Digital Technologies and Change in Education

The Arena Framework

Niki Davis

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317270324
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Éducation générale

Digital Technologies and Change in Education provides professionals and other leaders with a road map of the processes of change for teachers, schools, universities, and educational systems, including extensive case studies and evidence that clarify the benefits and challenges of digital technologies in education. To this end, Niki Davis offers a theoretical framework—the Arena—as a tool for exploration and analysis of our own experiences of teaching, leadership, and research. With a blend of local, regional, and global examples from all sectors of education, this book allows readers to move past the potentially misleading glitter of new technologies and into the co-evolving ecologies that make up education and training locally and globally.

1 Introduction

Where are the promised benefits of digital technologies for education? In a digital world, what are schools and universities transforming into and how? How can educators and their leaders stay in the forefront of continuously changing digital technologies and educational systems? This book explores the ways that education is evolving under the influence of digital technologies and vice versa. The chaotic complexity of these processes is leading to an increasing diversity of K–12 schools and tertiary organizations. Networked educational services and educational agencies further complicate the picture. In the 21st century, change has become a constant feature for everyone.

This book is for those who want to be involved in the leadership of change and so includes teachers, advisors, and coordinators in K–12 schools and postsecondary institutions. It also aims to inform the work of executive leaders and others leading change in educational systems and services involving K–12 schooling and postsecondary education, as well as policymakers and community stakeholders. In addition, it provides a comprehensive global framework to inform research and development in the field of curriculum and instructional technology.

The chapters are grounded in extensive research that relates directly to educational practices. The organizing metaphor is captured in the “Arena”, a tool I have developed and use to examine, illustrate, and map change with digital technologies in education. The Arena identifies the teacher as the “keystone” within the structure of educational environments, for it is the people in this role who ensure that learning is personalized and effective. That assurance enables learners individually and in collaboration with their peers to aspire to and successfully engage with the vast array of knowledge available to society today and to play a part in new discoveries.

The Arena provides a robust organizing framework that clarifies learning as interrelated with political and commercial drivers in multiple layers of education. The book draws on research studies from many countries, exposing commonalities and differences that are important in an age of globalization. In writing this book, I have consolidated my work as a leading scholar and theorist in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education, including preservice teacher education. The many contributions by collaborators and organizations that inform this work add authenticity. I acknowledge their collaboration and applaud their work in education.

I also recognize that the original nature of the theoretical developments in this book are contentious, not least because I have dared to apply to education a set of scientific theories grounded in the discipline of ecology in ways that those who are grounded in that discipline may find hard to accept. However, a potential lack of acceptance does not make my case weaker. I stand on “the shoulders of giants”, including Charles Darwin, who experienced opprobrium because of his ideas, but who also became stronger as he answered his critics and as his ideas gained credence. In time, his ideas spread to, gained acceptance from, and informed many disciplines within the scientific community.

This book is similarly about the diffusion of innovations, an interdisciplinary field in which the work of Everett Rogers is widely acknowledged because the successive editions of his book titled The Diffusion of Innovations provide syntheses of the research in this area for decades until 2003. The most recent edition of that book, published in 2003, included an examination of the changes that implementation and diffusion of digital technologies were bringing to many sectors, including education. It was only at this point that Rogers began to recognize that the emphasis organizations in many sectors were placing on these technologies was often leading to unexpected and occasionally disastrous consequences.

I experienced discomfort in teaching graduates about Rogers’ overarching theory, the Change Communication Model, because the processes involved in the diffusions of innovations that I researched and also experienced were far more complex than communications theory alone could explain. This oversimplification became increasingly frustrating for me because it tends to exacerbate the unexpected and potentially damaging outcomes, many of which increase inequity in the provision of education to underserved populations. The frustration pushed me to seek a more accurate and equitable overarching theory. The Arena of change with digital technologies is that theory, and this book is the first time I have communicated it in depth. The Arena provides a new conceptualization of the role of technology in education and society.

An Overview of the Book

The book presents the Arena as a theoretical framework and articulates ways in which it can be applied. Illustrative case studies of K–12 schools, universities, and organizations that provide software and other services aim to guide readers to interpret change in their own contexts. Although the processes of change are unpredictable and challenge educators, the Arena clarifies why complex systems do not need to break down when changes disrupt or stress increases. Instead, each change leads to other changes that may emerge in unexpected ways. The illustrations (stories) in this book are closely informed by a strategic selection of my journal articles published up to 2016. Together, the stories draw out key messages from a wide range of contexts in Australasia, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as contexts where there are fewer educational resources. I encourage you to interpret these stories in terms of your own intellectual journeys.

