ICT: Changing Education

Chris Abbott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135700645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is changing the face of education. In this timely and accessible book, Chris Abbott examines the process by which ICT, and in particular its role in relation to literacy, has become central to national educational policies.
The author traces the history of computer use in schools and examines the concept of virtual learning communities using case studies involving learners, parents and educationalists. The role of the Internet is considered along with the differing national policies on its adoption and on developing online context. ICT: Changing Education reveals the development of open and flexible learning as the next stage of ICT's involvement with education.

1
ICT and Literacy

The suggestion that there might come a day when schools no longer exist elicits strong responses from many people. There are many obstacles to thinking clearly about a world without schools. Some are highly personal. Most of us spent a larger fraction of our lives going to school than we care to think about.… The concept of a world without school is highly dissonant with our experiences of our own lives. Other obstacles are more conceptual. One cannot define such a world negatively, that is by simply removing school and putting nothing in its place. Doing so leaves a thought vacuum that the mind has to fill one way or another, often with vague but scary images of children ‘running wild’, ‘drugging themselves’ or ‘making life impossible for their parents’. Thinking seriously about a world without school calls for elaborated models of the non-school activities in which children would engage.

(Papert, 1993:178)

One of the aims of this book is to begin to develop some suitable models of what school is becoming at the beginning of a new century. It is written from a belief that we are no longer faced with a decision as to whether schools should change, but with the reality that our concepts of school, learning and education have developed and fragmented to such an extent that the identification of schooling with a 100-year-old building full of teenagers who do not want to be there is no longer seen as either appropriate or defensible by many. It is the central thesis of this book that, to a large extent, it is the increased availability of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that has brought about this change of thinking.

What has become recognised ever more widely since Papert wrote the passage above is that ICT is already changing society, and therefore education, even if schools do continue. The impact of change is not only technological but also social. The Internet is already changing practices in banking and shopping and in the creation of virtual communities, and any vision of the future of education has to recognise new methods of accessing information and new ways of relating to others. We begin this book as we will end it, by considering the fulcrum on which the intersection of ICT and schooling rests: the teacher.

ICT and Literacy: The Technologically Literate Teacher

Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in ten years.

(New York Dramatic Mirror, 1913, quoted in Saettler, 1968:98)

Entering the teaching profession in the early 1970s, as I did, involved grappling with the technology of the day. The epidiascope, a Heath Robinson-like assemblage of lights and mirrors, had enthralled me as a 1950s primary pupil. It had the ability, for example, to project on to a large screen images of constellations that totally absorbed me and my fellow New Elizabethans. By the time I began teaching such wonderful devices were no longer available, and the teaching machines that made a brief appearance at my grammar school in the 1960s, and will be considered when we look at the history of programmed learning, had long been consigned to a cupboard.

It was the Banda, the spirit copier, which formed for teachers in that period the height of technological aspiration. Mysterious and multisensory, the Banda is remembered by older generations of teachers as much for its smell and its ability to print purple marks on any inappropriate but light-coloured surface as it is for its most important facility: the ability it gave to teachers to make multiple copies of a printed text or even image. After a century or more of the textbook in ascendancy, the Banda was the advance party for the future pairing of computer and photocopier, which would transform teacherly practice through access to these technologies.

There were other devices available to the literacy teacher of the 1970s, of course: having developed an early interest in the teaching of reading I soon experimented with the Language Master, which provided speech feedback when flash cards were passed through it. These cards, usually flash cards containing single words, had a magnetic strip on the reverse which carried a speech recording. This was an early example of a technology simply modelling an existing practice—the use of flash cards in the teaching of reading—and adding some technological facility to the resource. Like the talking book software of the 1980s, the fundamental principle was that technology should add to rather than change practice. This would become an unsupportable stance to take in the light of later conflicting evidence.

The Ricoh Synchrofax too, sometimes known as the Audio Page, offered an early opportunity to attempt a fusion of text and spoken language, which only became fully usable years later, after the advent of speech cards in computers with sufficient memory. An A4 card was completely covered in magnetic material on one side, enabling several sentences of audio to be recorded and then played back while viewing the text or image that had been fixed to the reverse. Both devices were complex to use and required attendance at in-service training courses from teachers who wished to use them; and within a few years both had all but disappeared as the computer offered the same facilities and much more.

Current multimedia software and Internet access bring a vast array of imagebased information into the classroom. Before becoming available via the computer, this kind of information was found in the school library and, on occasions, through the use of 16mm film, filmstrips and, later, videotape and then cassette. For a teacher to become proficient in the use of a 16mm film projector often required attendance at a whole series of training sessions, and even the humble filmstrip seemed to be destined to be inserted upside down and back-to-front before the correct orientation could be found. Bringing film into the classroom was often seen then as a revolutionary or even puzzling practice; was it not the case, it was suggested, that ‘watching a film is a solitary experience.… We go out to a movie, to a special building or room constructed for that purpose alone’ (Ruth, 1977:110). It is interesting to note that the same article looks forward quite perceptively to the advent of cable and satellite television but that in the whole of a lengthy article on new non-print media there is no mention of the computer. Until relatively recent times, computers were seen as resolutely text-based. Even in 1985, a major volume dealing with the teaching of literacy contained the index entry ‘Computers, see Word Processing’ (White, 1985).

