Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age

A Critical Analysis

Neil Selwyn

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136894077
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Éducation
• Categoria: Éducation générale

This book presents a wide-ranging and critical exploration of a topic that lies at the heart of contemporary education. The use of digital technology is now a key feature of schools and schooling around the world. Yet despite its prominence, technology use continues to be an area of education that rarely receives sustained critical attention and thought, especially from those people who are most involved and affected by it. Technology tends to be something that many teachers, learners, parents, policy-makers and even academics approach as a routine rather than reflective matter.

Tackling the wider picture, addressing the social, cultural, economic, political and commercial aspects of schools and schooling in the digital age, this book offers to make sense of what happens, and what does not happen, when the digital and the educational come together in the guise of schools technology.

In particular, the book examines contemporary schooling in terms of social justice, equality and participatory democracy. Seeking to re-politicise an increasingly depoliticised area of educational debate and analysis, setting out to challenge the many contradictions that characterise the field of education technology today, the author concludes by suggesting what forms schools and schooling in the digital age could, and should, take.

This is the perfect volume for anyone interested in the application and use of technology in education, as well as the education policy and politics that surround it; many will also find its innovative proposals for technology use an inspiration for their own teaching and learning.

Part I
High-tech hope and digital disappointment

1
Revisiting the promise of digital technology and schools Introduction

A few years ago, in the midst of the UK government’s concerted push to encourage the use of electronic smart boards in schools, I accompanied a group of Masters students (mainly international scholars from China, Taiwan, Ghana and Uganda) on a visit to a local primary school. We braved a torrential British rainstorm to observe the real-life application of the digital technologies that the group had been studying during the previous semester’s module on ‘E-learning in the twenty-first century’. For our visit I had taken care to contact a school that was known locally for its enthusiasm for educational technology, and upon our arrival I was relieved to see that the school was laden with technological ‘kit’. Data projectors and interactive whiteboards (the preferred term in Britain for the electronic smart board) assumed prominent positions in all of the classrooms. Desktop and laptop computers could also be found in every classroom, as well as in two large rooms that had been converted into dedicated computer suites. A number of handheld devices were also located throughout the school. In contrast to all these high-tech accessories, the school was itself housed in an austere and imposing Victorian-era building with high ceilings, huge windows and endless tiled corridors. The main classrooms had tall sloping ceilings that followed the contours of the steeply pitched roof. The overall impression was of a typical late nineteenth-century school building which was now home to some decidedly twenty-first-century schooling. In short, the school appeared to provide an excellent example of UK primary education for my Masters students to experience.

Yet it soon became clear that this combination of Dickensian and digital-age schooling was not an altogether harmonious affair – especially with regards to the school’s interactive whiteboards. The school’s senior management team had decided, quite sensibly, that the projector for each classroom’s whiteboard needed to be suspended securely from the apex of the ceiling. The time of our visit coincided with a spate of thefts of data projectors (each with a retail value of approaching £1,000) from schools, universities and workplaces throughout the region. Unfortunately, health and safety legislation decreed that the maximum permitted length of the aluminium poles that held the projectors in place was just over three metres. Given the ceiling height of around six metres, the school was left with a number of data projectors that were suspended three metres from the ground with the attendant whiteboard fixed about one and a half metres from the ground (the minimum height it could be placed without incurring serious image distortion).

Given the height of the whiteboards from the floor it transpired that while adults were able to write on the boards and manipulate the software, everything remained out of reach for all but the tallest of the children in the school. When one member of our group enquired about the practicalities of this situation, we were proudly shown a newly painted wooden box and set of small steps that the school had procured. This makeshift platform allowed the school students to reach the whiteboard when necessary. We were told that the school’s Parent Teacher Association was in the process of raising the required funds to purchase similar wooden platforms for all of the other classrooms. This, I had to explain to my group, was the UK government’s digital technology policy drive in action – albeit not as seamlessly as my students had been led to believe from their readings of the academic literature.

This enforced situation of ‘making do’ and ‘getting by’ sums up the messy realities of digital technology use in twenty-first century school systems. The fact that teachers or students in this particular British school were not using the interactive whiteboards with much regularity or enthusiasm was understandable. The paucity of whiteboard use in this school appeared to be influenced by a range of issues beyond the usual explanations for low technology take-up (i.e. that teachers lack the expertise, confidence or know-how to use the technology properly, or else that they lack access to the technology). Instead, when my Masters students and I were reflecting later on our visit, we could see that (non)use of the interactive whiteboards was shaped by a range of unseen factors that were rarely acknowledged in the academic literature. After discussing the matter for a few minutes we had come up with the following factors that could be said to have some bearing on the apparent shunning of whiteboard use in the school:

• IT industry pressure to integrate whiteboards that were designed originally for office environments and adult users into school settings;

• government policy requirements to insert an interactive whiteboard in every school regardless of demand;

• the social context of the school and its environs (in the case of our visit school such issues included national health and safety regulations, and local fear of crime);

• the materiality of the Victorian buildings that many UK schools remain housed in;

• the relatively small size of primary school students in comparison to adult-sized computer hardware;

• the pragmatism of the Parent Teacher Association in finding and funding low-tech solutions to high-tech problems.

