Education and Technology

Second Edition

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1

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY

Primary Schools and ICT, Neil Selwyn, John Potter and Sue Cranmer
Learning Reimagined, Graham Brown-Martin
Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Art, Mona Sakr

Forthcoming from Bloomsbury

Disabled Children and Digital Technologies, Sue Cranmer

Education and Technology

Key Issues and Debates Second Edition

Neil Selwyn

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Preface
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Second Edition

Contents

What Do We Mean by ‘Education’ and ‘Technology’?

Making Sense of Technology and Educational Change

A Short History of Education and Technology

Technology and Learning

Technology and Teachers

Technology and Educational Institutions

Technology and the Individualisation of Education

Education and Technology: Where Now?

Glossary References Index

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Preface

Education is shaped increasingly by digital technologies and the things that people do with them. Yet,
technology is often something that just ‘gets done’ in education without much thought or reflection.
This book was not written to simply add to the chatter and noise that surrounds education and
technology. This is not a book that offers ‘How To’ advice or lists ‘50 Apps to Use in the Classroom’.
Instead, this book explores wider issues and questions as to what we are doing with technology in
education ... and how we might do it better.

More often than not, discussions about education and technology gravitate quickly towards similar
sets of issues. For example, people will point to obvious shortfalls between potential benefits of
technology as opposed to practical limitations. Those people working in schools, colleges and
universities might highlight institutional ‘barriers’ to the widespread roll-out of technologies – for
instance, a perennial lack of time and resourcing, or the difficulties of ‘fitting’ technology around
curriculum and assessment structures. Similarly, there is much talk of individual ‘barriers’ to
technology use in education, such as people’s attitudes, skills and motivation, and the ‘fit’ of
technologies with the existing priorities of teachers and students.

It is important to recognise that these are primarily social, rather than technical, issues. These are all
issues that are rooted in the social relations, cultures, politics and economics of education. Of course,
there is no such thing as a purely ‘technical’ issue, but it is often much easier for those of us working
in education to focus on the practical and mechanistic aspects of technology use, while overlooking
wider factors relating to people and places. As such, this book aims to engage with the ‘bigger picture’
of education and technology – to move beyond an applied perspective and bring the concerns of social
science to bear on the use of technology in educational contexts.

As will soon be evident, social science is a useful way of broadening our understandings of education
and technology. Underpinning this approach is a desire to be critical, yet balanced, and to get beneath
the hype and exaggeration that often pervade discussions of technology. Engaging with critical – as
well as celebratory – perspectives is a necessary step towards creating better uses of technology in
education. There is little point in pretending that everything is fine with technology use in education.
This book, therefore, makes an effort to highlight the problematic as well as the positive aspects of
education and technology, while all the time striving to be constructively critical rather than
dismissively cynical.

So, at this early stage it is worth foregrounding a few of the recurring themes that develop throughout
the book. These are the kinds of issues and debates that the next eight chapters have in store.

1. One quickly established message is that ‘nothing is straightforward’. Most people would agree that
digital technology is a prominent feature of contemporary society, and is set to increase in prominence
over the next few decades. Yet, this is perhaps one of the only things that we can be sure of. Indeed,
the only thing that is completely certain when it comes to technology and education is that there is no
certainty. As will be demonstrated in each of this book’s chapters, we cannot assume that technology
will simply ‘come good’ of its own accord in the near future. Instead, education and technology is a
site of intense conflict and struggle, where many of the big battles are fought over what ‘education’ is
and what ‘education’ should be.

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2. Another issue that becomes quickly apparent is the need to distinguish between rhetoric and reality.
In other words, we need to look beyond questions of how technology could be used and, instead, ask
questions about how technologies are actually used in practice. This is not easy – most technology
development is driven by ambitions to improve and innovate, prompting many practitioners to be
interested mainly in asking ‘state-of-the-art’ questions about technology. Instead, this book recognises
the value in asking what might be termed ‘state-of- the-actual’ questions – that is, questions that are
less aspirational but more realistic in their outlook.

3. This book certainly challenges expectations of the technological ‘transformation’ of education.

Digital technology is usually presumed to facilitate new and improved forms of education, but is often
used to do the same old things – just slightly differently. This book asks questions of what is genuinely
new and/or different when digital technologies are used in education. Where is technology being used
to bring together areas of education that were previously unconnected? Where is there substantial
‘disruption’ of educational arrangements?

4. When analysed in these terms, technology is rarely found to be a means of solving problems. Instead,
technology often leads to the introduction of new problems or the alteration of existing problems. As
such, another central concern of this book is to examine the nature of technological and educational
‘change’. Here it is important to recognise that the relationships between education change and digital
technology are not as straightforward as we might like to imagine. The ‘impact’ of technology on
education is not something that can be discussed in binary terms of Good/Bad or Change/No Change.
In fact, it is sensible not to frame technology in ‘cause and effect’ terms of impacts. There is a tendency
to imagine technology along deterministic lines where a device or application somehow causes
individuals and institutions to change what they are doing. Yet, the realities are far messier, with
various social aspects of education often influencing the shape of technology use.

5. In this sense, the book is careful to approach digital technology in terms of human and non-human
factors. For example, when people talk about ‘the internet’, they are not usually referring to specific
technological devices and artefacts per se (e.g. copper wires, routers, servers, HTML code). Instead,
talk of ‘the internet’ is most often concerned with the activities and practices that people engage in
with these devices and artefacts, as well as the social contexts of these practices and activities. All
these human aspects can influence the nature of what the internet is. The internet, like all technologies
discussed in this book, is socially shaped.

6. Following this line of thinking, the book highlights a range of educational processes, procedures and
practices that can influence – and socially shape – the nature of technology use. These include
classroom culture, ideas about pedagogy and curriculum, the links between education and the world
of work. They also include educational policymaking and the hidden curriculum, as well as the everyday
pressures of being a student or being a teacher. Such influences mean that it makes little sense to
expect technology to be capable of having inevitable and predictable effects on education.

These issues and arguments are developed across the next eight chapters. Perhaps the main ‘take
home message’ from this book is that we need to be more realistic (and less idealistic) about education
and technology. There are few grounds for being super- confident or over-certain about the imminent
transformation of education. Most people who are involved in education have grown weary of the
hype, cheerleading and bravado that surround digital technology. Instead, it is important that
everyone interested in education develops understandings of technology that are suitably attuned to
the complexity of the topic.

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So, hopefully, this brief introduction will enthuse you to get going with the ‘proper’ bits of the book,
and after reading the next eight chapters, your ideas and assumptions will have been challenged and
perhaps even changed. Like most things in education, the more you look at technology use, the more
complicated it becomes. This book is intended to make these complicated things a little clearer!

Neil Selwyn Melbourne, Australia – May 2016

Acknowledgements

There are a number of people who have helped the ideas and arguments expressed in this book to
come to fruition – especially in challenging and refining my understandings of education and
technology over the last twenty years. In particular, I would like to thank colleagues from Monash
University who have been kind enough to discuss and/or read over various draft versions of the
material in this second edition of the book. They include Michael Henderson, Mike Phillips, Scott Bulfin,
Selena Nemorin and Luci Pangrazio.

I would also like to repeat my thanks to former colleagues at UCL’s ‘Knowledge Lab’ who helped shape
the writing of the first edition. They include David Buckingham, Brock Craft, Anastasia Gouseti, Carey
Jewitt, Diana Laurillard, Harvey Mellar, Ambrose Neville, Richard Noss, Martin Oliver, Kaska Porayska-
Pomsta, John Potter, Sara Price, Rebekah Willett, Niall Winters and Michael Young. I would also like to
acknowledge the contribution made by all of the students with whom I have discussed these ideas
during the various courses that I have taught on this topic over the last twenty years.

Finally, I am always mindful of the hard work that goes into the production of every book. So in terms
of the production and publication of this book, I would also like to thank the production and editorial
team at Bloomsbury. Thanks to Ally Baker for her guidance with the First Edition of the book, and to
Rachel Shillington for commissioning the Second Edition. Thanks also to Maria Giovanna Brauzzi and
Jyoti Basuita at Bloomsbury – as well as the anonymous readers and referees for commenting on
earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Notes on the Second Edition

Anyone familiar with the First Edition of the book (2011) should find this second edition to have been
improved and updated without losing the basic spirit and structure of the original. Producing a second
edition of a book on a fast-changing topic inevitably involves rewriting each chapter to include recent
developments in digital technology, education change and education theory. Some of these changes
reflect the changing topicality and terminology. For example, the First Edition was written in an era of
interactive whiteboards, MMORPGs, virtual worlds and clickers. While these technologies still exist,
they are hardly the cutting-edge developments that they once were. Other changes are more
substantial. For example, this new edition features expanded sections on teachers and pedagogy,
alternate models of schooling, notions of technological change and ‘disruption’. It also incorporates a
range of the academic and popular commentary that has been produced since the writing of the First
Edition.

Notwithstanding these improvements, I hope that anyone familiar with using the First Edition of this
book will be able to continue much as before. While some of the chapter titles are altered, the eight
‘key’ issues remain the same. This Second Edition still opens with discussions of key definitions and
the relationships between technology and education change. The book also retains an interest in the
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history and the future(s) of education and technology. The chapter on technology and learning has
been expanded to consider recent theories of networked and connected

forms of information and knowledge. As with the First Edition, at the core of the book is a concern
with how technology bumps up against the interests of institutions, educators and individual learners.
Indeed, the discussions in the First Edition on democratization have been reworked into a new chapter
(Chapter 7), which unpacks the issues and tensions surrounding technology and the individualisation
of education. All told, this book should provide readers with a robust means of making sense of
education and technology for a good few years to come.

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 1 What Do We Mean by ‘Education’ and ‘Technology’?

Chapter Outline
Introduction
What is education?
What is technology?
From ‘analog’ to ‘digital’ technology
Making sense of digital technologies in education Conclusions

Introduction

The use of technology – and in particular the use of digital technology – is now an integral aspect of
education. Yet, making sense of education and technology is not a straightforward task. Technology
development over the last couple of decades has been unceasing and extensive. We live in a ‘digital
age’ where niche technology products and practices can rapidly become mainstream features of day-
to-day life. For example, it has become standard to purchase palm-sized computing devices and carry
them around at all times. The most popular online platforms are now accessed by billions (rather than
millions) of users each day. Many people turn to technology for immediate solutions to mundane
problems. These days, people simply send a text message to arrange to meet up, Google the answer
to a misremembered fact or forgotten name, use GPS to find their way – whatever predicament one
might be in, it is more than likely ‘there’s an app for that’.

It is understandable, therefore, that many core features of education are beginning to be reassessed
and reimagined. For instance, digital technologies lie at the heart of how people communicate,
consume information and organise their lives. This clearly has implications for how learning takes place,
how knowledge is created and how people prefer to be taught. At the same time, digital systems and
networks are integral to the running of modern institutions. This has obvious consequences for schools,
universities and other forms of education provision. With such issues in mind, anyone interested in
education has a growing need to be mindful of the complex relationships that are developing between
education and technology. This is a topic that demands sustained analysis and critical thought. This is
not a topic that we can simply ignore.

Unfortunately, education and technology is something that people rarely give serious thought to. This
is not to say that intelligent or thoughtful things are never said about education and technology. Yet,
most people see little need to scrutinise what has become a familiar feature of educational practice.
The majority of people in education see digital technologies as a common-sense element of their job
and, for the most part, something that is simply ‘got on with’. This book does not share such
complacency. Digital technology is certainly an embedded part of contemporary education contexts,
but it is surely something that requires sustained and honest appraisal. More than ever before, the
issues and tensions that have grown up around education and technology merit close examination.

As will be reiterated throughout this book, any critique of education and technology needs to be wide-
ranging and broad- minded. In particular, our primary focus should be not on technological devices,
tools and applications per se, but on the practices and activities that surround them, the meanings
that people attach to them and the social relations and structures that these technologies are linked
to. At this early stage of the book, such concepts might appear to be imprecise and unclear. The

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remainder of this chapter will therefore lay the foundation for subsequent exploration of these issues.
First, then, it is helpful to consider a couple of basic questions of definition. What exactly do we mean
by the terms ‘education’ and ‘technology’?

What is education?

Perhaps the best way to develop a rounded understanding of ‘education’ is to start by defining another
term altogether – that is, that of ‘learning’. Despite being a concept central to education, many
educational writers and academics are surprisingly diverse in their basic definitions of ‘learning’. When
we keep this ambiguity in mind, the description offered by Ivan Illich is perhaps as good as any: ‘To
learn means to acquire a new skill or insight’ (1973, p. 11). In these terms at least, the process of
‘learning’ refers to an individual’s acquisition of new skills, or else new forms of knowledge and
understanding. These different aspects of learning are also reflected in Benjamin Bloom’s well-known
‘taxonomy of educational objectives’ (1956). Here Bloom asserted that all learning can be described
in terms of three overlapping domains: the psychomotor domain (manual and physical skills – that is,
‘doing’); the affective domain (emotions and attitudes – that is, ‘feeling’) and the cognitive domain
(intellectual capability and knowledge – that is, ‘thinking’).

One recurring contention among educationalists is whether learning should be seen as a product or
as a process. Many of the theories of learning that were developed during the first decades of the
twentieth century tended to conceptualise learning as an end product or outcome – most often as a
distinct change in behaviour. This view of learning is expressed, for example, in the ‘behaviourist’
conception of learning as a relatively permanent change in behaviour as a result of an individual’s
experiences. This notion of learning-as-product continues to be a popular way of understanding
learning, especially among those directly involved in education. Many students (and some educators)
continue to see learning as consisting largely of ‘gaining knowledge’ and ‘the filling of empty vessels’
– ideas that Carl Bereiter (2002) describes as ‘folk’ theories of learning. These concepts were reflected
in Roger Säljö’s (1979) investigations during the 1970s and 1980s where he questioned large numbers
of adult learners to explore their perceptions of what they were doing when engaging with education.
The view of learning-as- product was certainly apparent in the first three types of answers that Säljö
received, which were as follows:

• learning as a quantitative increase in knowledge, learning as acquiring information or ‘knowing a lot’;

• learning as memorising, learning as storing information that can be reproduced;

• learning as acquiring facts, skills and methods that can be retained and used as necessary.

However, the fourth and fifth categories of answers revealed in Säljö’s research could be said to point
towards a different notion of learning. In this sense, some people were also found to describe their
learning as an ongoing process rather than a finite product:

• learning as making sense or abstracting meaning, learning that involves relating parts of the subject
matter to each other and to the real world;

• learning as interpreting and understanding reality in a different way, learning that involves
comprehending the world by reinterpreting knowledge.

These latter descriptions of learning as an ongoing process introduce the idea of an individual learner
building upon his or her previous experiences and, in some instances, changing his or her behaviour
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as a result. As we shall see in Chapter 4, this is certainly a view of learning that many contemporary
educationalists and psychologists would concur with. As Jerome Bruner (1996, p. 146) put it, learning
‘is not simply a technical business of well managed information processing’. Instead, learning might
also be seen to involve individuals having to make sense of who they are and develop an understanding
of the world in which they live. From this perspective, learning can be seen as a continuing process of
‘participation’ rather than a discrete instance of ‘acquisition’ (Sfard 1998).

In this respect, we should acknowledge that learning can sometimes be an unconscious and unplanned
process that individuals are unaware is taking place. Alan Rogers (2003) referred to this type of
learning as an ongoing process of ‘task- conscious’ learning that takes place all the time. As Rogers
argued, this learning is ‘concrete, immediate and confined to a specific activity; it is not concerned
with general principles’ (2003, p. 18). For example, much of the learning involved in parenting a child
or in running a household could be said to fit this description. While some commentators have referred
to this kind of learning as unconscious or implicit, Rogers (2003, p. 21) suggests that it might be better
to speak of people as having a consciousness of the task. In other words, while the learner may not be
conscious that learning is taking place, he or she is usually aware of the specific task at hand.

Of course, when asked to describe ‘learning’, most people would think of forms of activity that are
rather more organised and planned. In this sense, learning is often a process that individuals are
consciously engaged in. Rogers (2003) labelled this as ‘learning-conscious’ – that is, learning that is
facilitated in some way by someone else. This can be described as ‘educative learning’ rather than the
incidental accumulation of experience just described above. This definition implies a consciousness of
learning where individuals are aware fully that the task they are engaged in involves some form of
learning. As Rogers put it, this process usually involves guided episodes of learning – in other words,
‘learning itself is the task ... learning [is made] more conscious in order to enhance it’ (2003, p. 27).

In these terms, then, the processes and practices of ‘education’ are obviously related to Rogers’
‘learning-conscious’ descriptions of learning. When most people talk about ‘education’, they are
referring to the institutionally sponsored provision of formalised learning – that is, learning that is
structured and often assessed and credentialised. Formal education is perhaps the easiest form of
education to identify and by far the most discussed in the academic literature. A wide range of
institutionally provided educational opportunities exist – most obviously the compulsory forms of
school-based learning for children and young people. Similar forms of continuous post-compulsory
education also exist through colleges, universities and various types of distance education. Formal
education can also be found outside of settings such as schools and universities. For instance, ‘adult
education’ and ‘community education’ institutions offer a range of full-time and part-time
opportunities to engage in classes and courses. Work-based training also represents a major source of
adult formal education – including health and safety training, work- related evening classes, as well as
more complex forms of professional development. These latter forms are increasingly relevant to the
broad concept of ‘life-long learning’ – that is, the notion that education encompasses not only the
compulsory phases of schooling but also education and training throughout the life-course.

In contrast to these examples of formal education, Rogers’ notion of task-conscious learning relates
mainly to what could be termed informal education. In one sense, informal education can be seen
simply as ‘forms of learning that occur in and through everyday life’ (Mills and Kraftl 2014, p. 3). This
is learning that usually has no curriculum, assessment or formal ‘teacher’. In contrast to the types of
formal education just described, informal education ‘is not typically classroom based or highly
structured, and control of learning rests primarily in the hands of the learner’ (Marsick and Watkins
1990, p. 12). Perhaps the most common form of informal education is work-based ‘learning on the job’

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– yet, informal education also includes a range of learning stimulated by general interests, pursuits
and hobbies outside of the workplace.