It is now routine to see moving images on television and computer screens in classrooms, but it is easy to forget that this is a relatively recent development. Twenty years ago the use of video would be likely to involve moving the whole class to a viewing room, with early tape-based video players being both expensive and difficult to operate. In most secondary schools it was necessary to book a technician or Media Resources Officer to operate the videotape player, with the clear message being that the operation of technology was a specialised activity beyond the skills that could be expected of a teacher. The technological skills expected of a teacher in the present day, by contrast, are probably in excess of those possessed by the resources technicians of that earlier era.

It was in the area of reprographics that technology was just beginning, in the 1970s, to change teacher practice, and was sowing the seeds of the process which is now accelerating. First the spirit copier, then the ink duplicator and finally and most crucially the photocopier changed for good the relationship between teacher, text and technology.

By 1994 in the United States the Telecommunications Policy Review (11 June 1994:1) was confidently stating that 84 per cent of American teachers considered only one type of technology to be absolutely essential: a photocopier with an adequate paper supply. Photocopiers became part of teacherly practice in a way that computers are only just beginning to approach. It has been suggested (Marcus, 1993) that we move through two stages in our embrace of new technology, with the first stage characterised by ambivalence about the extra possibilities offered and only the later stage leading to what has been called the ‘dawning of irreversible change’ (Midani, 1986).

Irreversible change is certainly an apt summary of the effect of the photocopier on teacher practice. Where once the textbook ruled supreme, it is now routine for teachers to select from a much wider range of resources; to change those resources from year to year or from lesson to lesson, and to differentiate the learning activities they give to pupils in their care. ICT has the potential to cause irreversible change in classrooms and schools, and has sometimes done so already; at other sites the machines simply wait in readiness like the characters in a science-fiction story, later to fulfil their potential.

Great claims have been made for the importance of the PC: the invention of the digital computer has even been described as ‘the single most revolutionary moment in the history of representation since the emergence of language’ (Dibbell, 1998:56). Whether that moment was or was not revolutionary for the way in which society educates its young is the topic of this book, and efforts will be made to suggest that such a revolution is approaching, if not yet quite upon us.

Computers and Changing Literacy

Future courses may not be examined by testing the limits of an individual’s memory but instead may challenge a student’s strategies for obtaining information quickly, for ordering it into a logical sequence, for arriving at conclusions from given facts and for accurate and rapid problem solving.

(Hills, 1980:45)

In his far-sighted book dealing with the future of the printed word, Hills raises many of the issues to be discussed here. Even in 1980 he foresaw the changes which would have to come for traditional secondary education. In particular, he noted ‘a possible trend away from the formal educational setting—a building specifically set aside for the purposes of education where teachers teach and students learn—towards a more home-based educational system’ (Hills, 1980: 41). We will return to this concept, now a very prevalent one, in the final chapter.

It is its ability to provide and retrieve information, together with its potential as a communicative tool, rather than as a teacher substitute, that is the basis for claims that the computer will change schooling irrevocably. As has been described elsewhere (Gates, 1999), the idea of a tool that enables one to access information is not new, and can be traced back to Dr Vannervar Bush’s Memex machine, which he described in 1945. Bush’s idea was to design a storage system which would enable the retrieval of items but also their linkage to other data stored in the same system, a process he called ‘associative indexing’. Although his methodology now looks impossibly cumbersome, Bush did, as Gates acknowledges, predict ‘the multimedia PC connected to the Web…[and] the equivalent of Internet search engines’ (Gates, 1999:165).

Many of today’s teachers grew up in a pre-computer world, and may even have moved through the handwriting technologies of pencil, then nib pen, ballpoint and fountain pen. They may well remember the excitement that accompanied the invention of the ink cartridge, solving as it did the blotting and spillage problems of thousands of clumsy children—and of quite a few teachers. Many adults will remember their first personal meeting with the world of printing, which was for many in the UK a John Bull printing set. This popular birthday present of the middle years of the twentieth century consisted of a large number of small rubber printing letters together with an ink pad and some slotted wooden letter block holders. The first task, in those far-off days when sharp objects were sometimes permitted in infant hands, was to separate all the letters with a razor blade. This done, the gleeful recipient could set about printing with abandon, although always irritated by the inevitable shortage of particular muchneeded letters: there were never enough Es.

The next stage for many was the acquisition of a typewriter, a complex piece of writing technology that has many links with the computer, not least the similarity between the keyboards used by both as input devices. Typewriters existed for well over a hundred years but are no longer manufactured anywhere in the world. Reconditioned models are still produced in India, coincidentally the country popularly supposed to have the fastest growing number of computer users. It appears to be a myth that the keyboard layout of a typewriter is designed to slow down users and therefore avoid clashing levers. Despite the claims of the advocates of speech recognition, however, this layout and the various national variants of it look likely to live on for many years through their adoption as computer keyboards.