Chapter 2 provides the foundation for the whole book. In it, I present the central theory that is the focus of this volume. Essentially, I offer my “theory of everything” as an Arena that educators can use to guide their leadership in a world that is rapidly changing as a result of the increasing ubiquity of digital tools. More specifically, the Arena of change with digital technologies in education is an ecological framework for understanding change mediated through digital technologies within educational organizations and the contexts within which they are situated. This two-way interaction between adoption of digital tools and development of an education system is one of coevolution. Appreciation of this process lets educators and their stakeholders, including service providers, recognize how and why educational ecosystems become situated and evolve over time as people within those systems identify, adopt, adapt, and/or reject an increasing range of digital tools and environments. Taken as a whole, the Arena enables a global perspective encompassing all the educational systems of the world.

I begin Chapter 2 by introducing and explaining relevant concepts and terms from the field of ecology because the Arena’s conceptualization is based in human ecology. Throughout the book, terms from ecology are italicized to clarify their meaning. I also briefly describe use of the Arena to map educational ecosystems in a global context, which is to say on the global ecosphere. The central part of the chapter tells the story of a university teacher who innovates by introducing a simple web-based tool to increase student interaction in her campus-based course. The story also includes an account of an innovation introduced by that teacher’s head of department and involving the university’s learning management system (LMS). This first illustration aims to demonstrate the utility of the Arena framework with respect to gaining an authentic global perspective of the changes that can occur. Evolutionary change processes in the university’s pedagogy and administration are explained in terms of human ecology, as are the related ongoing changes in the global LMS software company. This simple illustration and its analysis clarify the structural importance of the teacher as the most important keystone species in the theoretical framework. It also emphasizes how important it is for the other keystone species in the framework, including the executive in the business-like administrative ecosystems of education, to leverage and support that teacher.

Chapter 3 is about quality learning enhanced by digital tools. In it, I describe how technology can be deployed to enhance the quality of learning within and across disciplines. I suggest that when digital tools are applied purposefully and effectively to maximize human potential in education, it is possible to add the fourth role of transformer to the three roles of tutor, tool, and tutee that Robert Taylor (1980) previously identified in his seminal book The Computer in the School. Drawing upon collaboration with leading educational scholars, including Bridget Somekh and Charles Desforges, I explore aspirations for quality learning and teaching with digital tools—aspirations that are synonymous with those for the curriculum as a whole (Davis et al., 1997). Although a “covert” aspiration is that of enabling a more effective achievement of existing educational goals, a complementary aspiration is that of using digital technologies as intellectual tools that “liberate” learners in ways that facilitate the development of personalized, self-managed learning.

Furthermore, in Chapter 3, I review the adoption of digital tools for quality learning in a range of disciplines, each framed within educational technology standards promoted by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, 2007) for K–12 education. Improvements evident in the quality of creativity and communication have been observed in music education and many other disciplines. These illustrations culminate in an extraordinary interdisciplinary example drawn from the leadership of Aaron Doering in adventure learning (Doering & Veletsianos, 2008). Here I use the Arena to map and thereby analyze the changes that digital technologies are bringing to this approach to education, an approach that spans the globe. The complexity evident in mapping adventure learning on the Arena indicates why quality learning through synergistic application of digital tools for multiple purposes can be so elusive and hard to sustain. At the same time, the mapping also shows that taking this complexity into account when designing and implementing digital tools for use in education can ensure long-term, quality, transformational learning.

My focus in Chapter 4 is on change within educational organizations. In order to clarify how leadership can be shared in ways that model and promote the culture for learning in K–12 schools and other educational organizations, I describe the leadership strategies in a future-focused middle school in New Zealand. The dynamic model of a spinning top presented in the chapter poignantly communicates the risks that school leaders such as Carolyn Stuart bravely take when living productively on the edges of the chaos common in the future-focused world of the 21st century (Mackey et al., 2015).

My next step in Chapter 4 is to contrast two professional development models that rapidly developed in the UK around 2002 to scale up the ICT professional development of teachers nationwide (Davis, Preston, & Sahin, 2009). I use the Arena to map the contrast between one of the least and one of the most successful models. The efficiency gains expected for the technocentric computer-based training model were an expensive and damaging illusion. In contrast, the (so-called) organic model with its overlapping communities, each designed to support the others, allowed the ecosystems within them to build capacity for their future-focused practice. The organic model made the best of the natural evolutionary processes for both education and digital tools. Because illustrations of what does not work are also revealing and instructive, Chapter 4 also includes examples from Birgit Eicklemann’s longitudinal research of schools which although originally identified as innovative users of digital technologies did not remain so (see, for example, Davis, Eickelmann, & Zaka, 2013). Eicklemann’s research confirms that executive leaders have an important role in sustaining capacity and leveraging conditions for quality learning with digital tools. I conclude the chapter by arguing that eMaturity frameworks, such as the eMaturity Model (Marshall, 2016), are unlikely to guide educational change in a productive direction.