As a whole, then, the term ‘education’ can be best understood as the conditions and arrangements
where learning takes place. Yet, in reaching this definition we should recognise that education is not
simply a technical matter of facilitating an individual’s learning. Indeed, thinking about education and
technology only in terms of ‘learning’ narrows our attention towards specific processes and activities
centred on the individual ‘learner’ rather than the broader aims and purposes of ‘education’. Instead,
Gert Biesta (2015) suggests that there are three broader functions of ‘education’ that need to be
acknowledged alongside matters of ‘learning’. The first is what can be termed the ‘qualification’
function – that is, giving people the knowledge, skills and dispositions that allow them to ‘do something’
– whether this is training for employment or the ‘life skills’ needed to function in society. The second
is what can be termed the ‘socialisation’ function – what Biesta describes as ‘insert[ing] individuals
into existing ways of doing and being’ such as particular social, cultural and political ‘orders’. The third
is what can be termed the ‘subjectification’ function – giving individuals a sense of who they are and
encouraging the ability to act autonomously, and think independently and critically.

These broad societal and cultural functions remind us that much of what takes place in an educational
setting might have little or nothing to do with learning per se. Often, the most significant aspects of
education lie beyond the immediate instance of an individual engaging in the process of learning.
Instead, it is important to also consider what can be termed the social ‘milieu’ of education. This can
include the organisational cultures and micro politics of educational institutions such as schools,
colleges and universities. Similarly, how an individual engages with education is also often linked
closely with the concerns of institutions such as the family, the workplace and the wider community.
In turn, these contexts are themselves set within a range of even wider social milieu – not least,
commercial marketplaces, nation-states and global economies. While it is perhaps not immediately
apparent to an observer of a classroom setting, it would be foolhardy to attempt to explain any aspect
of education without some consideration of all these wider influences.

It seems appropriate that this book’s discussions of education and technology pay attention to the
aspects of education that lie above and beyond the context of the individual and his or her immediate
learning situation. This will include acknowledging the linkages between educational systems and the
various elements of the ‘macro’ level of society such as global economics, labour markets and political
and cultural institutions. Similarly, we need to understand the act of learning as being entwined with
many other stratifications of social life such as family background, socio- economic circumstances,
gender, race, disability and social class. The study of education and technology should, therefore, be
seen through the lens of ‘social science’ – moving beyond making sense of the ‘technical’ aspects of
learning and also paying close attention to the social world of education.

What is technology?

Making this distinction between the ‘technical’ and ‘social’ aspects of education carries over into how
we can approach the notion of ‘technology’. Unlike learning, there is fairly clear agreement among
academics on the definition of ‘technology’. In basic terms, technology is understood as the process
by which humans modify nature to meet their needs and wants. In a (pre)historic sense, the concept
of technology refers to humans’ ongoing use of tools and crafts to adapt and control their environment.
Human use of technology is usually seen as beginning over two million years ago with the conversion
of natural resources into simple tools. This practice was adopted for reasons of survival and mastery
of the environment (e.g. the development of the spear), as well for more affective purposes such as
decoration and adornment (e.g. the development of cave painting). Seen along these lines, technology
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is one of the features that distinguish humans from most other animals. As David Nye reasons,
‘Animals are atechnical; they are content with the simple act of living. Humans in contrast continually
redefine their necessities to include more’ (2007, p. 2).

As Nye suggests, technologies are utilised by people not just to sustain forms of life but also to enhance
and improve existing forms of living. Early humans’ development of the ability to control fire greatly
increased the availability of food sources. Similarly, the invention of the wheel around 4000 BCE
greatly helped people to move around and control their environment. In this sense of significant
improvement, the development of the wheel is very similar to the development of the computer.
Indeed, the notion of using technology as a means of improving previous arrangements certainly lies
at the heart of what we would see as more ‘modern’ technologies. For example, technological
advances such as the printing press, the telephone and the internet all lessened physical barriers to
communication and allowed people to interact on a worldwide basis. Even the development of
technologies such as nuclear weaponry could be said to have followed this logic of making things
better, albeit from a more contestable perspective. As Volti (1992, p. 4) puts it, ‘Technologies are
developed and applied so that we can do things not otherwise possible, or so that we can do them
cheaper, faster and easier.’

This emphasis on ‘doing things better’ implies that the term ‘technology’ refers to more than just the
material tools and artefacts that are used to do something. This can be seen in the origins of
contemporary uses of the word ‘technology’ in the ancient Greek word ‘technología’. The first half of
‘technología’ relates to the Greek word ‘techne’, which can be variously translated as skill, art or craft.
This itself reflects an earlier Indo- European prefix ‘teks-’, which refers to the process of weaving or
fabricating (as in ‘textile’). The second half of ‘technología’ relates to the Greek suffix ‘-logía’, which
translates roughly as the understanding of something, or as a branch of knowledge. In this sense, the
term ‘technology’ has always referred to the processes and practices of doing things, understanding
things and developing knowledge. As Albert Teich puts it succinctly, ‘Technology is more than just
machines’ (1997, p. 1).

Indeed, contemporary uses of the term ‘technology’ refer to far more than just machinery and
artefacts (i.e. the ‘non-human’ material aspects of technology). Instead, they also refer to the social
contexts and social circumstances of the use of these machines and artefacts (i.e. what can be termed
the ‘human’ aspects of technology). How we understand these ‘human’ aspects of technology involves
a number of important distinctions and definitions. For instance, Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman
suggest that ‘technology’ should be seen in three ways: the physical objects themselves; the human
activities that take place in conjunction with these physical objects; and the human knowledge that
surrounds these activities – that is, ‘what people know as well as what they do’ (Mackenzie and
Wajcman 1985, p. 3). From this perspective, technologies are understood as ‘cultural’ objects, part of
bodies of knowledge shared between people and passed down from generation to generation (Goyder
1997).

This idea of technologies being more than just machines or material artefacts is made clearer if we
consider a contemporary technology such as the internet. Most people would agree that the internet
is more than just the copper wires, fibre-optic cables, wireless connections, servers and processors
that constitute the material networks of computing devices that support the internet. Indeed, when
people talk about the internet, they are usually referring to the activities that they engage in online,
the cultures and values that can be said to surround these social activities and the knowledge that
results from these activities. In this sense, it is far more useful to describe the internet in terms of its
social ‘content’ rather than its technical form (Wessels 2010).

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One of the most straightforward ways to conceptualise the social and the technical aspects of
technology is offered by Lievrouw and Livingstone’s (2002) description of three distinct,
interconnected aspects of what ‘technology’ is:

• artefacts and devices: the technology itself and how it is designed and made;

• activities and practices: what people do with technologies (including issues of human interaction,
organising, identity, techniques and competencies);

• context: social arrangements and organisational forms that surround the use of technologies
(including institutions, social structures and cultures).

We shall return to these different aspects of technology throughout this book. As well as encapsulating
neatly the human and non-human aspects of technology, these three categories introduce the
contention that technologies are not merely ‘neutral’ tools that humans can use freely in any way that
they wish. Instead, technologies are an important part of the conditions of social life, often ‘providing
structure for human activity’ (Winner 1986, p. 6).

Of course, this idea of technology providing structure and setting conditions for human activity can be
seen in beneficial terms. We have already discussed how technologies have been developed and used
to enhance the quality of life from the invention of the spear and the wheel onwards. Most
commentators would agree that present-day technologies continue to play similar roles in the distinct
improvement of society. Indeed, some people would go further than this, and argue that many
present-day technologies have significant potential for transformative change, not least in enhancing
the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices.

Yet, as we shall discuss throughout this book, it is important to adopt a balanced perspective on the
potential benefits and presumed transformations of technology. In particular, any technology must
also be seen in terms of limits and constraints that it imposes as well as opportunities that it may offer
for individual action and agency. Even what may appear to be the most ‘transformatory’ technology
can end up limiting the choices

and opportunities available to some individuals. In particular, acknowledging that technology is

connected with pre-existing organised structures of human activity can help us develop more detailed
understandings of why technologies are used (and not used) in education in the ways that they are. It
is therefore important to acknowledge that technologies do not always change things in education for
the better. Technologies do not always allow people to work more efficiently, or support people in
doing what they want. Instead, technologies can often have unexpected and unintended
consequences, especially when used in education. Technologies are often linked to a range of other
issues far beyond immediate concerns of the individual student or classroom.

The strengths of conceptualising technology in this way are illustrated if we consider one of the most
familiar educational technologies of the last hundred years or so – the textbook. In one sense,
describing a textbook (such as the one that you are reading at the moment) as artefact refers to the
material book itself – its pages and covers, ink and paper. There are, of course, some very important
issues relating to textbooks as artefacts, not least their portability and durability, as well as the
environmental issues related to printing paper-based books. Yet, if we also consider the activities and
practices of using textbooks, then a number of other issues come to the fore. For example, the activity
of reading requires certain skills and literacies that can advantage some individuals and disadvantage
others. The practice of using textbooks in a classroom can also imply certain modes of teaching and
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learning – often passive, didactic and instructional, but perhaps learner-driven and imaginative.
Textbooks can be used as starting-points for discursive forms of learning, or simply as an end in
themselves. As Norm Friesen (2014) reasons, textbooks are designed to become meaningful in
conjunction with specific forms of educational engagement – for example, large lectures and classes,
or perhaps solitary note-taking, annotation and other self-study practices. Even now, when used in a
classroom context, a teacher may well choose to teach ‘to the text’. In some classes, textbooks will be
the sole preserve of the teacher; in others they will be distributed to every student.

Focusing on the context of the textbook as an educational technology introduces a set of further issues.
For example, the content of textbooks is an especially contentious area. Often, textbook content will
reflect the notion of an ‘official curriculum’. In countries where there is no official state-authorised
curriculum, the textbook can itself ‘become’ the de facto curriculum. Often, the content of a textbook
will imbue certain judgements, assumptions, values and perspectives on what is otherwise presented
as ‘objective’ information. Much has been written, for example, about the selective tradition of
textbook content where some voices are silenced and other voices privileged. Concerns exist over the
promotion of stereotypes and values, such as the presentation of race, class, gender and disability.
These issues are reflected in long-running debates over the tendency of history textbooks to privilege
the ‘voices of the victorious’ – usually the accounts of white, European males. Indeed, there have been
long-running debates over the tendency for textbooks to portray male-centred versions of history
(criticised by some commentators as only telling ‘his-story’). Attempts have, therefore, been made to
produce alternative texts focusing on ‘her-story’ – that is, historical accounts that are written from a
feminist perspective, that emphasise the role of women and that are told from women’s point of view.

The wider context of the textbook as an educational technology also includes the role of commercial
companies in producing and selling the books. Like all aspects of educational technology, textbook
production certainly remains a big business. A company such as Pearson Education sells over $4 billion
worth of textbooks and curriculum materials each year. From this perspective, the politics of textbook
production and sales are understandably complicated. In the United States, for example, some states
and large school districts have significant leverage over the editorial decisions of publishers concerning
what is printed and not printed in their books. Groups who have sufficient purchasing power to
influence publishers’ decisions can dictate the inclusion of information on contentious topics such as
the theory of evolution, climate change and slavery or the rights and wrongs of abortion. As Michael
Apple (1991) has argued, the textbook should be seen as a social and political issue – as a likely source
of ‘official knowledge’ and the commodification and commercialisation of what takes place in the
classroom.

From ‘analog’ to ‘digital’ technology

These different aspects of the textbook suggest that even the most familiar and ordinary instances of
technology use in education will be linked to a wide range of social issues and factors. This is especially
the case with the types of technologies that this book is concerned primarily with – that is, recent
forms of digital technology. We, therefore, need to now define what ‘digital’ is and consider the wider
practices, contexts, issues and factors that ‘the digital’ might be linked to.

The ‘digital’ aspects of contemporary life have so frequently been talked about over the last few years
that it is easy to lose sight of the origins of the word. In basic terms, ‘digital’ simply refers to
discontinuous data, based on the two distinct states of ‘off’ or ‘on’ (or 0 and 1) with no value in
between. Digital computers, for example, are capable only of distinguishing between these two values
13
of 0 and 1, but are able to use binary codes to combine zeros and ones into large numbers and other
practical forms of information. In order to understand the significance of digital data, it is important
to understand its opposite – that is, analog data. ‘Analog’ refers to data that can be measured as a
continuously varying value. The most commonly cited example of analog data is that of the hands of a
clock, which move continuously around the clock-face to provide an ongoing measurement of time. A
digital clock, in comparison, is only capable of presenting a discontinuous series of numbers denoting
time with a gap between each value (every one-hundredth of a second, for example).

Alexander Galloway (2015) argues that the defining characteristic of ‘digital’ technologies lies,
therefore, in their capacity to first split and divide things, and then to reassemble them (usually in
forms that appear to be unaltered). The essence of digital technologies, therefore, could be said to lie
not in zeros and ones, but in ones and twos – specifically, ‘the one dividing into two’ (Galloway 2015,
n.p.). At first glance, the disassembled and reassembled nature of digital objects might appear
unimportant. Yet, these distinctions are crucial in explaining why digital technologies are seen to be
‘different’ (and most people would argue ‘better’) than what came before them.

The ‘difference’ of digital technology is something that people often find difficult to describe, yet it
usually relates to the fact that digital technologies essentially facilitate the simulation of the ways that
real-life things look, sound and feel, while at the same time processing information at a scale, spend
and complexity that was previously impossible. Many people are, therefore, able to discern (if only
faintly) the aesthetic differences of these digital simulations. In particular, it is important to remember
that humans generally experience the real world in analog form. For example, vision is a response to
the ever-changing intensity and wavelengths of light. Similarly, sound is made when objects vibrate
producing continually fluctuating pressure waves that can be picked up by our ears. Nevertheless, as
the example of the digital clock suggests, most analog events can be simulated through digital
information. Thus, while they might not be able to fully explain why, many people would agree that
there is a difference between hearing something in ‘real life’ and as a digital recording, or comparing
a digital photograph with its old-fashioned chemical equivalent. While we might become inured to
experiencing things in digital form, simulating the real world through billions of pixels is a qualitatively
and quantitatively altered process that will often feel slightly ‘different’.

Such aesthetic differences notwithstanding, it is understandable why most people consider digital
technology to be an improvement on previous analog ways of doing things. First, digital information is
far easier to store and distribute electronically as it is dense and compressible, meaning that a great
deal of digital data can be stored in a small physical space. Moreover, digital data are easier to
manipulate accurately than ‘real-world’ analog data. A good comparison of the manipulability of
analog and digital information would be the lengths that one would have to go to alter the appearance
of a conventional photograph as opposed to a digital image on screen. Digital data are seen to give
the users more control over using, storing and altering data as they see fit. Digital processes are seen
to be instantaneous and infinitely replicable. Perhaps most significantly, it is much cheaper to
distribute and sell large amounts of digital data. Digital technologies make good logistical and good
commercial sense.

All of these technical advantages have led to the idea of ‘the digital’ being associated with a number
of wider qualities and characteristics – not least the general perception that digital technologies are
more precise, more accurate and more efficient than analog machines and methods. Digital
technologies are seen to allow processes and activities to take place on far greater scales than before,
in considerably quicker and more powerful ways. Crucially, digital technologies and digital practices
are seen to give more control and flexibility to the individuals that use them. Digital technologies are,
therefore, associated with dramatically enhanced and improved ways of doing things. For many people,
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digital technologies are seen to have ushered in a new and improved era of living – the so-called digital
age.

One of the striking characteristics of many recent accounts and analyses of the digital age is the
generally transformatory (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 discourses
of progress, transformation and the allure of ‘the new’. Indeed, many people’s perceptions of digital
technology appear to be driven by a belief that it represents something new, although it is often
difficult to pin down the exact nature of this newness. As Galloway puts it, ‘There is something about
the digital. Most people aren’t quite sure what it is. Or what they feel about it. But something’ (2015,
n.p.). In particular, general discussions of the digital age tend to be informed by an implicit
understanding that advances in digital technology offer distinctively new possibilities in relation to
preceding ‘pre-digital’ times. As Lev Manovich concludes, often underpinning the idea of the ‘digital
age’ is an assumption that ‘computers and software are not just “technology” but rather the new
medium in which we can think and imagine differently’ (2013, p. 13).

Making sense of digital technologies in education

We will return to these specific distinctions and arguments throughout the book. For the time being,
we can conclude this chapter with some broader definitions and concerns. As has already been implied,
the remainder of this book will focus mainly on digital technologies rather than ‘pre-digital’
technologies such as the textbook or pen. In this sense, much of what we shall go on to discuss relates
to what has been referred to in the past as ‘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 computerised devices – that can be used to produce, manipulate, store,
communicate and disseminate data. Put simply, then, the umbrella term of ‘digital technology’ can
refer to a range of different aspects of contemporary technology use in education, including the
following:

• Computerised devices with an ability to access, modify, store and share data – for example,
smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktop computers.

• Other electronic devices with an ability to create, transmit and view data – for example, digital
cameras, wearable technologies (such as smart-watches, activity trackers).

• Display technologies capable of displaying digital data – for example, projectors, smart boards,
holograms, 3D displays, optical head-mounted displays.

• Additive technologies capable of processing digital data in physical form – for example, 3D printing.

• Artificial intelligence tools and systems – for example, intelligent systems, robotics.

• Systems software that controls and operates computer hardware in addition to supporting the
running of applications software – for example, operating systems (such as Windows, iOS, Android,
Linux), user interfaces.

• Applications software that helps users perform an activity – for example, word processors,
spreadsheets, search engines, games.

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• Simulation software – for example, virtual reality, mediated reality, augmented reality.

• Data processing tools and techniques – for example, data mining, analytics, algorithms.

This list is by no means exhaustive, yet these examples highlight a number of characteristics of
technology use that have emerged over the past twenty years. One of the defining features of these
forms of digital technology is that they draw upon what can be termed as a ‘networking’ logic. This is
apparent, for example, in the networked connections that the internet and mobile telephony support
between people, objects, organisations and information regardless of space, place or time. Similarly,
many contemporary digital technologies are built around ‘interactive’ rather than ‘broadcast’ forms
of exchange, with information shared between ‘many-to-many’ rather than transmitted from ‘one-to-
many’ (Jensen 2015). As Kevin Kelly noted over twenty years ago, ‘The central act of the coming era is
to connect everything to everything. ... All matter, big and small, will be linked into vast webs of
networks at many levels’ (1995, p. 201). The integration of networked technologies into many aspects
of everyday life since this observation has prompted recent commentators to proclaim ‘the culture of
connectivity’ as a defining feature of contemporary society – in terms of both the ‘connectedness of
human users’ and the recent ‘automated connectivity of platforms’ through flows of data and complex
algorithms (van Dijck 2015, p. 2).

