, our capacity to remember is no longer limited by how good we are at memorizing. Paper and pencil and/or a digital device, such as a smartphone, dramatically extend how much information we are able to store and recall, and for how long we will remember. In the latter case, our remembering takes place in collaboration with a technology to which we have outsourced some of the cognitive burdens of storing information. In fact, by collaborating with such tools – External Memory Systems or EMS (Donald, 2010) – most of the limitations in capacity, accuracy and permanence that apply to the human memory no longer play any decisive role. Such examples of mergers between minds and technologies could be multiplied by looking at how we make calculations, keep time, navigate and engage in a range of other practices.

Learning, thinking and symbolic technologies

To understand human learning and thinking in a meaningful manner, we therefore have to include the capacity of people to use and master the cultural tools that are significant in their society. Also, before attending to the wonders of recent digital technologies, and what they do to the manners in which we learn, we must make a brief turn to history and consider how we got where we are in terms of our capacities to learn and think. My focus here will be on what Donald (2010, p. 70) refers to as ‘symbolic technologies’, i.e. non-biological tools created over millennia by people to ‘represent, communicate and store knowledge’ (op. cit.).

Evidence of intent symbol-making – stone carvings, rock paintings and engravings on egg shells – tells us that such practices have a very long history (Texier et al., 2010). It is likely that some of these early forms of symbol-making – and media use – served cognitive functions, for instance, for storing information or keeping track of time (early forms of calendars, cf. Marshack, 1972). However, the ability to store information outside the human body took a giant leap when writing emerged some 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (in present-day Iraq). In the latter context, writing was the cultural solution to the problems of keeping track of information in the growing city-states with a complex economy, and where contracts, book-keeping, tax-registers and other forms of documentation were necessary to regulate social life. Here we see the emergence of ‘document societies’ (Thomas, 2001) relying on a new and advanced intellectual technology, cuneiform writing. Writing was done on clay tablets, the hard disks of their time, and in this sense the technology is both symbolic (use of a script, images and other symbols) and material (implemented on clay tablets that could be stored and inspected).

Symbolic technologies require socialization of people’s minds. This is the other side of the coin; such forms of expression presuppose that people are part of interpretive communities where members know how to decipher and produce symbols. The cultural response to the technological inventions of this time was another invention: schooling and formal instruction (Kramer, 1963, p. 229ff). The scribal schools in Mesopotamia, with classrooms, pupils, teachers, lectures and many of the other elements we recognize from present-day schooling, is one of the very first examples in history of a systematic intellectual training of the mind, a shaping of the cognitive and communicative skills that took place through the activity we now refer to as studying.

Through history, many other inventions have transformed the way we communi cate and participate in knowledge practices. Perhaps the most significant one, second only to the technology of writing, was the invention of the printing press in the mid-nineteenth century. The German smith and engraver Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398–1468) designed a printing press with movable type that made it possible to print books in large numbers and at a fraction of the cost of hand-copied texts. This innovation transformed societies and paved the way for mass literacy and mass education, and its significance for the spread of knowledge and information can hardly be overestimated. Mentalities of people changed as they could access knowledge that was preserved over time and publicly available through books (Eisenstein, 1997).

Learning and digital technology

Computers, computing and digitization appeared shortly after the Second World War. Information (of any kind: pictures, music, texts) could now be converted into digital form as discrete units – bits – in binary code. Digitization makes it possible to access, process, store and share information in novel ways. Databases can be built and searched. Computing and digitization have come to play a significant role in almost all social activities, our personal lives, as well as in production systems, transport and health care. For one thing, our homes and cars are full of sensors and digital devices. The impact on society of digitization is profound, and many argue that we now live in post-industrial, globalized network societies that have emerged as a consequence of the affordances of new communication technologies (e.g., Castells, 1996).

Early on in the development of computers, questions were raised about how education and instruction could profit from these inventions. Already in the late 1950s, ambitious and fairly large-scale experiments were launched to test the potentials of the technology. During the following decades, large numbers of projects sought to implement computers in classrooms with moderate to low success (Cuban, 1986). There was a strong commitment from policy makers, but much less enthu siasm from teachers. With the introduction of personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s, the attempts to transform education by means of computers gained new momentum. The PC (or its equivalent) had its own operating system, memory and software and could be operated by a user as an independent unit or connected to a LAN (local area network) by means of a cable or, later, a wireless connection. During the middle of the 1990s, the World Wide Web and the Internet appeared on the scene, and this was to have dramatic effects on society and pose new challenges to edu cational institutions.

The personal computer as a tool for learning attracted a lot of interest among researchers and educators. Strong advocates – technophiles – saw PCs as ‘children’s machines’ (Papert, 1993) where young people could learn and develop by exploring the world at their own pace and according to their own interests. Following this spirit of promoting independent learning through the use of ‘powerful technologies’, a favorite metaphor of this line of reasoning, some went as far as to predict that there ‘won’t be any schools in the future’ (Papert, 1984, p. 38), but, in hindsight, this is not what happened (in fact, more children than ever are at school now, and they spend more time in classrooms than previous generations, and the demand for schooling is increasing indefinitely, it seems, cf. World Bank, 2012).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• PART I Understanding the learning potential of children’s apps
• PART II Key app challenges
• PART III Empirical evidence
• PART IV Future avenues
• Index