The typewriter has been a key technological device for access to information; used to type underground newspapers in repressive states, it is also seen on the streets of many developing countries, where the literate but poor can earn a living by typing letters for others without the appropriate skills. The combination of typewriter and photocopier—or duplicator— can be a threatening one to totalitarian states, and photocopiers in particular are sometimes legally accessible only to those who are trusted by the state to conform.

These issues of access to print and the effect this has on society have been the subject of much interest (Eisenstein, 1983; Spender, 1995), with suggestions that the establishment, and in particular the established church, felt greatly threatened by the growing ability to read of wider sections of society. Although they deal with similar developments, Eisenstein and Spender approach the issue from different perspectives. Spender emphasises those aspects of the post-printing period which aimed to preserve old ways rather than to capitalise on new possibilities, whereas Eisenstein seeks to explain and illuminate a period she sees as one of great change, energy and renewal. Spender, writing more than ten years after Eisenstein, deals at length with the contemporary literary artefact which is the World Wide Web homepage, another development in mass literacy which has also been attacked and denigrated by those who, in some cases, stand to lose their previously privileged literacy status. Her remarks on the attitude of the established church could also be applied to much of the reaction to the availability of online publication.

According to the Church, the new custom of allowing everyone to go off and read in isolation and to develop opinions of their own was a recipe for anarchy and disaster.… The members of the establishment …were trying to hang on to their own skills…they didn’t want changes which marginalised them and left them feeling worthless and useless. That is why they kept insisting that the old ways were the only ways and that the new should be fiercely resisted.

(Spender, 1995:8)

Spender also attributes much of what she sees as the ‘dismay and distress at the passing of the print era’ as being directly related to the way in which the rise of computer technology has sounded the death knell for the ‘patriarchal presence that has been encoded in communication’ (Spender, 1995:10).

By the end of the twentieth century it was no longer possible to view literacy as based on the word or even on the word-based text. Literacy today is essentially multimedia, composed of an amalgam of words, pictures, sounds and the moving image. Lanham was among the first to deal with the shift in literacy and in terms of what he described as the icon/alphabet ratio (Lanham, 1994), the process by which images have become part of, rather than ancillary to, texts. Understanding of this process was taken much further by others, especially Kress, who has focused on visual literacy in much of his writing (Kress, 1982, 1993; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). In The Grammar of Visual Design (1996), written with Van Leeuven, Kress attempts to describe this development in linguistic terms.

Sharples’ analysis of writing as an act of creative design offers an account of the mental, physical and social aspects of writing, which acknowledges the central role of the newer computer-based technologies in affecting and forming literacy practices and processes. He suggests that technology is changing the very nature of writing, and that the intelligent computer, the ‘weaver of texts and teller of tales’ (Sharples, 1999:205) may be the eventual outcome of the move to automation within literacy. Alongside growing acceptance of the concept of virtual literacy came the allied idea of an identifiable and desired information literacy (Loveless and Longman, 1998) and the implications of this for teachers.

Kress and others in the New London Group (NLG) produced an influential paper (New London Group, 1996) at a time when the Internet, in particular, was first attaining its ascendancy in the discussion of computerrelated literacy practices. The paper deals with what it sees as the changing social environment facing students and teachers, and calls for a much wider view of literacy than has previously been current. The members of the NLG take this stance in the expectation that such an understanding will enable two goals to be achieved: access for students to the changing ways in which work, power and community are described, and assistance for students who wish to get involved with these changes so that they can control and plan their own future social and working lives.

The NLG develop in their paper the notion of multi-literacies, which suggests that literacy is not only changing but fragmenting into a series of different but allied literacies. Some members of the group have written elsewhere (Kress, 1996a) on this topic and suggested (Kress, 1996b) the concept of dynamic representational resources, a term developed from Critical Discourse Analysis and a more inclusive and cohesive take on the issue. In his response to the NLG paper, Street (1996) contrasts the notion of multi-literacies with what he describes as multiple literacies. In his 1996 address and in later writing (Street, 1998, 1999), Street argues that the multi-literacies approach might be located in an understanding of the historical context within which literacy, and computer technology, has developed. He considers three models of literacy: the Autonomous model, Critical Literacy and New Literacy Studies; and then argues that although multi-literacies need not be located within one of these areas, the NLG are at least under an obligation to take account of these positions on literacy.

Street sees the autonomous model of literacy as rooted in technological determinism, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: ICT and Literacy
• 2: Virtual Communities
• 3: Changing Schools
• 4: Learning, Computers and Social Interaction
• 5: Educational Responses to Technology
• 6: The Rise of the Internet and the Race to Connect
• 7: Towards a New Understanding of ICT and Schools