Another defining feature of these digital technologies is that they are increasingly social in nature, as
evident in the popularity of the so-called social media. Of course, it can be argued that the idea of
‘social media’ is not new. As Zizi Papacharissi reasons, ‘All media are social. All media foster
communication and by definition are social’ (2015, p. 1). What distinguishes recent digital technologies
is their capacity to support forms of ‘mass socialisation’. In this sense, the use of many of the digital
technologies just listed depends upon the collective efforts of their users. Many of the most popular
online services and applications rely on openly shared ‘user-generated’ content that is authored,
curated, critiqued and reconfigured by a mass of users. In this way, much online technology use is
based upon an interactive and participatory ethos – as Danah Boyd puts it, supporting contexts for
mass interaction that ‘help people connect and collaborate, socialize, and coordinate’ (2015, p. 1).

One further defining feature of many of these digital technologies is the generation and processing of
data. For example, vast amounts of data are generated, stored and shared through the use of many
of the digital technologies listed above. This data is becoming an important part of how digital
technologies now operate. Computational tools are being developed to facilitate the processing of ‘big
data’ where vast data sets are joined together and analysed through large-scale and complex
calculations based around the use of algorithms, analytics and data mining. As Rob Kitchin notes, much
of the recent excitement for ‘big data’ analytics reflects the notion that complex social systems ‘can
be disassembled into neatly defined problems that can be solved or optimized through computation’
(2015, n.p.). These ideas relate back to established theories in fields such as cybernetics, artificial
intelligence and ‘machine learning’ that seek to harness the power of mathematical modelling,
statistical analysis, feedback and algorithms. The application of such techniques to modelling learning
and other educational processes has prompted understandable interest. All of these trends look set
to continue into the near future, reflecting the ongoing development of digital technology. This can
be seen in the increasing capacity of digital technology to store and process data. Over the last few
years, even the most casual technology users have witnessed their use of data storage progress from
talk of ‘megabytes’ and ‘gigabytes’ to ‘terabytes’ of information (or, if you prefer, from millions of
bytes to trillions of bytes). This expanding capacity for storage and connectivity means that the built-
in capabilities of technologies have become less important than their ability to connect to more
powerful devices and systems elsewhere. Such advances will continue to be accompanied by the
‘ubiquitous’ placement of digital technologies throughout the environment. The advance of flexi-
16
screen technology, for example, now allows miniature and disposable devices to be embedded in
everyday objects such as clothing and paper. This is sometimes described in terms of the ‘Internet of
Things’ where internet-connected sensors and data- generation devices are integrated into everyday
physical objects, machines and appliances, humans and animals.

All these advances suggest that life in the remainder of the twenty-first century will increasingly be
arranged around interactive, individualised digital technologies in the same way that life in much of
the twentieth century was shaped around mass broadcast technologies of the television, telegraph
and radio. We will return to the future educational implications of these technological developments
in Chapter 8. Suffice to say that, while it may be relatively straightforward to foresee the technical
form and function of the digital artefacts of the next ten years or so, gaining a sense of the associated
social practices, activities and wider contexts of use may be far more difficult.

Conclusions

At first glance it might appear that this chapter has little immediate relevance to the key issues,
concerns and debates surrounding technology use in education. Indeed, while we have talked much
of ‘education’ and of ‘technology’ there has deliberately been little consideration of the two concepts
in union. Instead, the discussions so far have taken the necessary step of disengaging ourselves from
our personal experiences of the digital age and, instead, beginning to think dispassionately about the
role of technology in society. Often, social scientists refer to this process as ‘making the familiar
strange’ – an awkward but necessary initial stage of any objective analysis.

This chapter has attempted to take a step back from the day-to- day details of technology use in
education and develop a solid basis for reconsidering and reevaluating the topic of educational
technology. First, we have made a case for a broad and societally aware definition of what ‘education’
is – that is, it covers a wide range of issues above and beyond formal learning in a classroom. Similarly,
we have made a case for developing a more precise understanding of what technology is. This should
allow us to avoid the weakness that limits many discussions of education and technology which, as
Martin Oliver (2016, p. 35) observes, often ‘mak[e] many claims about technology’s effects, but rarely
as[k] what technology is. This is a dangerous oversight; it leaves us with inadequate accounts of the
role of technology, and we risk simply cataloguing a series of outcomes without really understanding
what is happening or why’.

In this spirit, this chapter has contended that any discussion of education and technology needs to
cover much more than the material technologies and tools that are used in educational settings.
Moreover, there is little sense in seeing digital technologies simply as neutral tools that are used in
benign ways within educational contexts. Like all other technologies, educational technology is
intrinsically linked with the social, cultural, economic and political aspects of society. In particular, this
chapter has highlighted the need to understand the educational use of technology in terms of practice
and context. In other words, educational technology is less about devices and applications, and more
about what is ‘done’ with these devices and applications – that is, practices and meanings. From this
perspective, it is worthwhile returning to Lievrouw and Livingstone’s (2002) framework and defining
our interest in the use of technology in education along the following lines:

• artefacts and devices: the technologies themselves and how they are designed and made before
they reach educational settings;

17
• activities and practices: what people then do with the technologies in educational settings and for
educational purposes (including issues of human interaction, organising, identity, techniques and
competencies);

• context: the social arrangements and organisational forms that surround the use of the technologies
in educational settings and for educational purposes (including institutions, social structures and
cultures).

It will be useful to keep these distinctions in mind throughout the remainder of this book. Before doing
so, it might also be worthwhile taking some time to consider the different types of questions about
education and technology that these distinctions raise. Take, for instance, the following questions that
media critic Neil Postman (1997) was keen to suggest should be asked of any new technology in
education. While Postman was pondering the increased use of computers and the internet during the
1990s, his questions hold up remarkably well in the present day, that is:

• What is the problem to which a technology claims to be a solution?

• Whose problem is it?

• What new problems will be created by solving the old one?
• Which people and what institutions will be most harmed by this

new technology?
• What changes in language are being promoted by these new

technologies?
• What shifts in economic and political power are likely to result

from this new technology?

• What alternative uses might be made of a technology?

These questions point to a range of issues, ideas and approaches that might be taken forward into the
remainder of this book. For example, Postman highlights the uncertain and contestable nature of
technology change, in addition to suggesting that technologies are not neutral but promote certain
values, interests and agendas over others. These questions alert us to the interaction between
technology and society, economics, politics and culture. These questions also highlight the likelihood
that any intended outcomes of technology use will be accompanied by unintended consequences of
technology use. Perhaps the most important areas of critique that Postman invokes are those of use
and usefulness. Why do we actually need digital technology use in education? How exactly are digital
technologies impacting and changing education? Is this even a sensible way to think about the
relationship between education and digital technology? All of these issues will now be explored in
Chapter 2.

Further questions to consider

• What instances of technology use in education can you think of that are not concerned primarily
with learning and/or teaching? What issues and processes do these technologies

address? How is technology use reinforcing or altering these issues and processes?
• How do the issues raised in our discussion of the paper-

18
based textbook relate to the ‘new’ technology of the digital textbook? What new issues does the
digital textbook introduce? What existing issues remain, or are even amplified in the shift from using
paper textbooks to digital textbooks in education? Remember to think about the activities, practices
and wider contexts of digital textbook use, as well as the artefacts (hardware and software).

• Digital technologies are often celebrated in terms of their speed, size and storage capacity. To what
extent are the advantages of digital technologies related to matters of quantity rather than quality?
What limitations or even disadvantages can be associated with the ‘digitisation’ of educational
practices and processes? What aspects of education might not be easily simulated in digital form?

Please go to http://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/education-and- technology-second-edition/ to

download and listen to discussion around these further questions.

Further reading

Further discussions of the nature of education and learning can be found in the following books:
Matheson, D. (ed.) (2014). An Introduction to the Study of Education, 4th edn. London, David Fulton.
Smith, J. (2016). Key Questions in Education. London, Bloomsbury. David Nye is a well-known social
historian of technology. In this book he develops a wide-ranging and informative overview of key
theories and ideas about technology:

Nye, D. (2007). Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

A large number of authors have written about digital technology and the nature of ‘the digital’. This
book (freely available online in English and Spanish) features nineteen essays on various aspects of
internet technology, from a number of notable commentators like Manuel Castells (writing on the
topic of global impacts on society), Evgeny Morozov (politics), Yochai Benkler (innovation and
creativity) and David Crystal (language):

BBVA Foundation (2014). Change: Nineteen Key Essays on How the Internet Is Changing Our Lives.
Madrid, Turner.

An accessible account of the nature of social media is provided by the critical media theorist Christian
Fuchs:
Fuchs, C. (2014). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.

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 2 Making Sense of Technology and Educational Change

Chapter Outline
Introduction
The imperatives of ‘internal’ change
The imperatives of ‘external’ change
The imperatives of ‘disruptive innovation’
Recognising the wider significance of technological change in education
Thinking more carefully about education and technology Conclusions

Introduction

Most people would not question the assumption that digital technology is essentially a ‘good thing’
for education. This mirrors the widespread belief that digital technologies are leading to general
improvements and even transformations in most areas of society. Technology development is
associated with a ‘change of scale now affecting life on the planet. ... The planet is being urbanized,
equipped and reorganized’ (Augé 2014, p. 47). This includes new organisations of labour, the
increasing dominance of global markets and the interests of transnational companies exceeding those
of nations. As we saw in Chapter 1, many accounts of life in the digital age are based on generally
optimistic expectations of such progress and the allure of ‘the new’.

It therefore makes sense to assume that education will benefit from the increased use of digital
technology in similar ways to the rest of society. Indeed, evidence of digitally driven improvement and
change seems to be prevalent in nearly every area of contemporary life. For example, digital
technologies appear to be supporting a ‘flattening out’ of hierarchies and introduction of a ‘networking
logic’ to the arrangement of many aspects of society. These changes are seen to be encouraging open
(re)configurations of social relations and a corresponding ‘under- determination’ of organisational
structures (see Friedman 2007). Put simply, large bureaucratic organisations of the twentieth century
are believed to be losing much of their significance and power in the face of the fast-paced and fluid
nature of ‘digital’ processes and procedures.

These transformations are not only taking place on a grand societal scale. Digital technologies are also
seen to be introducing distinctly ‘individualised’ ways of doing things in everyday life. Growing
numbers of processes and practices are now centred on the needs of individuals rather than the
demands of large institutions and organisations. Some commentators contend that digital
technologies are bringing people together in new ways that allow individuals to do things for
themselves without the involvement of organisations and official institutions. For example, strong
claims are often made regarding the role of digital technologies such as the internet in enriching
people’s personal connections and ‘social capital’ (Sajuria, van Heerde-Hudson and Hudson 2015).
Some commentators have even claimed that digital technologies offer a basis from which to develop
powerful forms of global ‘cosmopolitanism’:

As we enter an age of ever-increasing global connection, we are experiencing vast but subtle shifts in
how people communicate, organize themselves, and make decisions. We have new opportunities to
participate in conversations that are local and global, to argue with, persuade, and be persuaded by
people far from our borders. And we have much to argue about, as our economies are increasingly

20
intertwined, and our actions as individuals and nations affect one another’s climate, health, and wealth.
And as these connections increase, it should be no surprise that we will also experience a concomitant
rise in mystery. (Zuckerman 2013, p. 5)

Even if we discount some of the more idealistic aspects of these statements, a major part of popular
and academic opinion could be said to hold an essentially optimistic view of the life-changing power
of digital technology. These changes are usually presented in wide-ranging and far-reaching terms
across many areas of society. In particular, it is often argued that education and learning are
particularly fertile areas for digital improvement and change. Indeed, there would seem to be a
number of substantial overlaps between the main concerns of education and the main characteristics
of digital technology – not least the production and dissemination of knowledge through interaction
with others. In many ways, the central concerns of education and learning could be said to be
interlinked closely with some of the main functions and processes of digital technologies. Surely, then,
the increased use of digital technology throughout education is an inherently ‘good thing’?

This seemingly close affiliation between education and the digital has certainly led many people to
assume that education is an obvious area where technology-based change and improvement will take
place. Indeed, the inevitability of digital change in education is justified usually along a number of
different lines. The first is the idea that digital technology has clear potential to change many aspects
of education for the better. In other words, there is an ‘internal’ imperative for the increased use of
digital technology within educational settings. The second is the belief that the rise of digital
technology elsewhere in society necessitates corresponding changes in education. In other words, the
general digitisation of society acts as an ‘external’ imperative for the increased use of digital
technology in education. The third is the sense that technology heralds an inevitable ‘disruption’ to
the educational status quo. This chapter will now go on to consider the nature of these arguments in
further detail. How and why does education need to change in this era of digital technology?

The imperatives of ‘internal’ change

Some of the most immediate rationales and reasons for the increased prominence of digital
technology in education relate to the basic desire to make education ‘work better’ – what was referred
to above as ‘internal’ issues and pressures. In particular, many academics and practitioners believe
technology to be capable of supporting a range of improvements to the core processes of education.
These generally relate to benefits of scale, scope, speed and synchronicity. Such benefits have
prompted the interest of growing numbers of educationalists in using digital technologies to overcome
deep-rooted problems and limitations of education. As Bill Ferster observes, education has a well-
developed faith in technological solutionism – that is, the hope that ‘new technologies will solve the
problem better than previous efforts’ (2014, p. xii).

These ‘internal’ benefits and changes tend to be expressed in various ways, all of which will be
elaborated upon in later chapters. One of the most frequently cited benefits of digital technology use
is its role in supporting and enhancing cognitive processes and thinking skills. The use of digital
technology is seen to support a wide range of cognitive benefits. For example, it is argued that digital
technologies assist important prerequisites to higher-order thinking, namely memory, and automation
of ‘lower- level’ skills such as spelling. Digital technologies are often associated with allowing learning
to take place within collaborative and supportive social contexts. Indeed, digital technologies such as
the internet fit neatly with popular ideas that learning often takes place best as a social process of
collective knowledge construction. In this sense, digital technology can link learners to other people
and tools that may support and mediate effective learning.

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As such claims suggest, a key benefit of technology-based education is seen to be its positioning of the
individual at the centre of learning processes. In particular, digital technologies are often described as
increasing the freedom of individuals to choose the information and the people appropriate to their
particular educational needs and circumstances. Networked technologies such as the internet
certainly provide individuals with almost instantaneous access to a wealth of information and
communication. In particular, digital technology can offer individuals a ready means of contact with
other learners, teachers and experts on a global as well as local basis. Indeed, many commentators
remain enthused by the educative potential of computer-mediated communication. Learning and the
exchange of information are felt to lie at the heart of digitally supported ‘virtual communities’ and the
collation of collective knowledge through the formation of ‘online brain trusts’, ‘computer-assisted
group minds’ and ‘crowd sourcing’. Through these means, individuals can learn with (and learn from)
whomever they choose. This increased flexibility and individualised control makes digital technology
an especially appropriate means of supporting the forms of ‘informal’ education outlined in Chapter
1.

Digital technologies have also been welcomed as invaluable tools for teachers. With the ability to
deliver instruction that is directed and differentiated, educators can concentrate their efforts on the
majority of students in a class. The internet can allow teachers to develop more rigorously researched
and engaging lessons, and present teaching materials in a way that makes educational content ‘come
alive’. Digital technologies are also portrayed as assisting teachers in the more procedural and
bureaucratic elements of their job, supporting tasks such as marking and producing lesson materials
and allowing them to spend time with students. Computer-mediated communication is also seen as a
valuable source of professional support and development, acting as a space for online dialogue and
sharing resources between educators around the world. In short, digital technologies are seen to be a
valuable and integral part of a contemporary teacher’s repertoire – allowing him or her to explore and
extend his or her own practice and improve the overall ‘learning experience’.

In addition to the benefits to individual learners and teachers, other ‘internal’ educational benefits of
digital technologies are seen to include the improved organisational effectiveness of educational
institutions. As digital technology has grown to become an integral part of commerce and industry,
the pressure on educational institutions to follow suit has increased. Digital technologies are seen to
‘modernise’ schools, colleges and universities – instilling businesslike efficiencies in how these
education institutions operate. Aside from matters of organisational, managerial and administrative
efficiency, another popularly perceived benefit of digital technologies is that they can improve the
‘outcomes’ of educational institutions, such as increasing standards in the form of reading ages, IQ
scores, examination results, retention rates and students’ progression to higher levels of study.

Another organisational benefit of digital technology is the more efficient delivery of education. In
particular, one of the most obvious advantages is the use of digital technology for ‘breaking boundaries’
beyond ‘the four walls of the classroom’ (Campbell 2015, p. 108). In this way, digital technologies are
popularly seen as widening access to education, supporting a diverse provision of educational
opportunities from which individuals can choose. Technology-based education is therefore perceived
to extend beyond the reach of traditional education provision (such as schools, colleges and
universities) to other organisations such as commercial organisations, community groups and cultural
institutions such as museums and libraries. By overcoming practical issues of economy and scale (such
as buildings, staffing and other physical resourcing limitations), ‘virtual’ educational provision allows a
diversity of smaller, more specialised organisations to provide learning opportunities. Some
commentators have welcomed digital technology as enabling more competitive and effective
‘marketplaces’ for education to develop (Jones 2010).

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All these advantages are seen to allow greater numbers of people to participate in a wider range of
learning than was previously possible. In particular, the increased choice associated with technology-
based education is believed to encourage the inclusion of social groups who might otherwise find it
difficult to engage in education. The distribution of educational opportunities via technology, it is
suggested, can help overcome barriers that deter people from taking part in learning. Digital
technologies may do this by making learning provision more flexible, reducing costs, making learning
more accessible, offering reliable and accessible information, and allowing people to learn on an ‘any
place, any pace’ basis. These shifts are seen to support more democratic forms of educational access.
As Kevin Carey argues:

These historic developments will liberate hundreds of millions of people around the world, creating
new ways of learning that have never existed before. They will also upend a cornerstone of the
American meritocracy, fundamentally altering the way our society creates knowledge and economic
opportunity. (2015, n.p.)

The imperatives of ‘external’ change

Of course, the push for digital technology in education also stems from a range of interests and
agendas outside of the education profession – not least, policymakers, employers and parents. One of
the most immediate ‘external’ imperatives for the educational use of digital technology is seen to be
the straightforward priority of ‘keeping up’ with the rest of modern life. As we discussed in Chapter 1,
the increasing complexity of technology development has been accompanied by a corresponding
growth in the use of digital technologies across most areas of life. Yet, many people feel that educators
and educational institutions are noticeably ‘behind the times’ in comparison to technology use in other
sectors of society. This creates an imperative for education to respond to technological advances, what
Robert Boody (2001, p. 8) described as the priority of ‘running just to keep in place’.