There are certainly many more issues that could be identified in addition to this initial list. The overall point of this vignette is that there are many reasons why digital technologies in schools may be ‘not working’ in the ways that many people believe that they should. Moreover, there are many ways that digital technologies may perhaps be allowed to ‘work better’ within the school setting. Getting to the heart of these debates involves paying sustained attention to a range of aspects of educational technology above and beyond the hardware and software that most obviously constitute ‘the digital’ – not least giving serious thought to the social relations that surround the use of digital technologies in schools. Taking a wider critical view of the ‘digital’ aspects of contemporary schools and schooling therefore forms the focus of this book.

This is a book about the social, cultural, economic and political aspects of digital technology and education. In particular it sets out to unpack the relationships between digital technology and compulsory education – i.e. schools, schooling and all other elements of the formal organised provision of education to children and young people. This is a book that attempts to make sense of what happens (and what does not happen) when the digital and the educational come together in the guise of ‘schools technology’. The next nine chapters will identify and examine the key tensions and controversies that surround technology and schooling in the early twenty-first century, culminating in a set of suggestions, proposals and recommendations for addressing the ‘problems’ that appear to beset schools technology. Above all, the book sets out to develop a critical understanding of all these issues – offering a counterbalance to the often uncritical and unreflective academic study of educational technology over the past forty years.

Attaching the subtitle ‘a critical analysis’ to this book is not intended to imply a dogmatic adherence to any particular theoretical stance or viewpoint. Rather it reflects the book’s ambition to take a sustained look at schools and digital technology in terms of some rather unfamiliar concepts in the academic study of educational technology. These include issues of power, politics, control and conflict, as well as matters of empowerment, equality, social justice and participatory democracy (see Gunter 2009). The book, therefore, seeks to re-politicise an increasingly de-politicised area of educational debate and analysis. It sets out to challenge the many contradictions that characterise the field of educational technology, and to develop new understandings of the forms that schools and schooling in the digital age could – and should – take.

The roots of this book lie in two simple contentions resulting from fifteen years of researching and writing about education and new technologies. First, it should be clear to all but the most zealous technophile that the much-heralded technological transformation of schools and schooling has yet to take place. As such it is perhaps time to accept that educational technology is simply not ‘performing’ as well as it could in formal educational settings. Second, it should be clear to even a casual reader of the literature in this area that academic discussion of educational technology is in urgent need of an overhaul. In this sense, it is perhaps time for renewed academic debate and analysis about why the use of digital technology in schools is as it is. From these contentious starting points this book sets out to offer a deliberately critical analysis of schools and digital technologies such as the internet, mobile telephones and other new digital media. With these thoughts in mind, the remainder of this first chapter now goes on to address some of the deceptively simple issues and assumptions that will underpin the remainder of the book’s discussion – i.e. what is meant by digital technology and, most importantly, what is the significance of ‘the digital’ to gaining an understanding of contemporary schools and schooling?

What is ‘digital technology’ and why does it matter?

This book is concerned with what is diversely referred to as digital technology, information and communications technology, computerised technology and a number of other variations on the ‘information technology’ label. In a technical sense all of these terms refer to computer-based systems – particularly software applications and computer hardware – that can be used to produce, manipulate, store, communicate and disseminate information. From the 1980s onwards, these systems have taken many forms as digital technologies such as computers, mobile phones and the internet have converged into an ever-growing retinue of tools, artefacts and applications. Now what is referred to vaguely as ‘digital technology’ can actually refer to one of any number of portable, handheld and mobile devices operating a wide range of software services and applications. Recently this diversity has been furthered by the rise of so-called ‘social media’ and ‘web 2.0’ technologies – internet-based services and applications that are based around a mass socialisation of connectivity powered by the collective actions of online user communities. The rapid pace of the diversification and convergence of ‘the digital’ can often appear, to academic audiences at least, as an impossible phenomenon to document and analyse in a reasoned or considered manner. Most recently, for example, technological commentators have already begun to move on to herald the emergence of biotechnologies, nanotechnologies and a third generation of ‘semantic web’ and ‘cloud computing’ tools based around the ‘intelligent use’ of information. All told, the relatively simple label of ‘digital technology’ refers to an ever-changing complex of technological artefacts and tools.

However, this book is not concerned primarily with technological artefacts per se. The use of the term ‘digital technology’ also alludes to the ongoing digitisation of culture, politics, economics and society that can be associated with such technologies – what can be termed ‘the digital age’ for want of a better label. Rather than being seduced wholly by the technical complexity and prowess of technological artefacts that process data in binary form of ‘zeroes and ones’, this book’s primary interest therefore lies in the things that are then done with these digital technologies. The roots of this book’s concern with the ‘digital age’ therefore lie in the activities and prevailing ways-of-being that have come to characterise life in the contemporary digital age – at least as experienced in technologically-infused (over)developed societies in Europe, North America and much of south-east Asia. In these grand terms, then, this book’s analysis of ‘schools and schooling in the digital age’ is intended to offer an investigation of the issues, tensions and controversies that lie at the heart of contemporary schooling. Beyond its broad interest in digital technology this book is more specifically concerned with a range of social, economic, cultural and political issues associated with the use of digital technologies that many commentators believe are set to (re)define contemporary schools and schooling. In particular, the rapid rise to prominence of the digital in contemporary education can be seen as part of a broader set of recent societal phenomena, not least the rise of a restructured free-market capitalism that lies at the heart of much – possibly all – contemporary societal change. It follows that anyone seeking to make sense of contemporary educational change pays close attention to these issues.