The coevolution of K–12 education with online learning environments provides some of the most interesting phenomena from which to explore the potential and pitfalls of change with digital technologies in education. My focus in Chapter 5 is therefore served by consideration of online teaching in K–12 schools. During the first two decades of the 21st century, K–12 systems in the United States evolved rapidly to include new digital services and partnerships in exciting and challenging ways. However, these developments have also had contentious knock-on impacts for K–12 schools that leaders are still struggling to address. My account of this situation provides an example of how changes grouped within the community, resources, political, and bureaucratic sectors of the Arena can lead to rapid increases and/or decreases in participation in ways that may destabilize the K–12 sector. In other countries, the coevolution has been steady. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, online learning developments emerging from a nationwide correspondence school and other partnerships are serving well-understood gaps in K–12 provision, including that for families in rural and remote regions of the country. There are also nations such as India in which online teaching for underserved secondary school students has been rare or unknown.

In Chapter 5, I not only contrast the evolution of practice in different countries but also provide the story of the creation and evolution of one service in the United States, Iowa Learning Online, which provides supplementary courses to high schools throughout the state. Iowa Learning Online was the first such service to support preservice teacher education to provide early field experiences through the tutelage and oversight of an exemplary online teacher (Compton & Davis, 2010). An analysis of Iowa Learning Online clarifies the natural processes that are important to the stable coevolution of education and digital technologies. These include the principles that the service’s founders Gail Wortmann and Pam Pfitzenmaier established with their stakeholders in 2004. The chapter also clarifies the ways in which online teaching “decouples” the roles of the teacher (Harms et al., 2010).

In Chapter 6, I draw on my own experiences as a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher in the UK, United States, and Aotearoa New Zealand in order to flesh out the theoretical base of the Arena. My overall aim in this chapter is to show educators, including teacher educators, all of whom experience ongoing challenges with regard to their own learning and professional development relating to digital technologies, how they can use the Arena and/or complexity thinking to help them improve the outcomes that typically eventuate when they adopt digital tools in their work. I begin by discussing the characteristics of complex systems and identify how they appear in educational contexts. I next introduce and compare a range of concerns-based models that can be applied to predict and influence the behavior of people when their work or another context is affected by one or more innovations, such as the introduction of a digital tool or its rejection.

The main illustration in Chapter 6 is my own work at the University of Exeter in the early 1990s when I was one of the first teacher educators in the world to integrate information technologies into preservice teacher education (Somekh & Davis, 1997). I also employ the Arena at this point in order to provide a better understanding of the change processes that occurred when I supported my art colleagues to integrate their first digital tools in a program for preservice secondary school teachers. Reflections on my role as a change agent identify ethical challenges that I missed on the way.

The final chapter (7) traces my intellectual journey to a new conceptualization of the role of technology in education and society. My intention in reflecting on my career and the insights gained when writing this book is to support the journey leaders take as they develop a more global and nuanced view of educational systems that incorporate complexity thinking and the holistic view embedded within the Arena. I illustrate the tensions for educators, like myself, who came from a science background in the 1980s and found they needed people skills if they were to effectively lead students and colleagues to use technology in ways that develop new social practices for teaching and learning, organizational leadership, and the development of research teams. In this chapter I also clarify and acknowledge the contributions of many collaborators and others who contributed their knowledge and critique on my journey, and I publicly thank them for this support. As I discuss the construction of the Arena, I also argue for the importance of leaders continuously interrogating their beliefs and theoretical understandings over many years. In the 21st century, good educational leaders are those able to develop and inculcate a future focus in their organizations.

Conclusion

As an industry, education in 2015 was estimated to cost US$4.5 trillion worldwide, with US$1.4 trillion of that cost accounted for by K–12 and postsecondary education in the United States (Gemin et al., 2015, p. 97). Of that sum in the United States, US$670 billion was spent on K–12 education and US$380 million on learning management systems and platforms. In terms of total annual expenditure by gover...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Arena Framework and a Story
• 3. Can Digital Tools Enhance Quality in Learning?
• 4. Organization-wide Changes with Digital Technologies in Education
• 5. Change in K–12 Education with Online Teaching
• 6. Understanding the Complexity of Change
• 7. The Journey of the Arena Framework and into the Future
• Index