Of course, the imperative for education change is not just based around concerns of remaining ‘up to
date’ with technology for its own sake. Many people would argue that education faces an ongoing
societal pressure to respond to the economic and societal changes associated with technology. In
particular, digital technologies are now seen as an integral part of maintaining education’s relevance
to fast-changing economic demands. These concerns are often described in terms of meeting the
needs of the ‘knowledge economy’, ‘networked society’ and ‘late capitalism’. While contestable, such
concepts seek to describe the changing post-industrial era in which much of the world now finds itself.
For example, in most developed countries, the production, transmission and consumption of
‘immaterial goods’ such as information and knowledge are seen to now outweigh the traditional
importance of manufacturing and the production of material goods. These shifts mean that the most
successful countries are those that maintain ‘knowledge-based’ economies – that is, economic
systems where the use and application of knowledge produce the majority of economic benefit and
power.

Crucially, many of these shifts are associated with the growth of digital technology – especially
information processing and telecommunications technologies. Many people therefore see it as
necessary that digital technologies are used to support the new forms of education and training
required by the knowledge economy. Of course, success in the knowledge economy does not derive
from technology-based education alone. Nevertheless, many industrialists and governments see
education as playing an important role in providing sufficient levels of ‘human capital’ within a society.
In this sense, one of the most prominent external imperatives for the increased use of digital
technologies in education relates to the technology-related skills required to work in the knowledge
economy. For example, many occupations are now centred on information processing, with workers
23
using digital technology to create and manipulate information-based products and services. These
occupations are dependent on technology- orientated workers who are flexible and adaptable in
terms of what they are able to do, and who are sometimes referred to in terms such as ‘knowledge
workers’ or ‘symbolic analysts’. All of these economic shifts now mean that digital technology is a key
element in sustaining the links between education systems and the ever-changing needs of the
economy.

Aside from issues of economic success and ‘employability’, the ability to use digital technology is also
considered to be an essential life-skill for individual citizens to be able to effectively participate in
society. Education, therefore, faces the additional imperative to provide individuals with the necessary
life skills to survive (if not thrive) within societies that are predicated on technology use. From this
perspective, there is a strong imperative for schools to introduce even the youngest of students to
technology. Indeed, so-called digital competence and digital literacy are seen to be important
capabilities for contemporary life, ‘essential for coping successfully with digital society’ (Machala and
Orešković 2014, p. 581). These pressures are experienced across all stages of education – from the
young child in kindergarten to the retired person in an adult education centre.

Of course, it is important to recognise that pressures for technological change do not come solely from
government, industry and the educational ‘establishment’. Indeed, external imperatives for
technological change are expected by other ‘consumers’ of education. Many commentators argue that
technological expectations increasingly stem from the young people who are now entering schools,
colleges and universities. These are cohorts of students who were born into the era of the internet
and smartphones, and who consider digital technologies to be ‘more than simply something you use
for fun or novelty, it is an integral and natural part of life’ (Whitby 2013, p. 65). As a result, the current
‘App Generation’ are seen to expect digital processes and practices to be woven into all aspects of
their lives, including the ways in which they learn and are educated (Gardner and Davis 2014).

As commentators such as Marc Prensky (2001, p. 1) have warned since the beginning of the twenty-
first century, ‘Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our
educational system was designed to teach.’ Arguments such as these suggest that education systems
must simply change in order to ‘keep up’ with the demands of those they seek to educate. As Greg
Whitby (2013, p. 133) continues, ‘Schools as we know them have to change if we want to be offering
today’s young people an education that is relevant to the way they live and will work in the twenty-
first century.’ Of course, much of the pressure for increased technology use in schools, colleges and
universities is also being driven by the personal beliefs and experiences of parents and adult educators.
Indeed, it could be argued that there is an implicit connection in the minds of many people from older
generations between digital technology and the ‘quality’ of contemporary education.

All of these external imperatives for educational change are evident around the world. In particular,
these pressures and demands have prompted considerable political efforts to increase the use of
digital technology in education. The past twenty years or so have seen the educational use of digital
technology become a prominent feature of government policymaking around the world. Nearly every
developed nation (as well as many developing nations) now has a detailed ‘digital education strategy’
based around the broad aim of supporting educational institutions to make extensive use of digital
technology. These strategies and initiatives most commonly involve spending significant amounts of
money to ensure that the internet is available throughout campuses and classrooms, and that students
and teachers have sufficient access to computerised devices – ideally on a ‘one-to- one’ personal basis.
Much effort is also put into the training of teachers alongside the inclusion of technology-related
components into recommended curricula. Regardless of a country’s social or economic circumstances,

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digital technology has formed a central part of the improvement and modernisation of most education
systems over the last twenty years or so.

The imperatives of ‘disruptive innovation’

Many people presume that these internal and external imperatives will lead educators and educational
institutions to steadily accommodate he increased use of digital technology. However, an alternate
view is that traditional forms of education will be transformed radically by digital technology whether
they choose to or not. These arguments relate to a buzzword that has resonated throughout recent
discussions of education and technology – that is, ‘disruption’. Over the last few years, the idea of
‘disruption’ has become one of the most familiar (and over-used) ways to describe technology-led
change in society, from high-street retailing to the newspaper industry. For many people, the idea of
digital disruption is equally applicable to education. For example, in its discussion of the ‘reinvention
of the university’ through the ‘creative destruction’ of digital technology, The Economist concluded
bluntly: ‘The internet, which has turned businesses from newspapers through music to book retailing
upside down, will upend higher education’ (2014, n.p.). Similarly, as new media commentator Jeff
Jarvis reasoned five years earlier, ‘Education is one of the institutions most deserving of disruption –
and with the greatest opportunities to come of it’ (2009, p. 201).

As words such as ‘disruption’, ‘destruction’ and ‘reinvention’ suggest, these are highly provocative
propositions. Rather than improvement of long-standing educational institutions, systems and
structures, the notion of digital ‘disruption’ implies more radical forms of technology-driven
innovation and upheaval. Digital technologies are, therefore, presented as sweeping away old regimes
and existing orders. Instead, digital technology is seen as an opportunity to reimagine the provision of
education in a form fit for the twenty-first century. While this might appear to be extreme rhetoric
that would appeal only to a radical minority, statements about the digital ‘disruption’ of schools and
universities are now being made with such frequency and force that they have begun to pass into
mainstream popular and political debates about the likely future of education.

It is useful to trace these increasingly common sentiments about the digital disruption of education
back to their origins in writing about economics and business. While it is not often mentioned by name,
much recent talk about the disruption of education stems back to the writing of Clay Christensen on
‘disruptive innovation’. According to Christensen, the focus of any digital disruption is not the actual
technology per se, but how the technology is applied and what the technology makes possible that
was possible before. Often, ‘disruptive innovation’ involves a prescient combination of relatively
ordinary, low-specification technologies that are deployed cleverly to address emerging values, needs
and desires that have not been catered for elsewhere.

Christensen accepts that these simple applications and ideas might often seem counter-intuitive or
inferior in comparison to previously dominant, successful ways of doing things. Nevertheless,
disruptive innovations tend to be advantaged by an ability to successfully make products or services
available to new populations who previously had not been able to access them. Then, over time, these
new ways of doing things with these new populations take root and extend into the existing
established marketplace. This often then leads to the reduction of prices and forces existing providers
to either change their ways or go out of business. Key to this scenario of technology-driven change is
the economic concept of value – that is, the outcomes of the activities, processes and relationships
associated with a service, and how these are exchanged. Such outcomes can be tangible (in terms of
the accumulation of resources or the generation of wealth) or intangible (in terms of knowledge, social
25
good or environmental well-being). In both senses, disruptive innovations alter what is seen to have
value and what is to be valued in a marketplace. As Horn and Christensen put it, ‘Eventually, the
disruptive innovation changes the very definition of quality in a marketplace’ (2013, n.p.). It is
important to stress that this analysis does not see established institutions as being punished for simply
‘failing to keep up with technology’. However, established institutions will often ignore new innovation
as long as it falls outside of their existing ‘value networks’ – that is, what is required to continue to
compete successfully against current competitors. Instead, established institutions often prefer to
focus on what Christensen calls ‘sustaining innovations’ – things that have helped them historically to
succeed and sustain the attributes that have come to be most valued in their market. Previously
successful organisations tend to be most interested in doing new things that allow them to get
‘incrementally bigger, more powerful and more efficient’ at the things that they already do (Horn and
Christensen 2013, n.p.).

In contrast, Christensen celebrates the ability of new innovators such as small ‘start-up’ firms and
entrepreneurs to occupy different value networks. In particular, these different priorities will allow
them to cater for ‘non-consumers’ who could not otherwise access established forms of the service.
Every so often, one of these alternate ways of doing things will expand until the point that it can invade
and ‘disrupt’ the existing established marketplace. As Horn and Christensen put it, ‘Eventually the
quality becomes just good enough for the established customers to flock to it’ (2013, n.p.). At this
point, the new market and new value network become the norm, and existing, older institutions are
left attempting to catch up. Then, the disruption is complete.

Such arguments have certainly resonated with educational audiences. In fact, it is telling that after his
initial successful exposition of the argument, Christensen chose to write specifically on the likely
disruptive innovation of schools and higher education. In his 2008 book on public schooling, Disrupting
Class, Christensen noted how most of the major education investments over the last forty years in
digital technology had largely taken the form of ‘sustaining innovation’ intended to boost market
interest in the existing product of the ‘school’ and ‘schooling’. Cast in this light, it is difficult to argue
against the fact that ‘digital textbooks’ and ‘learning management systems’ are all sustaining
innovations that do not offer fundamentally different forms of educational opportunity, but simply
more efficient, expedient and/or expensive versions of traditional educational provision.

In contrast, Christensen argued that the ‘disruptive deployment of computers’ demands the reimaging
of school as a ‘modular system that students can use to personalize education to fit their needs’ (2008,
p. 243). Digital technology could then be used to support ‘online facilitated networks’ of learning and
decentralised decision making and control. As Christensen put it, ‘Smart people will do smart things if
we just enable them to do so’ (2008, p. 244). Crucially, very few supporters of this way of thinking
presume that such innovation is likely to be initiated from within the school system. From the very
beginning of Disrupting Class, it is lamented that schools lack the ‘institutional capacity for change’
(Christensen 2008, p. vi).

Of course, as an astute Harvard Business School professor, Christensen is keen to stress that the idea
of ‘disruptive innovation’ should not be seen as a hard-and-fast solution per se, but, instead, offers a
different way of thinking about solutions. In this sense, this view of technological change invites us to
rethink the very nature of education – its core activities and relationships, its core purposes and values.
‘Disruptive innovation’ is not about using technology to do the same things differently, but using
technology to do fundamentally different things. This might involve engaging previously uninvolved or
excluded people in educational activities, offering different products and services, striving for different
outcomes and opening up new markets and finding new value. Genuine disruption, therefore, requires
the involvement of different interest groups and previously uninvolved innovators in the provision of
26
education. This sense of renewal, therefore, explains the tendency of some proponents to refer to the
use of digital technology in education as a ‘game changer’.

Recognising the wider significance of technological change in education

These are bold and far-reaching claims, yet they need to be approached with a degree of caution.
Surely such changes cannot be totally inevitable, or wholly beneficial? At this point, we need to remain
mindful of avoiding what was referred to earlier as an ‘unquestioning acceptance’ of popular
assumptions of technology and educational change. Instead, we need to think much more carefully
about the significance and nature of the changes involved in these claims about education and the
‘imperatives’ and ‘innovations’ of technology. As such, there are a number of caveats to consider
amidst such talk of change and disruption of education. Everything described in this chapter so far
should be seen as persuasive ideas that, nevertheless, merit questioning and challenging. First, while
they may all appear commonsensical, none of these claims are necessarily accurate or objective
descriptions of the realities of technology use in education. In fact, care has been taken throughout
the last few sections of this chapter to qualify these changes, improvements and innovations as
‘perceived’ or ‘argued’ rather than as undisputed fact. Second, claims of ‘disruption’ and ‘game
changing’ are usually made for a reason. These are not neutral extrapolations of technology
development. Instead, confident claims of digital change are often linked to wider agendas, ideas,
interests and values about educational (and societal) reform.

Third, we need to recognise the political, corporate, commercial and/or economically driven nature of
such talk of improvements, imperatives and disruptions. While not necessarily a bad thing, political
agendas and business ideals often do not translate easily over into education. Indeed, education could
be argued to entail obligations that ‘are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business
executive has to employees, partners, and investors’ (Lepore 2014, n.p.). Fourth, then, we need to
remember that neither technological change nor educational change is a matter of ‘common sense’.
Indeed, as soon as anything is presented as being inevitable, our suspicions should be raised.
Technological change is complex, and few – if any – aspects of education are as straightforward as
these ‘imperatives’ might suggest. Any digital ‘solution’ in education is almost always accompanied by
a number of unintended consequences, secondary effects and longer-term shifts.

In short, it is important to recognise that most of the arguments about technology and education
change considered in this chapter so far involve fundamental challenges to existing ideas of what
education is, why education is provided and how education is carried out. These new claims and
arguments are certainly not neutral, factual descriptions of inevitable technical adjustments and
alterations. Instead, they challenge many established assumptions about the types of learning and
forms of educational opportunities that need to be made available; the role of the individual in the
learning process; the role and status of teachers in the learning process (e.g. issues of pedagogy); the
status of knowledge (e.g. issues of curriculum) and the status of the educational institution. As the
examples highlighted so far in this chapter illustrate, all of these aspects of education are seen to be
challenged by the ongoing use of digital technology.

For some commentators, the educational imperatives of technology imply a fundamental rethinking
of the relationships between individuals, knowledge, education professionals and educational
institutions. As Robert Kozma (2003, p. 5) reasoned, digital technology is implicated in a number of
changes to how the nature of education and learning might be perceived. In terms of school-based
education, for example, these changes include the following:
27
• re-imagining the role of the teacher: changing from the teacher as initiator of instruction for the
whole class to the teacher as a guide who helps students find their appropriate instructional path and
evaluate their own learning;

• re-imagining the nature of teaching: changing from teachers working in isolation to teachers
collaborating with their colleagues on joint plans and projects;

• re-imagining the role of the student: changing from students as passive individuals to students as
active learners working in teams to create new knowledge and solve problems;

• re-imagining the role of the educational institution: changing from educational institutions that are
isolated from society to educational institutions that are integrated into society;

• re-imagining the role of the parent: changing from parents uninvolved in their children’s education
to parents who are actively involved.

Of course, in outlining these changes Kozma is assuming the continuation of basic educational
institutions and structures such as the school. However, as the arguments relating to disruptive
innovation imply, other commentators choose to view the educational changes associated with digital
technologies in more drastic terms. With digital technology, it is argued, we do not necessarily need a
‘school’ or ‘university’, ‘teacher’ or ‘student’. Instead, many of the structural shifts suggested above
might be best achieved without formal education at all. As later chapters will discuss, many
commentators anticipate inevitable shifts from the current model of institutions providing education
to alternate models where individuals are responsible for arranging their own learning. Such
predications are hastened by the rise of education provision that is technologically mediated on an
open scale – such as the so-called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that emerged at the
beginning of the 2010s. Given these developments, some people now anticipate a shift to a new model
of education where no institution is responsible for the education of an individual.

As these latter scenarios suggest, many of the seemingly ‘common-sense’ claims being made about
the changing use of technology in education imply a substantial remoulding of educational provision
around the needs of the individual learner. Conversely, they also imply the significant reduction (or
even complete replacement) of educational institutions, teachers and curriculum. Present discussions
of technology and educational change, therefore, tend to reach a couple of possible conclusions. The
first is the argument that educational institutions must make some significant adjustments to their
‘traditional’ arrangements.

As Tony Bates (2004) put it, this view sees educational institutions as having to either ‘transform or
die’ in the face of technological progress. The second is the more radical argument that technology
effectively renders most established arrangements of education provision obsolete and redundant. In
other words, educational institutions will ‘die’ whether they change or not. Both of these logics were
illustrated in arguments for ‘disruptive innovation’ and the external/internal imperatives of
technological change.

Such scenarios imply significant changes to education and should not be taken lightly. Yet, it is
important to remember that these arguments are not as inevitable and cut-and-dried as they may first
appear. Debates about technology and educational change are not simply matters of discussing when
presumed changes will occur. Instead, we need to think more carefully about why these changes
should – or should not – occur. In particular, we need to acknowledge that change in education is
rarely as unproblematic as some commentators would have us believe. As Michael Fullan has observed,
28
educational change is not a straightforward process. Not everyone benefits from an educational
innovation in the same way and, from a more practical perspective, the consequences of educational
change are often difficult to assess. As such, we cannot simply assume that technological change is an
inevitable force for good in education. As Fullan (2007, p. 6) concludes, ‘Change is not necessarily
progress.’

It is sensible to approach all of the issues outlined in this chapter with a degree of caution and even
scepticism. In particular, it is important to recognise that many of the key questions surrounding
education and technology are not technological questions per se. Instead, they are related to wider
questions of what education is, and what we want education to be. The scale of these questions
certainly suggests that we should not be seduced by promises of technological capacity to change
everything for the better. Questions about the future of education are far too important to be left to
presumptions of the ‘power’ of technology. Instead, careful thought needs to be given to the claims
and assumptions that surround technology use in education. First and foremost, then, more
consideration needs to be given to how we actually go about conceptualising the topic of technology,
education and change – how we can move beyond common-sense assumptions and exaggerated
expectations. Instead, how might we develop a more socially circumspect analysis of education and
technology?

Thinking more carefully about education and technology

The first steps towards thinking more carefully about education and technology involve taking nothing
for granted. From the outset, we need to recognise the contestable nature of all the claims that
surround education and technology. None of the descriptions of education and technology presented
so far in this chapter are necessarily neutral, objective or empirically grounded. Instead, many of these
claims and arguments are perhaps described more accurately as value-driven aspirations. This is
certainly the case with some of the more exaggerated claims made about technology-related change
in education. Take, for instance, the observation that digital technology promises nothing less than
‘the creation of a more just, human, inclusive society, where the development and transformation of
teaching and learning services social and emotional as well as economic ends’ (Sutherland, Robertson
and John 2008, p. 5). At best, this could be seen as enthusiastically ambitious. It could be argued,
however, that such rhetoric unrealistically over-extends the capabilities of digital technology to affect
change, and distracts attention away from the realities of contemporary education and society.

While those who commentate on the possibilities of technology use may often rely on spectacular
predictions and grand assertions, the realities of technology use are often more mundane and
compromised. Even the most enthusiastic proponents would concede that the realities of digital
technology use in education often fail to match the rhetoric. While the past twenty years or so may
have seen substantial increases in the physical presence of digital technology in schools, colleges and
universities, the much promised technology-led ‘transformation’ of educational processes and
practices has, nevertheless, failed to materialise. Although digital technologies and other personalised
technologies may well have undoubted potential to support students, educators and institutions, it
seems that this potential is being realised only on occasion. As Martin Oliver (2016) observes, this can
leave veteran educational observers with a distinct feeling of ‘Groundhog Day’ when presented with
the latest ‘next big thing’ in education and technology.