One of the striking characteristics of many recent accounts and analyses of the digital age is the generally transformatative (and often optimistic) ways in which the changes associated with digital technology tend to be imagined. In short, most accounts of the digital age are framed within common discourses of progress and the allure of ‘the new’. Many popular and academic perceptions of digital technology appear, for example, to be animated by a belief that the digital age represents a ‘pervasive sense of leaving the past behind’ (Murdock 2004, p.20). In particular, many general discussions of the digital age tend to be informed by a notion that the development of digital technology represents a distinctively new and improved set of social arrangements in relation to preceding ‘pre-digital’ times. This sense of improved change can be described as the ‘digital remediation’ of everyday life and social processes (see Bolter and Grusin 1999), where digital technologies are seen to be reconfiguring many – possibly all – social processes and practices for the better. This is not to say that ‘new’ digital forms are believed to be usurping all practices and processes that have gone before, but rather that digitally-based activities are able to borrow from, refashion and often surpass their earlier pre-digital equivalents. For many commentators, therefore, the ready answer to alleviating or even overcoming contemporary social problems is now seen to involve some form of digitally related solution. As Steve Woolgar (2002, p.3) reflects, ‘the implication is that something new, different, and (usually) better is happening’.

A prevailing faith in the ameliorative ability of digital technology is evident across most domains of human activity. At a macro level of analysis, for example, the ‘flattening out’ of hierarchies and the introduction of a ‘networking logic’ to the organisation of social relations is seen to support an open (re)configuration of society and a corresponding under-determination of organisational structures (e.g. Castells 1996; Friedman 2007). Conversely, at a micro-level the many ‘affordances’ of digital technology are seen to be boosting an individualisation of meaning-making and action that prompts, for example, a resurgence of more ‘primitive’ pre-industrial ways of life. For instance, the networking aspects of digital technologies such as the internet and mobile telephony have long been portrayed as rekindling a previously lost sense of tribalism, nomadism and communitarianism (Rheingold 1994; D’Andrea 2006). A range of claims have also been made regarding the role of digital technologies such as the internet in providing new opportunities for informal exchanges of knowledge, expertise and folk-wisdom (Sproull and Kiesler 1991), supplementing an individual’s social capital (Wellman et al. 2001; Haythornthwaite 2005) and even ‘breaking down the barriers and separate identities that have been the main cause of human suffering and war’ (Mulgan 1998, cited in Robins and Webster 2002, p.247). Even overlooking the more fanciful and idealistic aspects of such accounts, the majority of popular and academic commentary concurs that digital technologies have recast social arrangements and relations along more open, democratic and ultimately empowering lines. In the (over)developed world at least, these changes are often imagined to have been wide-ranging and far-reaching. As Nicholas Gane (2005, p.475) reflects:

It would seem to me that internet-related technologies have directly altered the patterning of everyday life, including the way we work, access and exchange information, shop, meet people, and maintain and organise existing social ties. These technologies have done more than ‘add on’ to existing social arrangements; they have radically altered the three main spheres of social life, the spheres of production, consumption and communication.

As Gane implies, the direct alteration of everyday life is evident across all main areas of society such as business, industry, politics and polity, the family, news media, entertainment and leisure. Yet many people would argue that education has proved to be a particularly significant site for the reconfigurative properties of the digital. In particular, many people see the primary concerns of education as resonating especially closely with those of digital technology – i.e. the production and dissemination of information and knowledge through communication and interaction with others. While this affinity is seen to apply to all levels and forms of educational provision, many people would argue that compulsory schools and schooling should be seen as one of the most important and most appropriate areas of education in which the effects of the digital age are being felt.

Why look at digital technology, schools and schooling?

Having outlined this book’s focus on the digital, it is also important to make clear the terms of reference for the educational aspects of discussion – in particular the notions of school and schooling. This book is concerned with what is referred to in North America and Australia as ‘K12’ or ‘P12’ education and often labelled elsewhere as compulsory schooling – i.e. the elementary and secondary schooling that is provided free of change by the state and is generally mandatory for all children and young people. Nearly all readers of this book will have attended a school for much of their childhood and adolescence. Such is the familiarity that stems from this personal experience that many people give little thought to what schools actually are and how they really work. With this thought in mind, it is worth taking a little time to clarify the terms and scope of reference that will underpin the remainder of this book’s discussions.

In the most basic sense schools can be understood as the institutions where children and young people receive educati...

Indice dei contenuti

• Foundations and Futures of Education
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Part I High-tech hope and digital disappointment
• Part II Making sense of schools, schooling and digital technology
• Part III What to do with schools in the digital age?
• References
• Index