This gap between how technology could be used and how it actually ends up being used suggests that
we need to avoid imagining new technologies as ready solutions to existing education problems. Much
of the enthusiasm for education and technology outlined in this chapter reflects a recurring belief in
technology as some sort of corrective or ‘technical fix’. As Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (1989)
29
observed, the history of education has been characterised by attempts to use the ‘power’ of
technology in order to solve problems that are non- technological in nature. The history of education
is also characterised by a tendency to ignore the often ineffective or unsustainable outcomes that
arise as a result of technology use. As this book has already illustrated, there is little to suggest that
much has changed since Robins and Webster made this observation.

Anyone who is studying education and technology therefore needs to steer clear of assuming that
digital technology has the ability to change things for the better. History reminds us that technical fixes
tend to produce uneven results, very rarely resulting in similar outcomes across the population and
often just replacing one social problem with another. Even when a technology is seen to ‘work’, it can
be difficult to ascertain why, especially when the application of that technology has been accompanied
by other (non-technological) interventions. Often, technical fixes will only deal with the surface
manifestations of a problem rather than its roots. Indeed, the social problems of education are
quantitatively and qualitatively different from most of the technical problems of education. Social
problems tend to be less specific, with many different causes, and do not operate within a closed
system. In short, we should not assume that the social issues surrounding education are easily ‘fixable’
via technology. As Megan Erikson concludes, ‘Education is not a design problem with a technical
solution’ (2015, n.p.).

All of these arguments suggest the need to move beyond commonsensical thinking about education
and technology. In particular, some of the most misleading assumptions about education and
technology are the deterministic claims of technologies possessing inherent qualities and being
capable of having predictable ‘impacts’ or ‘effects’ on students, teachers and educational institutions
if used in a correct manner. In its simplest form, such ‘technological determinism’ can be seen as a
way of thinking that presumes that technology determines social change. In its most extreme form,
‘hard’ technological determinism assumes that technology is the only factor in social change. While
many people in education would feel uncomfortable about making such direct associations, most
would perhaps concur with a ‘soft’ form of technological determinist thinking that assumes that
technology has a strong influence on social change. Take, for instance, this seemingly reasonable claim:

We live in a society in which new technology is rapidly altering people’s ways of thinking, believing,
behaving, and learning. It follows that education itself ought to reflect the change. (Bromwich 2014,
n.p.)

Claims of this sort have a long heritage in popular, political and academic discussions of the ‘effect’ of
technology on education. For example, a determinist way of thinking underpins popular claims that
various forms of digital communication have caused declines in traditional literacy standards, or that
internet use leads to improvements in learning. While appealing to those people who want to
construct bounded ‘scientific’ explanations and models, the dangers of such thinking about the use of
technology relate primarily to the simplistic conclusions that they lead us towards. In particular, this
way of thinking usually results in conclusions that recommend the overcoming of ‘barriers’ or
impediments within the immediate educational setting, so that the inherent benefits of technology
use may be more fully realised. This logic is illustrated in the frequent ‘blaming’ of teachers and
educational institutions for the failure of digital technologies to be used ‘effectively’. Indeed, current
discussions and debates about the use of digital technology in educational settings often continue to
follow a decidedly externalist logic, ‘treating new technologies as autonomous forces that compel
society to change’ (Nye 2007, p. 27).

Many of the claims and arguments presented earlier in this chapter have been based around the
assumption that digital technology is set inevitably to change various aspects of education. If nothing
30
else, the uneven nature of educational change over the last forty years or so suggests that this
relationship is not as straightforward as some people would like to think. There are many good reasons
to move beyond technological determinism, not least because such thinking often leads to incorrect
analyses and unrealised expectations. If the relationships between education and technology are
understood only in these instrumentalist ‘cause-and-effect’ terms, then the main task of anyone
studying education and technology is simply to identify the impediments that are delaying the march
of technological progress. This view is implicit, for example, in the growing calls to dispense with the
institutions and professionals that appear to be impeding the benefits of technology in education.
Technological determinism of this type leaves little room for manoeuvre, deviation or other form of
social agency in the implementation and use of technology. At best, educators, students and everyone
else involved in education are placed in positions of having to respond to technological change by
making the most ‘efficient’ or ‘best’ use of the devices and artefacts that they are presented with. As
Martin Oliver argues:

Conceptions of technology influence the kinds of claims that we make. If technology is viewed
instrumentally, work orients towards questions of efficiency using a simple, causal model; if it is viewed
in terms of practices or culture, questions of meaning, experience and value open up. (2016, p. 42)

The limitations of making determinist assumptions about technological change are apparent across all
areas of society. Take, for example, the strongly held claims throughout the 1980s and 1990s that
computerised technology would lead to the ‘paperless office’. With the benefit of hindsight, it is
reckoned that the use of email in an office-based organisation is associated with an increase in paper
consumption by around 40 per cent. The interesting question that arises, therefore, is how this
apparent ‘failure’ of digital technology to determine a reduction in paper use can be explained. Is it
because people in offices are simply failing to use the technology effectively or correctly? Is it because
office- based businesses and firms are resistant to change in their practices?

In fact, as Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper’s (2001) in-depth study of office life suggests, the ‘failure’
of digital technology to change office practices in the ways that many people expected does not have
one simple explanation. Instead, the ever- increasing use of paper in offices is due partially to the
complex ways that digital technologies such as email and non-digital technologies such as paper ‘fit’
with the existing cultures and structures of workplace environments. These researchers also found
that the continuation of the ‘paper-laden’ office is related to the ways that using paper ‘fits’ with the
wider everyday concerns and priorities of people’s lives (think, for instance, of the reasons one might
choose to use a Post-It note rather than email to convey a message). Because of these social and
cultural factors, paper looks set to continue to play an important role in office life regardless of the
technical efficiencies of digital alternatives.

Explanations such as these suggest that we would do well to approach education and technology in
similarly nuanced terms. As with any office or business environment, the realities of technology use in
educational contexts are often complex and not easily predictable. Any technology-driven ‘change’ is
certainly not inevitable or consistent across a whole educational system. In this respect, we need to
consider the social conditions, social arrangements and social relations that lie behind the use of digital
technologies in education – what was referred to in Chapter 1 as the social ‘milieu’ of technology use.
It also makes sense to refer back to the ideas of ‘technology as practice’ and ‘technology as context’,
and consider how the social and cultural aspects of education processes and practices may influence
the use of technology.

Sociologists refer to this way of understanding technology as taking a ‘social shaping’ perspective.
Following this line of thinking, it is accepted that there can be no predetermined outcomes to the
31
development and implementation of technologies in education. Instead any technological artefact is
seen as being subjected continually to a series of interactions and ‘negotiations’ with the social,
economic, political and cultural contexts that it emerges into. As Wiebe Bijker and colleagues put it,
understanding technology as being ‘socially shaped’ therefore allows us to open up the ‘black box’ of
technology (1987). This ‘black box’ analogy recognises that the use of technology in education is not a
hidden process, but one that can be subjected to scrutiny if we ask the right questions. In particular, a
social shaping approach suggests that questions are asked about the large number of organisational,
political, economic and cultural factors that influence the design, development, production, marketing,
implementation and ‘end use’ of any technological artefact. If we wish to gain a full sense of how and
why technologies are being used in the ways that they are in education, we, therefore, need to develop
a better understanding of how technologies are socially constructed, shaped and negotiated by all of
these factors and the ‘actors’ that represent them.

There are many different ways of looking at education and technology from this social shaping
perspective. One common approach is to focus on different levels of analysis where social actors and
interests may influence the use of technology – what can be termed the ‘macro’, ‘meso’ and ‘micro’
levels of description. Of course, the micro level of the individual student or teacher is undeniably
important and merits sustained consideration, not least in terms of the continued importance of
immediate ‘local’ contexts in framing learning processes and practices. Yet, these micro level concerns
can only be understood fully through consideration of what could be termed ‘the bigger picture’ of
education and technology. This includes the meso level of organisational structures and goals of
educational institutions, as well as the macro level of broader cultural, societal, political and economic
values. Such issues might be far removed from what one usually finds in discussions about educational
technology, but all are important elements of making full sense of education and technology.

As the remainder of this book progresses, it is important that we develop understandings of how these
different concerns work to influence each other. Robert Kozma’s (2003) framework for understanding
the use of technology in schools offers a good introduction to some of the different influences at play
here. At the micro level, for example, Kozma identifies factors related to the student and teacher, such
as their educational background, experience with technology, socio-economic background and norms.
Kozma also considers classroom factors as key micro level elements – not least, issues of classroom
organisation, class size and the type and arrangement of technology devices. At the meso level of
Kozma’s analysis are people such as school leaders and managers, parents and local business leaders
as well as organisations such as educational districts and boards. Here issues such as school type,
organisation, local culture, technological support and history of innovation are seen to shape the use
of any technology. Finally, at a macro level, Kozma points to the influence of education policymakers,
business leaders and the IT industry – all associated with wide-ranging issues such as national
curriculum, education funding, economic forces, cultural norms and so on.

Conclusions

While by no means a definitive list, Kozma’s examples highlight a wide range of interests and influences
that need to be considered when seeking to explain issues of educational change and technology. Even
at this early stage, it should be clear that there are many important issues that are overlooked or even
deliberately ignored in popular discussions of education and technology. One of the key aims for the
remaining chapters of this book, therefore, is to directly address these hidden issues and questions.
For example, how is technology shaped by the institutional concerns of schools, colleges and
universities? How does the ‘lived’ experience of teachers and students influence their use of
technology? What is the influence of commercial and private interests, especially when producing and
developing the technological artefacts that are used in education? While there may be no easy
32
answers to these questions, they all deserve consideration and further thought if we are to develop
clearer understandings of the highly negotiable and unpredictable nature of technology use in
education.

Making sense of the socially shaped nature of technology has implications for how the study of
education and technology is pursued. There is an obvious need to look beyond the hyperbole that can
often surround discussions of technology, and, instead, ‘to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out
the continuities from the discontinuities’ (Wieseltier 2015, n.p.). This suggests that we concentrate
mainly on understanding the ‘here-and-now’ realities of technology use rather than future possibilities
and potentials. As such, the predominant focus of the next six chapters will be on ‘unpacking’ the
ordinary, mundane aspects of education and technology. As Nobel Prize – winning economist Paul
Krugman puts it:

We ought to scale back the hype. You see, writing and talking breathlessly about how technology
changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane
issues – and an excuse for handling those issues badly. (2015, n.p.)

Following this advice to ‘scale back the hype’, we can now turn to another set of key issues and debates.
If we are to resist looking forward to the future, then perhaps we should focus on past forms of
education and technology? Chapter 1 has already touched upon the ‘long history’ of technology
development from prehistoric times onwards. If we are to gain a full understanding of the complex
relationships between education and technology, it is perhaps worth paying closer attention to the
‘recent history’ of the last hundred years or so – what could be described as ‘pre-digital’ and ‘early-
digital’ technology use. So, what useful lessons can be learnt from the educational implementation of
technologies such as film, radio, television and early forms of micro-computing?

Further questions to consider

• Why do we need technology in education? Are digital technologies essential to supporting effective
forms of education in the current ‘digital age’? What do digital technologies allow to happen in
education that would not otherwise happen?

• What examples of technological determinism are apparent in popular discussions of education and
technology? What ‘effects’ are digital technologies commonly believed to ‘cause’? For example, why
could this way of thinking be considered as misleading and reductive? What strengths – if any – does
technological determinism have as a way of understanding education and technology?

• What factors at the micro, meso and macro levels have an influence on how technologies are used
in education? How is

their influence apparent? What links and relationships exist between these different factors?

Please go to http://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/education-and- technology-second-edition/ to

download and listen to discussion around these further questions.

Further reading

These journal articles provide a good overview of the common justifications given for technology use
in education throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s: Wellington, J. (2005). ‘Has ICT come of age?
Recurring debates on the role in

33
education.’ Research in Science and Technology Education, 23(1): 25–39. Njenga, J. and Fourie, L.
(2010). ‘The myths about e-learning in higher

education.’ British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(2): 199–212.

A good discussion on the limitations of ‘technological determinism’ in education thinking can be found
in this article:
Oliver, M. (2011). ‘Technological determinism in educational technology

research: Some alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between learning and technology.’
Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(5): 373– 84.

An introduction to different social shaping perspectives on technology is provided in this journal article:
Selwyn, N. (2012). ‘Making sense of young people, education and digital

technology: The role of sociological theory.’ Oxford Review of Education, 38(1): 81–96.

34
 3 A Short History of Education and Technology

Chapter Outline
Introduction
Taking a historical perspective on education and technology The recent history of education and
technology
Educational film
Educational radio
Educational television
Micro-electronics and the birth of educational computing Learning lessons from the past
Conclusions

Introduction

The tendency for people to look forwards rather than backwards when thinking about technology is
wholly understandable. Like many other areas of life, it is often more compelling to anticipate what is
about to happen with technology than attempting to make sense of what has already happened. As
the philosopher Andrew Feenberg observes, a recurring feature in popular discussions of technology
is a failure to frame arguments about ‘new’ developments in a historical context (what can be termed
ahistoricism). Feenberg also highlights a tendency (what can be termed substantivism) to assume that
society has simply adapted to the technological conditions of the time in order to meet its material
needs regardless of the wider politics of technology. While these approaches are common throughout
different sectors of society, they are certainly prevalent in discussions of education and ‘new’
technology. As Megan Erickson laments:

Education reformers express frustration with the continuity of traditional schooling methods – though
most do not recognize the history to which they are intimately tied, since technological innovation is
imagined to be as ahistorical as it is apolitical. (2015, n.p.)

So, if we are to develop better understandings of education and technology, then due attention needs
to be paid to the history of the field. As we saw in Chapter 2, it makes little sense to assume that
technology drives human progress, or that education simply adapts to technological ‘change’. Instead,
it is more useful to see technology as influenced by a range of social, cultural, political and economic
factors – what was described in Chapter 2 as a ‘social shaping’ approach. This chapter develops a
socially focused history of education and technology. In particular, it focuses on the ‘pre-digital’ and
‘early-digital’ uses of technology in the schools, colleges and universities of the twentieth century.
What lessons can be learnt from the introduction of various ‘new’ technologies into classrooms from
the 1900s until the emergence of the worldwide web at the beginning of the 1990s?

Taking a historical perspective on education and technology

Looking back at the history of education and technology allows us to consider a number of issues and
factors that can only be revealed with the ‘benefit of hindsight’ (Cassidy 1998). In particular, taking a
historical approach has three specific advantages. First, a historical approach frames the development
of technology within a long-term perspective, allowing us to understand how one technology may
have ramifications for proceeding technologies, rather than one technology simply ‘replacing’ or

35
‘superseding’ another. Following this line of thinking, we can see how new technologies often pay
homage to preceding technologies, drawing upon and refashioning them, as well as challenging and
rivalling them. The historical development of technological forms can, therefore, be framed in terms
of continuity as well as change, with ‘new’ technologies often seeking to both borrow from and surpass
earlier forms. In this sense, we can fully understand the significance of a new technology only if we
have a sound understanding of its predecessors.

Second, it could be argued that the social significance of a technology is only fully apparent after some
time has passed. Only now are we beginning to develop sufficient ‘distance’ on technologies such as
the television or computer to gain a sense of what their influence has been on society. Most people
would agree that it is too early to be completely certain of the internet’s influence on society or, indeed,
its influence on education. Although digital technologies might appear to be developed and thrust
upon us in rapid succession, the integration of any technology into society is a long-running and
iterative process. A historical approach allows us to identify the significant long-term issues and
concerns at play as specific technologies become ‘embedded’ into everyday life.

A third advantage of taking a historical approach relates to ‘letting the dust settle’ and looking back at
the exaggerated enthusiasms and fears that often pervade initial understandings of what a technology
is and what it can do. In particular, looking back at pre-digital histories can remind us of the ways in
which ‘new’ technologies tend to be heavily promoted and ‘sold’ to education audiences. Reexamining
the history of a technology without the original ‘hype’ can offer new insights into how common-sense
expectations and assumptions about technologies are formed. History can provide us with a clear view
of the meanings and significances attached to technologies before they become seen as inevitable,
invisible and somehow natural.

These benefits of hindsight can be achieved in two different ways – what historians of technology refer
to as taking a ‘contextualist’ approach or an ‘internalist’ approach. The internalist approach tends to
focus on the history of the invention, design and development of technology – charting the
progression from one technology to another in a manner similar to describing the history of art.
Internalist accounts of the history of technology can be particularly insightful and revealing. As David
Nye describes, ‘Internalists usually find that creativity is by no means assured or automatic ...
emphasis[ing] alternative solutions to problems’ (2007, p. 57). Contextualist accounts, on the other
hand, tend to focus ‘on how the larger society shapes and chooses machines. It is impossible to
separate technical and cultural factors when accounting for which technology wins the largest market
share’ (Nye 2007, p. 59).

While ‘internalist’ accounts of the invention, design and development of educational technologies
would be of considerable interest, it is appropriate that this chapter takes a contextualist perspective.
The contextualist approach is especially well suited to examining the social history of technology use,
thereby shedding light on present relationships between education and technology. A contextualist
approach can provide useful descriptions of the social and technical issues that shape the use of
technology in ‘real-life’ contexts such as schools and classrooms. As David Nye concludes:

If one takes a contextualist approach then it appears fundamentally mistaken to think of ‘the home’
or ‘the factory’ or ‘the city’ as a passive, solid object that undergoes an involuntary transformation
when a new technology appears. Rather, every institution is a social space that incorporates or doesn’t
incorporate [new technology] at a certain historical juncture as part of its ongoing development. [New
technology] offers a series of choices based only partly on technical considerations. Its meaning must
be looked for in the many contexts in which people decide how to use it. (2007, p. 62)

36
With these advantages in mind, this chapter will reconsider four major ‘new’ technologies of the
twentieth century – film, radio, television and microcomputing. These examples help develop our
understanding of how technologies come to find a place in education, and also help us address a
number of wider questions about the relationship between education and technology. For instance,
we need to consider the different ways that technologies are implemented into educational settings.
What claims tend to be made on behalf of new technologies as they are introduced? What meanings
get attached to specific technologies – first by proponents of the technology and later by educational
users of a technology? It is also useful to explore why technologies are seen to ‘work’ or ‘not work’ in
education. For example, what ‘barriers’ and ‘enablers’ tend to be identified at the time as influencing
the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of a technology? What forms of ‘evidence’ are used to substantiate the
educational effectiveness of technology implementation? All of these questions will now be explored
by going back to the early 1900s and reflecting on the history of educational technologies throughout
the twentieth century.

The recent history of education and technology

Our focus on the twentieth century is not meant to imply that the history of education and technology
goes back no further than 1901. Over the last five thousand years or so, various technologies have
been linked closely with the development of educational thinking and reforms. The appearance of the
Mesopotamian abacus around 2700 BCE reminds us of the long history of ‘educational’ technology.
Indeed, technological artefacts and practices played an integral part of the forms of education and
learning that were envisaged by the Elder Sophists of the fifth century BCE, the medieval scholars and
the social reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Technologies such as the abacus,
chalkboard, hornbook and textbook have all played fundamental roles in supporting learning,
education provision and the development of knowledge across thousands of years.

It should be remembered that some of these early technologies continue to be a significant part of
contemporary education. For example, Comenius’ production of the first textbook in the mid- 1600s
(titled Orbus Pictus or The World in Pictures) is generally considered to mark the beginning of a long-
standing educational dependency on printed text. The implementation of the chalkboard in the 1800s
similarly persists in many contemporary classrooms, albeit usually in electronic ‘whiteboard’ rather
than slate ‘blackboard’ form. All of these technologies have had significant bearings on the nature of
educational settings and practices, and all have been accompanied by substantial promises of change
and transformation. In 1841, for example, the ‘new’ technology of the chalkboard was lauded by one
observer in effusive terms, proclaiming that ‘the inventor or introducer of the system deserves to be
ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not among the greatest benefactors of
mankind’ (cited in Tyack and Hansot 1985, p. 40). As this tribute suggests, the digital technologies of
today are by no means the first devices to be ‘hyped’ up by enthusiastic educational commentators.

This long history notwithstanding, the technologies of the twentieth century perhaps offer the most
useful comparisons with the use of contemporary digital technologies in education. The twentieth
century was a period of intense technological development – from the emergence of audio-visual
technologies such as the radio and television to the first digital computers and the early incarnations
of the internet and worldwide web. While all these technologies became integral parts of twentieth-
century society, their use in education was often compromised. The US educationalist Larry Cuban
provides an excellent overview of the difficult history of twentieth-century education technologies in
his book Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920. Here Cuban looks back
over education’s ‘fickle romance’ with technologies such as film, radio and television, and examines
how these technologies were used (and often not used) in twentieth-century classrooms. Tracing the
implementation of these technologies in education, Cuban explores the capabilities, claims and uses
37
that characterised people’s understandings of ‘educational technology’ at the time. It makes sense,
therefore, to revisit these examples for the purposes of our own chapter, starting with one of the
‘wonder technologies’ of the early 1900s – the motion picture.

Educational film

A small number of school teachers in North America and Europe began experimenting with the
projection of pictures displayed on film during the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides the
‘magic lantern’ slide projectors and stereograph viewers, the most popular of these technologies was
the filmstrip. Here pictures were projected from strips of film, with the teacher responsible for winding
on a sequence of images at appropriate intervals while reading aloud an accompanying narrative text.
This use of static pictures was heralded at the time as offering students a ‘window on the world’ and
prompted a growing enthusiasm for the so- called visual instruction and visual education movements.

Despite these early efforts, it took the development of the motion (as opposed to still) picture in the
early 1900s to establish the popularity of visual instruction, hastened in no small part by the
burgeoning success of newsreels. On one hand, motion pictures provided a ready response to growing
political demands for increased educational efficiency resulting from Taylorist ‘time and motion’
studies carried out in schools. Of course, enthusiasm for film use in education was also driven by
interest in the technology itself, particularly as the silent movie industry began to establish itself as a
major cultural form in North America and Europe. Accordingly, much of the initial impetus for
educational film came from the originators of the technology, not least the US inventor Thomas Edison.
As Edison predicted at the beginning of the 1920s:

I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few
years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. ... The education of the future, as I
see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture. (cited in Cuban 1986, p. 9)

During the first years of the twentieth century, Edison invested a great deal of time and money in
educational film ventures. From these beginnings, growing numbers of schools began to introduce
film into their teaching provision. Classrooms were equipped with blackout shades, silver screens and
16 mm projectors, all lending a distinct aura of modernity to the teaching process. As Bill Ferster notes,
film ‘played an important role in establishing the need to develop infrastructure to support
educational technology in the classroom’ (2014, p. 32). A range of specifically commissioned content
was produced to cover topics suitable for all levels of teaching and learning. Films commissioned by
Edison for his educational film library included titles such as Life History of the Silkworm, Magnetism
and Microscopic Pond Life (Saettler 1990). By 1910, the Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures listed
over one thousand different film titles arranged around thirty different topics and subject disciplines.

This activity was matched by the development of a substantial bureaucracy to accompany the use of
film in US schools. Only twenty years after the first school districts had committed themselves to
classroom use of motion pictures, twenty-five states had established visual education departments
and bureaus tasked with overseeing schools’ use of film. Courses to train teachers to use film were
run by universities and teacher training colleges, and five separate national professional organisations
for visual instruction had been established by 1930 (Saettler 1990). Educational films began to be
produced by the companies responsible for manufacturing projectors, such as Kodak, Western Electric
and Bell & Howell. All told, the use of motion pictures was an officially endorsed icon of ‘modern’ and
‘progressive’ teaching (Cuban 1986).

38
Enthusiasm for the classroom use of motion pictures grew during the first decades of the twentieth
century. One popular justification was that film provided a powerful means of improving public
education at scale – as one US Commissioner for Education put it, film offered a ‘most valuable weapon
for the attack on ignorance the world has ever known’ (Tiagert 1923). Many people were especially
impressed by the ability of films to ‘bring learning to life’ – promising a means to represent reality in a
visual form and to animate the spoken and printed word. As Charles Hoban argued in Visualizing the
Curriculum, the primary value of visual instruction was its degree of realism (1937). This, in turn, was
seen to assist the achievement of at least three main instructional objectives – ‘imparting a knowledge
of facts, teaching perceptual- motor skills, and influencing motivation, attitudes and opinions’ (Allen
1956, p. 125). As one US journalist marvelled in 1922, film was capable of animating and enlivening
the act of learning:

To the schoolboy of the year 1995 history will not merely be something to be memorized out of books.
It will be visualized and made real for him by the moving pictures that are being made now. The people
of our time will not be mere history book ghosts to this boy but living creatures who smile at him and
walk and play and love and hate and work and eat. (cited in Erickson 2015, n.p.)

Enthusiasm for the educational benefits of motion pictures was supported by a burgeoning body of
research and evaluation literature. Early ‘experimental’ studies, for instance, found that groups of
students using film were ‘greatly superior in learning information and concepts’ when compared to
students using traditional methods (Allen 1956, p. 132). A number of surveys and evaluations also
reported a belief among educators that ‘a body of factual information such as high-school science
could be taught by films alone almost as effectively as by a teacher using conventional classroom
procedures, and even better if the films were introduced and supplemented by brief study guides’
(Allen 1956, p. 126). Other studies, however, were less certain of the ‘effect’ of film-based education.
As Smith (1962) concluded, any overall findings of learning gains relating to the use of film ‘were
equivocal’.

Concerns over the lack of tangible effect were followed by subsequent declines in the use of motion
pictures. By 1954, one study of Michigan schools reported the use of educational film in the classroom
to be ‘the equivalent of a one-reel film about every four weeks’ (Dale 1958, cited in Cuban 1986, p.
16). As the 1950s progressed, it became apparent that films were not having a major impact on how
schools, colleges and universities went about educating students, despite their booming popularity as
an entertainment medium. As Larry Cuban describes, ‘Most teachers used films infrequently in
classrooms. Films took up a bare fraction of the instructional day. As a new classroom tool, film may
have entered the teacher’s repertoire, but, for any number of reasons, teachers used it hardly at all’
(1986, p. 17).

The reasons and explanations offered for this relative failure were varied. A national survey of US
teachers at the beginning of the 1950s highlighted four main areas of deficiency. These included the
need for ‘more time’, ‘more central coordination’ and ‘more adapted classrooms’, underpinned by the
need for ‘better support’ (cited in Hornbostel 1955). Based on his reading of the research of the time,
Larry Cuban offered four similar reasons for the decline of film use in educational settings. These
included teachers’ lack of skills in using the equipment; the high cost of the films, equipment and their
upkeep; the inaccessibility of equipment when it was needed; and the difficulty of finding and fitting
the right film to the class. All told, film enjoyed a relatively brief period as a mainstream classroom
technology.

39
Educational radio

Of course, film was not the only ‘wonder technology’ of the early twentieth century. During the 1920s
and 1930s, the attention of many educationalists shifted to the potential uses of radio in the classroom.
Again, widespread enthusiasm was expressed for the educational promise of this technology almost
as soon as it became available to schools, colleges and universities. The first established US
‘educational radio station’ was at the University of Wisconsin in 1917. Three years later, the Radio
Division of the US Department of Commerce issued several broadcasting licences that supported the
establishment of radio stations to broadcast educational programmes for the general public. One
celebrated example was the ‘RCA Educational Hour’, a music programme that reached a peak audience
of 6 million listeners. Alongside the efforts of established broadcasters such as RCA, more than sixty
universities and colleges offered radio-based instruction to learners, with some school districts
developing broadcasting stations and programmes that were integrated into everyday school lessons
(Cuban 1986). One particularly ambitious educational radio project was the establishment of the
‘World Radio University’ in 1937, which broadcasted classes in twenty- four languages to thirty-one
countries (Saettler 1990).

Perhaps the most extensive educational use of the radio was by the so-called Schools of the Air. From
the 1930s until the 1970s, commercial broadcast networks, state universities, colleges of education
and local school boards established over a dozen School of the Air initiatives to offer remote access to
school education. These services offered courses in subject areas designed to fit alongside traditional
school instruction. In a similar manner to traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ schools, these Schools of the
Air used gradated curricula, followed term-time schedules and even provided learning support
materials that could be used in classrooms. The CBS-run ‘American School of the Air’ was launched in
1930 and was soon offering lessons in subjects such as history, literature, art and health. It is estimated
that at the height of their popularity, School of the Air radio programmes were used by over 1 million
students across the United States – constituting nearly 10 per cent of the nation’s school children
(Bianchi 2008). In all, the use of the radio in education was deemed important enough for the US Office
of Education to establish a dedicated ‘Radio Section’.

The educational use of the radio was accompanied by considerable excitement and enthusiasm. It was
argued, for example, that the radio had the obvious advantage of providing high-quality teaching and
learning content to be transmitted to a large number of classrooms and students at a negligible
additional cost. As the founder of the Ohio School of the Air observed:

The central and dominant aim of education by radio is to bring the world to the classroom, to make
universally available the services of the finest teachers, the inspiration of the greatest leaders ... and
unfolding world events which through the radio may come as a vibrant and challenging textbook of
the air. (Darrow 1932)

Young people’s intuitive interest in the radio led some educators to believe it capable of increasing
engagement in their schooling (The Instructor 1928). Other commentators reasoned that the
immediacy of live radio broadcasts lent instruction a heightened relevance to recent events (Morgan
1931).The radio was also seen as a democratic medium that allowed high-quality education to be
experienced regardless of geographic or socio-economic circumstance. As one proponent of
educational radio put it, ‘With radio, the under-privileged school becomes the privileged one’
(unattributed quote in Cuban 1986, p. 23).

As all these examples illustrate, many educationalists held high hopes for the instructional use of the
radio in school, college and university education. As the Director of Cleveland public schools radio
40
station reasoned at the end of the Second World War, ‘The time may come when the portable radio
receiver will be as common in the classroom as the blackboard’ (cited in Dreyfus 2001, p. 27). Indeed,
the presence of radios in educational settings grew steadily throughout the first half of the twentieth
century. In the early years of the radio, receivers were scarce because of their high cost. Yet, by the
late 1930s, prices had dropped and studies conducted in the early 1940s found that more that half of
Ohioan schools had radio sets, with two-thirds of Californian schools owning one or more sets (Cuban
1986). There was also occasional evidence of the educational effectiveness of the radio as a teaching
tool. One experimental study in the 1930s, for example, compared students’ retention of information
from lectures and radio broadcasts, concluding that the radio was an efficient and effective means of
imparting information (Mathews 1932).

However, by the end of the 1940s it had become clear that the educational potential of the radio was
not being realised fully across the US school system. While many schools may have owned radio sets,
studies suggested that most teachers made sporadic use of them. One survey conducted in 1937 found
that the time 73 per cent of schools spent for using radio programmes was ‘little or none’ (Atkinson
1938). Another study of the Wisconsin School of the Air found that teachers who were accessing the
service reported making use of radio programmes in their teaching for an average of three times per
week. Reviewing the overall national use of educational radio at the end of the Second World War,
the US Federal Communications Commission concluded that ‘radio has not been accepted as a full-
fledged member of the educational family ... and remains a stepchild of education’ (Woelfel and Tyler
1945, p. 85).

While educational radio continues to be used in the present day (especially in developing countries
and remote rural regions), the medium had a far more modest impact on formal education in North
America and Europe than expected. Again, research studies of the time highlighted a number of
contributory factors – typified by a 1941 survey, which garnered reasons for US high school principals
not making use of the radio in their schools (cited in Cuban 1986, p. 25). This survey highlighted the
following logistic, technical and educational issues:

• no radio-receiving equipment – 50 per cent;

• school schedule difficulties – 23 per cent;
• unsatisfactory radio equipment – 19 per cent;
• lack of information – 14 per cent;
• poor radio reception – 11 per cent;
• programmes not related to the curriculum – 11 per cent; • class work seen as being more valuable
– 10 per cent; • teachers not interested – 7 per cent.

Educational television

The examples of film and radio illustrate a number of themes that recurred throughout the
introduction of ‘new’ technologies into educational settings during the twentieth century. As Cuban
and others have observed, most of the technological developments of the twentieth century – from
the x-ray machine to the aeroplane – were heralded for their educational potential, with most failing
subsequently to challenge the established ‘chalk and talk’ model of classroom teaching and learning.
While it is too simplistic to judge education as ‘resistant’ to film and radio, there were clear
discrepancies between the rhetoric and the realities of how these technologies were used in education.
This apparently compromised nature of technology use in education is illustrated in the case of
television – one of the defining consumer technologies of the twentieth century.

41
Experiments in the educational use of closed circuit television can be traced as far back as 1939. The
widespread use of broadcast educational television was initiated soon after by the US Federal
Communications Commission’s decision in 1952 to set aside 242 television channels for educational
purposes. In addition to prompting the development of public and community television stations, this
decision encouraged some universities and colleges to establish educational television stations
(Morehead 1955). Federal funding for these educational television projects was accompanied by
support from commercial organisations. Most notable was the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the
Enhancement of Education, which committed $100 million for trials of educational television projects
across more than 250 school systems and 300,000 students. Up until the 1970s, educational television
grew in prominence and popularity around the world. For example, by 1980, each of the three main
national TV channels in the United Kingdom boasted the annual production of around fifty television
series for schools and colleges, with three-quarters of schools using television programmes in some of
their lessons.

It would be fair to say that enthusiasm for educational television surpassed even the excitement and
hyperbole directed towards film and radio before it. Indeed, some of the most vocal early proponents
of educational television were those who had previously supported these earlier technologies. William
Darrow, for example, described television in glowing terms of ‘radio with its eyes open’, reasoning that
‘when the eye and the ear have been remarried in television we shall indeed be challenged to open
wide the school door ... there will be no “blindness” gap to be bridged’ (cited in Cuban 1986, p. 26).
Four decades on from its introduction, proponents of educational television continued to enthuse
about the medium’s ability to provide educators with ‘unique teaching resources’ – supporting a range
of learning ‘from the concrete to the abstract’ (Bates 1988, p. 215). As with film before it, the visual
qualities of television were seen to offer ‘a window on the world for our students’ coupled with ‘the
“enjoyment factor” which well-produced television brings to learning’ (Bates 1988, p. 214).

Effusive arguments of this sort were advanced regularly from the 1950s onwards. Over thirty years
before Bates’ claims, similar arguments had been advanced that television could ‘provide the closest
thing to real experiences for many children’ (King 1954, p. 20). As with the earlier enthusiasm for film
and radio, most supporters considered television to be capable of enhancing the quality and quantity
of instruction. As Lawrence Conrad reasoned, ‘Television could well prove to be the power tool of
education ... television could certainly increase the effectiveness of teaching, and it might well expand
the size of the classroom’ (1954, p. 373). All told, most educators welcomed television as a ‘quick,
efficient, inexpensive means of satisfying the nation’s instructional needs’ (Hezel 1980, p. 173).

These claims were reinforced by empirical evidence. A number of self-report studies during the 1950s,
for example, found the large majority of ‘early-adopting’ teachers to consider television- based lessons
‘valuable enough to continue’ (Allen 1956, p. 129). Other researchers provided persuasive case-studies
of particularly successful television projects and initiatives. Larry Cuban describes some of the more
celebrated case-studies of school systems that were making extensive use of educational television.
In the Pacific island of American Samoa, for example, a national scheme of television-based instruction
was introduced to supplement what was seen to be a poorly trained and poorly qualified teaching
workforce. Cuban (1986) reports that by 1966, four of every five school students in American Samoa
were spending between one-quarter and one-third of their class time watching televised lessons,
which were then supplemented by follow-up exercises and question periods led by teachers. Similar
‘immersive’ projects in US states suggested that television- viewing students could improve their
position in league tables of test scores when compared to national norms.

These success stories notwithstanding, by the 1980s educational television was generally deemed to
have failed to impact school, college and university education, especially when compared to the very
42
high levels of domestic television viewing. As Larry Cuban describes, by the 1980s it was being reported
that ‘most teachers seldom use the medium. When teachers do use television, they do so infrequently
and for only a tiny fraction of the instructional day’ (1986, p. 39). A survey by the United Kingdom’s
Independent Broadcasting Authority in 1990 suggested that a number of reasons could be associated
with this failure. These included issues such as the cost of television and video equipment; a lack of
teacher training to use television in teaching; the incompatibility of television programme content with
the school curriculum and the perceived low quality of programming (see Moss, Jones and Gunter
1991).

A further impediment that emerged from some research studies of television use in schools was the
suggestion that programme viewing disrupted the norms and routines of the classroom. Larry Cuban,
for one, reasons that television was often inserted into classroom settings without sufficient
consideration for the nature of the social contexts of schools and schooling. As he argued, ‘Television
was hurled at teachers. The technology and its initial applications to the classroom were conceived,
planned, and adopted by non-teachers’ (Cuban 1986, p. 36). Other observers reasoned that the
‘culture’ of television did not necessarily complement established practices and understandings
among teachers, classrooms and schools. As Richard Lewis (1962, p. 564) concluded:

Television is a significant creator of alarm ... TV, in a dramatic way, cuts sharply across all aspects of an
instructional program and prods deeply into the traditionally private classroom life of teachers.
Reactions to proposals to use television in instruction include the normal range from uncritical
acceptance to automatic rejection.

Micro-electronics and the birth of educational computing

The fourth example of twentieth-century educational technologies marked some of the first digital
devices to enter education. The so-called micro-electronics revolution involved a number of
technologies – not least the pocket calculator and other portable devices such as Texas Instruments’
Speak & Spell machine (Mably 1980). These technologies were all based around the potential of the
silicon chip to support computerised devices that were miniaturised, relatively cheap, robust and
boasted previously unachievable information-processing power. Micro-electronics devices such as
Speak & Spell were described in glowing terms as offering educators ‘a revolutionary product with
electronic voice and brain and not a single moving part to go wrong’ (cited in Carter 1979, p. 13).

Perhaps the most enduring – and certainly the most significant – micro-electronic device was the non-
networked ‘stand-alone’ micro-computer. The links between the development of computers and
education were long-standing. Decades before the development of the ‘micro’, much of the early
development of computer technology had taken place in university settings. Subsequently, mainframe
computers started to be used for teaching and learning as well as for research and administrative
purposes in universities in the early 1960s. Initially, educators focused on what were termed the
‘numeric’ uses of computers for engineering, math and computer programming. However, as the
1960s progressed, interest grew in the so-called non-numeric uses of computers, in particular what
was termed ‘computer- assisted instruction’. In 1966, the psychologist and philosopher Patrick Suppes
heralded the emergence of the ‘computer tutor’ as an apparent saviour of school and university
education, capable of providing education to any child or adult on a flexible and individualised basis.
‘Plug-in instruction’, we were told, would ensure the equitable future of educational provision, and
allow everyone access to top-quality teaching and learning (Suppes 1966).

As James Martin and Adrian Norman (1970) described at the time, by the end of the 1960s, educational
computing had developed into a number of forms. These included the following:
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• tutorial and coaching instruction: where the computer presents material to the learner and then
asks questions about it. A computer-based ‘tutor’ monitors the interaction between the learner and
the system, and decides when and how to intervene;

• drill-and-practice instruction: the computer helps the learner acquire skills by repetitive practice
(spelling, arithmetic, vocabulary and grammar of foreign languages);

• problem-solving: the learner is given a problem and discusses the result with the computer in a
conversational style;

• dialogue systems: the computer develops elaborate dialogues with the learner to approximate
spoken English;

• simulation/computer-as-laboratory: the computer provides simulated versions of experiments, with

learners observing the results of their actions on a screen;

• database use: the computer provides large files of instructional information that the learner can
browse selectively;

• educational games.

The use of all these applications spread across school and university settings during the 1970s and
1980s. By 1983, for example, computers were being used for instructional purposes in more than 40
per cent of all US elementary schools and more than 75 per cent of all US secondary schools.
Supported by federal government initiatives and private sector donations from the likes of the new IT
firms such as Apple, Tandy and IBM, the proportion of US schools with computers rose from 18 to 98
per cent between 1981 and 1991. Similarly, the ratio of ‘students-per- computer’ dropped from 125:1
to 18:1 over the same time.

From the initial uses of the technology in the 1960s onwards, enthusiasm for computers in education
was intense, with a wide range of claims and arguments being advanced. In particular, the area of
‘computer-assisted learning’ prompted considerable enthusiasm. For example, at the beginning of the
1980s, the French minister of education declared the combination of information technology and
schooling as nothing less than ‘le marriage du siècle’ (cited in Hawkridge 1983, p. i). Many of these
claims betrayed an awestruck sense of inevitability. As the popular UK technology writer Christopher
Evans proclaimed, there was little doubt that ‘portable, personal teaching computers ... will sweep
through the education system of the Western world’ (1979, pp. 118–20).

One major justification for using micro-computing in education was that of ‘computer literacy’, pre-
empting more recent imperatives of ‘digital literacy’ outlined in Chapter 2. As Howard Besser noted,
‘The primary argument given for instituting computer literacy requirements is the “good citizen” one
– that in order to be a productive member of society in the near future, one must know about
computers’ (1993, p. 63). Much enthusiasm was also directed towards the instructional value of
computer-assisted instruction, with commentators highlighting a range of learning- related benefits
such as encouraging critical thinking and creativity, as well as matching students’ learning styles and
motivational states. As Martin and Norman again observed: With computer assisted instruction the
process is pupil-centered, not instructor-centered and the machine adapts its pace to that of the
student. The dull students can ask for endless repetition without embarrassment and the machine will
retrace its steps with infinite patience. The quick student or the student who already partially knows

44
the material can skip a segment – with the machine questioning him to check that he does, in fact,
know it. (1970, p. 127)

The growth of micro-computing throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by
supporting evidence for its positive impact on education and learning. In 1966, one of the first studies
of the benefits of computer-assisted instruction took place in what was described as a ‘deprived’
school in Palo Alto, California. An extensive initiative made use of computer terminals, light pens and
screens to teach reading and arithmetic. As the research team concluded, ‘The technique was very
effective. The children loved playing with the terminals and their teachers had to “peel them off the
machines” to get them back to their lessons’ (Martin and Norman 1970, p. 123). Claims such as these
were repeated regularly over the next twenty years. This description of a similar Canadian educational
computing project also illustrates this point:

One of the earliest extensive uses of computer-assisted learning occurred in Ontario in the late 1960s.
It was designed to help an innumerate group of teenagers fulfill the math requirement for math
courses. The program was simple drill and practice, but was highly successful. Compared to the more
traditional teaching methods, the drop-out rate was reduced by 80 percent, while staff at times
dropped to only 10 percent per pupil. Not the least of the successes was the testimony of a girl who
stated that the computer was the first math teacher who had never yelled at her. (Stonier and Conlin
1985, p. 14)

Despite claims for substantial improvements in teaching and learning, the use of micro-computers
tended not be sustained across school systems or even within individual schools. Whereas some
teachers and students did make frequent use of the technology, nationally representative studies
suggested that the educational use of computers was sporadic and often inconsistent (e.g. Becker
1994). School-based research during this period reported that many computers were accessible to
teachers and learners only via dedicated computer rooms and ‘labs’, and that the most frequent uses
of the technology were for the (re)production of work through word-processing packages and for the
creation of drill-and-practice and tutorial software. As Christopher Conte (1997, p. 1) concluded, ‘In
many schools computers sit idle much of the time or are used for passive rote learning through drill-
and-practice routines rather than being used to cultivate higher-order thinking skills like synthesis,
analysis, and communication.’

As with film, radio and television before it, the apparent failure of the micro-computer to transform
education was linked with several factors. Issues of teacher expertise and confidence with
computers were often highlighted by research studies, issues that were usually reported as being
exacerbated by a lack of training. The theme of teacher ‘resistance’ and ‘antipathy’ towards
computers was also reported regularly. As Martin and Norman (1970, p. 130) lamented, ‘Most of
[the teaching profession] is avidly looking for reasons to hate computer assisted instruction.’ A
number of technical issues were also highlighted regularly by research studies throughout the 1970s
and 1980s, not least the difficulties of accessing computers, a lack of technical support when
problems were encountered and the general unreliability of hardware and software. David
Hawkridge’s (1983) overview of computer use in UK schools at the beginning of the 1980s identified
the following factors as contributing to the low take-up of the technology:

• restricted quantity, quality and variety of software and courseware;

• concerns over the over-dependence on mediated learning;

• teachers’ role changes associated with computer use;
• concerns over the weakening of public educational systems; • concerns over commercial bias;
45
• the over-emphasis on IT in government policy to maintain national prestige;
• teachers’ ambivalence towards technological innovation; • concerns over the ‘communications
effects’ gap (e.g. the inequalities introduced by computer ‘haves’ and computer ‘have nots’);
• concerns over the social and political bias introduced with information technology.

Learning lessons from the past

All of these phases of technology implementation pre-date the mainstream emergence of networked
‘online’ computing during the 1990s, the emergence of ‘social media’ and ‘apps’ during the 2000s and
the ongoing current emergence of learning analytics, personalised learning systems and the like. As
such, all of the educational technologies discussed in this chapter are now sufficiently ‘in the past’ to
allow for detailed and objective reflection on their rise and eventual decline. Hopefully, these accounts
have illustrated the benefits of looking backwards at a topic that is usually imagined in forward-looking
terms. Leon Wieseltier reflects thus on the difficulty of making sense of present-day technologies:

Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an
innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to
keep our heads and reflect. (2015, n.p.)

So what can taking a ‘long view’ of film, radio, television and micro-computing in education tell us?
Certainly, a main conclusion relates to the repeated failure of initial promises to be realised in practice.
Although these technologies were accompanied by the promise of benefits for education and learning,
all failed to meet the substantial expectations that surrounded them. Given the considerable impact
of film, radio, television and micro-computing in domestic, business and entertainment contexts, it
could reasonably be concluded that these failures were linked to issues specifically related to
education. If this is the case, then it would seem sensible to bear these issues in mind during
subsequent discussions of contemporary digital technologies.

In particular, all four phases of technology development detailed in this chapter were surrounded by
optimistic but speculative hopes of improving education provision and educational practice. This is an
important point to consider, as how and why technologies are introduced into social contexts will have
a significant bearing on the way they are used. It is clear that technologies such as the motion picture
were not introduced specifically in response to a strong demand from educators or students. Instead,
these technologies appear to have been introduced in largely ‘top-down’ ways. Often, these
technologies were introduced in response to what were referred to in Chapter 2 as ‘external’
imperatives – not least the expectation that the use of ‘new’ technology would bring education ‘up to
speed’ with the rest of society. Indeed, all four examples could be said to highlight a trend for
technology being introduced into education as a ‘solution in search of a problem’.

Certainly, we have seen throughout this chapter how successive introductions of film, radio, television
and micro-computing into education were accompanied by considerable hyperbole and hucksterism.
Many claims were made about the enhanced nature of technology-based learning and the resulting
improvements to learning, as well as the establishment of ‘fairer’ conditions for ‘rich’ and ‘poor’
students and schools. We also saw how research ‘evidence’ was produced quickly to ‘prove’ the ‘effect’
of these technologies, especially in terms of learning gains – regardless of the fact that this evidence
was inconclusive and equivocal. Aside from expectations of enhanced learning, it is notable how many
of the ‘educational’ rationales for these technologies were based on ambitions towards the
mechanisation of the teacher’s work, increased efficiency and economies of scale (Watters 2015). As
Bill Ferster concludes, the ‘siren’s call’ of film, radio and television technology in education was
consistently one of ‘potentially solve[ing] issues of cost, consistency and quality’ (2014, p. 42).
46
It could be concluded that film, radio, television and micro- computing all perpetuated what was
referred to in Chapter 1 as a ‘technical fix’. Of course, education was certainly not the only area of
twentieth-century society in thrall to the transformative potential of new technologies. Any
educational enthusiasm for these technologies must be seen as a subset of wider societal enthusiasms.
In general, the twentieth century was a period when many people were keen to proclaim the ‘power’
of various technologies to affect substantial societal change. Alvin Weinberg, a physicist who had
worked on the Manhattan Project, wrote a seminal paper in the 1960s criticising the eagerness of
politicians and policymakers to seize upon any ‘quick technological fix for profound and almost
infinitely complicated problems’ (1966/1997, p. 69). The flaw in this reasoning, Weinberg argued, was
that ‘social problems are much more complex than are technological problems’ (p. 68), requiring
‘social engineering’ rather than technological remedies. Although Weinberg was more concerned with
issues of warfare and poverty than education, his analysis holds true in terms of the burgeoning
interest throughout the twentieth century in audio-visual and computerised technologies as potential
solutions for the perceived shortcomings of national education systems.

Most of the commentators who have charted the history of education and technology throughout the
twentieth century make sense of these observations in terms of a clear ‘cycle’ of events that is more
or less repeated with each ‘wave’ of technology development. This cycle is seen to begin with
substantial promises for the transformative potential of the technology backed by research evidence
and other instances of scientific credibility. Yet, despite their initial enthusiasm and expectations,
educators then go on to make inconsistent use of the new technologies for a variety of technical,
professional and personal reasons. Perhaps most importantly, few changes appear to occur in the
arrangements of educational institutions. A number of rationales are then proposed to explain this
‘lack of impact’, such as resourcing, funding, educational bureaucracy and a general ‘teacher
resistance’. As memories of the initial enthusiasms for the technology begin to fade, educators are
then ‘sold on the next generation of technology, and the lucrative cycle start[s] all over again’
(Oppenheimer 1997, p. 47). As far as most historians are concerned, this cycle of ‘hype’, ‘hope’ and
‘disappointment’ is perhaps the biggest lesson about education and technology to be learnt from the
twentieth century. As Margaret Cassidy concludes:

While it is never entirely accurate to claim that history repeats itself, or that patterns and similarities
are accurate predictors of future events, it is probably fair to think that some of the obstacles that
stood in the way of radio, television and computer assisted instruction are still in place. (1998, p. 181)

As this chapter has shown, certainly a number of recurring issues have arisen throughout the history
of film, radio, television and micro-computing in twentieth-century education. All these technologies
could be said to have been hampered by a number of practical issues such as inadequate resourcing,
technological unreliability, increased financial cost of upkeep, inadequate training and teachers’ lack
of confidence in the technology. Many of the recurring issues throughout the different ‘phases’ of
educational technology highlighted in this chapter also hint at deeper structural issues and ‘clashes’ –
not least issues of congruity and ‘goodness of fit’ with pre-existing education structures. As Margaret
Cassidy (1998, p. 178) observes, all of these technologies certainly ‘posed problems in terms of fitting
into the schedule of the school day’. As many of the examples illustrated in this chapter suggest, this
lack of ‘fit’ related to issues of time, content and relevance to the curriculum. There is also a sense
that these technologies struggled to find a niche within the social and cultural contexts of the
educational institutions they were meant to be implemented into. Indeed, two of the recurring
obstacles to successful implementation identified by Larry Cuban (1986) were the nature of ‘the
classroom and school as work settings’, and the ‘situationally constrained choice’ that teachers face
when working in schools, colleges and universities.

47
This history of classroom technology certainly illustrates the apparent ability of educators to
accommodate these new ‘innovations’ and shape their use around existing practices. As Larry Cuban
reflects, one of the notable features of schools over the last one hundred years is the ‘remarkable
stability in how teachers have taught and do teach now. ... For the most part, teachers have tamed
technological innovations seeking fundamental reforms in pedagogy to fit their classroom practice
since the early twentieth century’ (2013, pp. 110–12). Yet, teachers are not solely responsible for the
limited showing of these technologies in education provision and practice. It is also notable how these
technologies were constrained by issues related to the substantial structural changes in schooling over
the twentieth century – particularly, the introduction of standardised curricula and examination
regimes, the need for standardised timetabling and centralised forms of organisation and governance.
In short, there were many formal and informal features of schools and schooling that these
technologies had to be fit around.

It could also be argued that the technologies in this chapter provide good examples of the continuities
that are implicit in any technological change. In particular, these examples highlight the tendency for
‘new’ technologies to continue practices, techniques and competencies established around preceding
technologies. This is apparent in the (lack of) progression from film in the 1920s to television in the
1960s. One could argue that many of these screen-related practices persist in forms of online video
tutorials and lectures used in the recent provision of MOOCs and ‘flipped classrooms’. Similarly, echoes
of the static film strip from the early 1900s are apparent in current uses of slideshow applications such
as PowerPoint in schools and universities (Smith 2015). All told, the examples featured in this chapter
remind us that ‘new’ technologies in education are haunted by ghosts of old technologies. In other
words, traces of the technical principles of what might be presumed as ‘dead media’ remain, even
though the technological artefacts might not. As Eugene Thacker puts it, ‘With dead media, the object
is no longer in use, but the form of the object remains active’ (2014, p. 129).

If nothing else, this chapter illustrates the complex nature of technology implementation. We have
seen that there is little historical reason to assume that technology use leads to inevitable and
sustained educational improvement. Instead, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the
implementation of technology in education is rarely a predictable or controllable process. As Robert
Reiser concludes, ‘Of the many lessons we can learn by reviewing the history of instructional media,
perhaps one of the most important involves a comparison between the anticipated and actual effects
of media on instructional practices’ (2001, p. 61).

So what lessons can be taken from this chapter’s ‘contextual’ account of old technology? All of the
examples in this chapter have certainly shown how educational institutions are social spaces that
mediate any ‘choices’ offered by new technologies. Indeed, the main benefit of taking a contextualist
approach has been to highlight the socio-technical nature of technology-related change in education.
The wonder technologies of educational film, radio, television and micro-computing are best
understood as embedded social practices. All of the examples in this chapter illustrate how the
implementation of technology in educational settings is a matter of human actions and institutional
inertia – not simply the relentless march of technological progress.

So while film, radio, television and micro-computing can all be associated with specific changes to
education during the twentieth century, none of these technologies could be said to have ‘caused’ or
generated widespread or systemic improvement. Instead, any changes are better understood in terms
of how each technology was appropriated within social relations and structures. This goes some way
towards explaining the seemingly slow, unpredictable and frustrating nature of educational change
throughout the twentieth century – a period that was in many ways characterised by swift and far-
reaching technological advancement. As Brigitte Wessels contends, ‘Although some aspects of
48
technological change may be fairly rapid, social and cultural change usually occurs more slowly ...
reflect[ing] the complexity and indeterminacy of the social’ (2010, p. 28).

Conclusions

The remainder of this book concentrates on the uses of twenty- first-century digital technologies. Yet,
in doing this, we should remain mindful of technical, social, cultural and political continuities from
earlier forms of technology. As Neil Postman reasoned at the beginning of the 1990s, the high-profile
‘failures’ of educational television, film and radio leave little excuse for educators to approach the
implementation of any new technology ‘with their eyes closed’ (cited in Oppenheimer 1997, p. 62).
That said, all the examples in this chapter can also help us think about how contemporary technologies
may differ from their predecessors. What possible discontinuities as well as continuities may be
apparent with contemporary forms of educational technology? We should not automatically presume
that current technology use is necessarily a case of ‘history repeats’. It may well be that emerging
forms of personalised digital technologies and social media applications encounter many of the issues
that have recurred in the past. But there may also be good reason to expect the current wave of digital
technologies to perhaps be ‘the one’ that finally overcomes these issues, and achieves the long-
anticipated technological transformation of education. Although history would suggest otherwise, it is
certainly possible to find people who expect this to be the case.

Indeed, many technologists would contend that the technologies of the twenty-first century are
qualitatively and quantitatively different from the technologies of the twentieth century. For example,
contemporary digital technologies certainly represent a ‘convergence’ of different media uses, which
means that they are perhaps not comparable directly to the technologies of the twentieth century. A
modern ‘multifunction’ digital artefact such as a smartphone can operate as a television, radio and
computer (as well as a telephone, camera, internet device and games machine). In addition, these
contemporary technology devices are often highly portable, not reliant on fixed power sources or
internet connectivity, and owned and brought into the classroom by individuals rather than controlled
by educational institutions. Contemporary technology is also more ‘interactive’ in nature rather than
relying on the ‘broadcast’ mode of transmission that characterised twentieth-century technology. In
all these ways, many people would argue that current digital devices and artefacts are finally capable
of meeting the promises made for the less capable technologies of the twentieth century. Perhaps the
likes of Thomas Edison were not wrong when enthusing about the transformative potential of new
technologies per se – merely that these promises were just being made one hundred years too early.

A further possible difference is the altered nature of what now constitutes ‘learning’. Indeed, many
educationalists would contend that contemporary forms of technology can now support radically
different forms of learning than were possible and/or desired in the twentieth century. Whereas film,
radio, television and micro- computing did little more than supporting the presentation of content and
providing resources for the passive reception and ‘doing’ of learning tasks by individual students,
contemporary digital technologies are capable of supporting dispersed and active forms of learning
that are based around collaboration between large groups of people. Many of the modes of teaching
and learning that accompanied the classroom use of film, radio, television and micro-computing now
appear in hindsight as notably restricted, often doing little more than reinforcing the teacher-
controlled ‘broadcast’ of information. Yet, as was detailed in Chapters 1 and 2, contemporary digital
technologies are more individual-centred and socially orientated. In these terms alone, many
educationalists and technologists now expect digital technology to break out of the ‘Groundhog Day’
cycle of hype, hope and disappointment. With these expectations in mind, we can now move to
another set of key issues and debates – the changing relationship between technology and learning.

49
Further questions to consider

• How has the use of film, radio and television endured in education, and could even be said to
continue to play an important role into the 2020s? What reasons can explain this longevity when
compared to the relative ‘failures’ of these technologies to be adopted in formal classroom settings of
the school, college and university?

• The smartphone could be seen as a telephone, computer, television, radio and camera all rolled into
one. To what extent do networked digital technologies such as this represent the ‘convergence’ of
previous technologies? Are any of the issues associated with the historical use of ‘separate’
technologies still applicable to the converged devices and platforms of today, or have these issues now
been largely overcome?

• How would the history of a recent educational technology be written in twenty years’ time? For
example, consider the educational use of iPads. What examples of ‘hype’, ‘hope’ and ‘disappointment’
can already be associated with iPads and other tablet computers? What wider issues and factors
already appear to have compromised the educational potential of these devices?

Please go to http://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/education-and- technology-second-edition/ to

download and listen to discussions around these further questions.

Further reading

Larry Cuban’s book on the history of classroom technologies in the twentieth century expands upon
all of the different technologies discussed in this chapter. It is well worth finding a copy if you can:
Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology

since 1920. New York, Teachers College Press.

Bill Ferster updates many of Cuban’s discussions, while also providing an interesting overview of the
rise of behaviourist ‘teaching machines’ in twentieth- century classrooms:
Ferster, B. (2014). Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of

Education and Technology. Baltimore, MD, John Hopkins University Press.

The first three chapters from this e-book by Audrey Watters cover what she terms ‘the hidden
history of Ed Tech’ – including further reflections on teaching machines:
Watters, A. (2015). The Monsters of Education Technology. Kindle, Amazon

Media.

Although not related directly to educational use, this book provides an interesting and entertaining
overview of the social history of technology: Pursell, C. (2007). The Machine in America: A Social
History of Technology,

2nd edn. New York, John Hopkins Press.

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 4 Technology and Learning

Chapter Outline
Introduction
Behaviourist theories of learning and technology
Cognitivist theories of learning and technology
Constructivist theories of learning and technology
Constructionist theories of learning and technology
Socio-cultural theories of learning and technology
Contemporary accounts of technology, information, knowledge and learning
Conclusions

Introduction

As discussed in Chapter 1, learning lies at the heart of most people’s understandings of what
‘education’ is. The major part of technology use in education is concerned with supporting acts of
learning in one form or another. In fact, many people working in the area of educational technology
would describe themselves as being ‘learning technologists’ and would characterise their work as part
of the ‘learning sciences’. As such, we cannot fully understand education and technology unless we
consider the key issue of how technology use can support, enhance and even improve learning.

The links between digital technology and matters of thinking, intelligence and learning stretch far back
into the history of computer development. As outlined in Chapter 3, the development of the computer
during the 1950s and 1960s was rooted in the field of artificial intelligence. This led to an early
emphasis within computer science on the challenge of teaching machines to think intelligently, or at
least of being able to add ‘thinking-like’ features to technology. A belief that computers are ‘machines
for thinking’ has, therefore, long persisted in technological and educational circles. As Martin Cohen
reasoned at the beginning of the 1990s, ‘Computers are not just machines that seem to think – they
promise to do people’s thinking for them and much else besides. It is in this sense that the computer
is an “educational tool” ’ (1993, p. 57).

An interest in learning and thinking continues to drive present- day developments of digital
technologies. Now, it is argued that computer technologies can have a profound influence on how
humans think. Over the last ten years, for example, cognitive scientists and others concerned with the
study of brain development have begun to document the possible links between technology use and
people’s capabilities for learning and processing information. This has prompted excitement among
some commentators over the technology-induced capacity of people to process information as well
as think differently than before. As Susan Greenfield (2014, n.p.) reasons, ‘The human brain will adapt
to whatever environment in which it is placed; the cyber world of the twenty-first century is offering
a new type of environment; the brain could therefore be changing in parallel, in correspondingly new
ways’. One of the key cognitive changes is seen to be the increased quantity of learning that can take
place. The vast networks of information, resources and people now available through digital
technologies such as the internet are seen to be restructuring and extending young people’s mental
faculties and ability to learn. As Marc Prensky (2012, p. 202) speculates:

Given that the brain is now generally understood to be massively plastic, responding, changing and
adapting to the inputs it receives, it is even possible that the brains of people receiving all these inputs

51
on a constant basis – i.e. searchers for wisdom – will be organized and structured differently in some
ways from the brains of today’s wise people.

These claims about the science of learning give credence to wider ‘common sense’ assumptions that
digital technology is inherently beneficial to the learning process. Indeed, few educators would contest
the idea that technology use (when properly applied) leads to some form of learning gain or benefit.
Digital technology is now used throughout educational institutions as a means to support learning –
either as an information tool (i.e. as a means of accessing information) or as a learning tool in its own
right (i.e. as a means of supporting learning activities and tasks) (Tondeur, van Braak and Valcke 2007).
There is also much enthusiasm for the ability of digital technologies to support people’s learning
beyond formal education. It is telling, for example, that some of the most popular computer
applications in recent times have been ‘brain training’ and ‘brain gym’ games. Indeed, Wired magazine
pronounced Nintendo’s ‘Brain Age’ as the fifth most influential game of the decade – selling over 19
million copies and ‘usher[ing] in the era of games that are (supposedly) good for you’ (Kohler 2009,
n.p.).

As all these examples suggest, most people in education consider digital technology and learning to
be inextricably linked. The key issue for this chapter to consider is how exactly technology can support
learning: What types of learning result from technology use? Why can technology support learning
that would not otherwise take place? We, therefore, need to examine the ways in which digital
technologies are associated with learning, and think a little more carefully about what learning ‘gains’
and improvements can be said to derive from technology use. In order to do this, we first need to
review key theories of learning that have been developed over the last hundred years or so, and
consider what explanations they provide for the role of technology in learning. The chapter now goes
on to review five of the key learning theories developed over the twentieth century – that is,
behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism, constructionism and socio-cultural psychology. Just what
contribution have these theories made to the use of digital technologies for learning?

Behaviourist theories of learning and technology

Much of the history of ‘pre-digital’ technology use in twentieth- century education was aligned with
‘behaviourist’ theories of learning advanced by psychologists such as John Watson, E. L. Thorndike and
B. F. Skinner. In particular, behaviourism grew to be a highly influential learning theory during the
1950s and 1960s, and continues to remain relevant to the use of digital technology in contemporary
education. Put simply, behaviourist accounts describe what goes on in the mind largely in terms of a
closed ‘black box’. Behaviourists are far more interested in the effects of learning than in the processes
of learning. Underlying the behaviourist view of learning is the idea of an individual’s behaviour being
‘conditioned’ by a series of reactions and responses to various stimuli in his or her environment. In
other words, the behaviourist approach suggests that when faced with a stimulus, a human will
respond (i.e. behave) in a particular way.

What happens subsequently will influence how the human responds (i.e. behaves) when faced with
the same stimulus again. If the consequence of this behaviour is reinforced by a reward or suppressed
through a punishment, then it is likely to be repeated or curtailed according to the nature of the
reinforcement.

For example, in the model of ‘classical conditioning’, behaviour is explained in terms of a series of
stimulus/response interactions based on punishment (perhaps best known through Ivan Pavlov’s
experiments on the digestive glands in dogs). In this manner, learning can be seen as the formation of
a connection between the stimulus and the response. This chain of events was illustrated in John
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Watson’s experiments during the 1920s with human subjects, most notably the purported ‘little Albert’
experiment. These experiments were based upon Watson’s belief that the majority of human
behaviours are based on conditioning. Watson set out to test this hypothesis by conducting a series of
experiments to make young children (such as ‘little Albert’) afraid of rats. He achieved this through the
association of a loud and unexpected noise whenever a rat was touched. After a series of similar events,
Watson demonstrated how this fear could then be generalised to other small animals. This fear could
also then be ‘extinguished’ by subsequent exposure to animals without the noise.

While offering a compelling explanation for a number of behaviours, the idea of learning being rooted
in reactions to punishment was gradually superseded by the model of learning through ‘operant
conditioning’. Here, learning was seen to be rooted in the event of being rewarded after correct
responses. Skinner’s experiments on conditioning the behaviour of rats, pigeons and dogs showed
how certain kinds of behaviours could be generated easily through a response/stimulus process of
feedback and reinforcement. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning highlighted the importance of
‘behavioural chaining’ where a behaviour was learnt in a series of steps, with the individual
incrementally mastering each step in sequence until an entire sequence was learnt. Skinner
demonstrated the concept of behavioural chaining through a series of experiments with animals
learning to perform certain tasks. For example, in his experiments to condition pigeons to learn to pull
levers in order to gain food, a succession of behaviours were first rewarded, but later left unrewarded
as the sequence of actions were internalised (e.g. touching the lever, moving the lever, moving the
lever to the left, and so on).

As these descriptions imply, the behaviourist view of the individual learner is largely that of a passive
recipient of learning experiences. In this sense, many people would argue that behaviourism is more
accurately described as a teaching theory rather than a learning theory. Indeed, much of Skinner’s
work was implicitly critical of conventional classroom teaching techniques. Skinner was particularly
frustrated by the time-lapse that usually occurs between a student’s response and the feedback that
a classroom teacher is able to provide. Skinner also bemoaned the infrequency of such reinforcement,
and the lack of personal attention that could be given to students in large classes. As with many of the
learning theories of the twentieth century, behaviourism soon became a driving motivation for
proposed reforms to the existing school system.

As the 1950s progressed, many behaviourists began to advocate a system of teaching and learning
that became known as ‘programmed instruction’. As Saettler (1990, p. 14) describes, this involves ‘a
curriculum that is programmed step by step in small units, focused on immediately observable and
measurable learning products’. Here, the links between technology and behaviourist theories of
learning were made explicit. In particular, the programmed instruction movement was built around
the development and use of a number of educational technologies and ‘mechanical devices’. As
Skinner reasoned at the time, the advantages of device-based learning were seen to be many:

If the teacher is to take advantage of recent advances in the study of learning, she must have the help
of mechanical devices. The technical problem of providing the necessary instrumental aid is not
particularly difficult. There are many ways in which the necessary contingencies may be arranged,
either mechanically or electrically. ... The important features of the device are these: Reinforcement
for the right answer is immediate. The mere manipulation of the device will probably be reinforcing
enough to keep the average student at work for a suitable period each day, provided traces of earlier
aversive control can be wiped out. A teacher may supervise an entire class at work on such devices at
the same time, yet each child may progress at his own rate, completing as many problems as possible
within the class period. If forced to be away from school, he may return where he left off. The gifted
child will advance rapidly, but can be kept from getting too far ahead either by being excused from
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arithmetic for a time or by being given special sets of problems which take him into some of the
interesting by-paths of mathematics. The device makes it possible to present carefully designed
material in which one problem can depend upon the answer to the preceding and where, therefore
the most progress to an eventually complex repertoire can be made. (Skinner 1958, p. 95)

Early instances of programmed instruction techniques included mechanical multiple-choice machines

and so-called chemo-sheets where learners were required to check their answers with chemical-
dipped swabs. Skinner himself devoted much time to the development of the ‘teaching machine’.
Based on the principles of operant conditioning, these devices required the student to answer a
question and then receive feedback on the correctness of the response. Skinner’s approach to the
design of teaching machines was to divide the learning process into a large number of very small steps
(frames), with positive reinforcement dependent upon the successful accomplishment of each step.
Because the process was reliant on a series of small learning steps, the teaching machines were
designed to give frequent positive reinforcement to increase the rate at which the individual correctly
learnt each step (e.g. some early teaching machines were designed to dispense candy rewards). The
teaching machines also operated on the principle that students should compose their responses
themselves rather than selecting responses from a set of pre-written multiple-choice options –
Skinner’s reason being that responses should be recalled rather than simply recognised. Unlike
conventional classroom-based activities, teaching machines were designed to keep students
continuously and actively engaged with learning tasks, providing immediate feedback for every
response.

In their heyday, teaching machines were widely considered a success. Soon after developing the first
machines for use in schools and universities, Skinner reflected that ‘with the help of teaching machines
and programmed instruction, students could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same
effort as in a standard classroom’. By 1963, there were seventy-three commercially available teaching
machines in various shapes and sizes, with companies such as Teaching Machines Inc. boasting sales
of over 150,000 machines (Ferster 2014). Although the popularity of programmed instruction began
to wane in the 1960s, the approach played an important role in the emerging field of ‘computer-
assisted instruction’. Early forms of computer-assisted instruction borrowed heavily from behaviourist
principles, especially in terms of so-called drill-and-practice computer programmes. Drill-and-practice
software continues to be used today, and is most commonly designed to reinforce basic skills such as
spelling, vocabulary development and typing. Many forms of online learning rely on basic exercises
and quizzes to provide students with ‘instantaneous, crucial feedback at each step, usually in response
to questions, and the students advanced through the content based on correct answers’ (Ferster 2014,
p. 50). Similarly, many contemporary ‘adaptive learning’ systems allow users to determine the
sequence of instruction or to skip certain topics, although, in essence, the technology is used to
present instruction to the individual, whose responses are then reinforced. Behaviourist principles also
inform ‘tutorial’ software packages, which present new concepts and provide step-by-step instructions
on how to complete certain objectives. In all these cases, behaviourist theories continue to underpin
the design and development of educational technology many decades on from the first teaching
machines. As Bill Ferster observes, ‘The principles introduced by behaviorism ... cast a long shadow on
educational technology, even to the present day’ (2014, p. 50).

Cognitivist theories of learning and technology

Behaviourist theory can be seen as one of the guiding influences on educational technology
throughout the twentieth century. However, behaviourist principles are now often criticised as
providing a rather bounded ‘input/output’ understanding of learning. As just discussed, behaviourist
accounts are concerned primarily with the individual’s observable behaviour rather than the cognitive
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processes taking place within the brain. This distinction is made clear when one considers
behaviourism’s close links with methods of animal training. At best, behaviourism relies on observable
changes in behaviour as an indication of what is happening inside an individual’s mind. As such,
behaviourism is limited in its ability to explain exactly how learning takes place and how knowledge is
constructed within the human mind.

In contrast, the theories of learning that have emerged from the field of cognitive science offer a very
different perspective. Here, learning is understood more in terms of the thought processes that lie
behind any observable behaviour. Unlike the behaviourist theories just described, learning is seen as
an internal process of mental action. In particular, these ‘cognitivist’ theories of learning seek to
describe the mental processes that underpin the act of learning within the human mind. Learning is
seen primarily as a matter of symbolic manipulation, with the individual’s mind involved in processing
goals, intentions, plans, mental representations and logical computations. As Tenenberg and
Knobelsdorf described it:

Viewing minds as symbolic machines that carry out inference procedures on symbolic representations
leads to a particular view of learning: learning is the acquisition, change and application of symbol
structures that denote knowledge about the world, such as scripts, plans and schemas. (2014, pp. 4–
5) The language of cognitivist theory involves quite complex descriptions of how stored
representations are mentally processed. By describing and modelling how the mind should work,
methods can be developed to support individuals in matching an ‘ideal’ performance. This interest in
describing the mental processes of learning provides common ground for the alignment of cognitive
psychology and technology-based education. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century,
cognitive psychologists became interested in developing computational metaphors of the mind – that
is, descriptions of how the mind processes and ‘computes’ information. In particular, mental processes
began to be conceived in terms of an internal knowledge structure where new information is
compared to existing cognitive structures called ‘schema’. It was argued that these schema could be
combined, extended or altered to accommodate new information as it is acquired and processed by
the mind. This computational orientation of cognitive psychology led to the development of computer-
like models of the mind, involving three main stages of information processing: ‘input’ first enters a
sensory register, then is processed in the mind’s short- term memory and is then sometimes
transferred to long-term memory for storage and retrieval.

In imagining this kind of an information-processing ‘computer’, cognitive psychologists see the mind
as relying on a number of components that would be familiar to any computer scientist. Indeed,
cognitivist theory was soon informing the development and design of technology-based learning from
the 1960s onwards – in particular, providing the basis for the development of ‘intelligent tutoring
systems’ and ‘cognitive tutors’. Here, computer technology is used to host a series of teaching
exchanges between an individual and an ‘intelligent system’. The intelligent system is designed to
respond to a model of what the individual should ideally be doing during a task. The individual’s
performance is then compared with this model and the system is able to ‘troubleshoot’ where his or
her mental actions have deviated from the ideal. On the basis of this comparison, the system is then
able to provide ‘intelligent feedback’ to guide the individual in further attempts at similar tasks.

This approach is based around the idea of programming a computer to ‘think’ like a human mind – a
process that lies at the heart of the field of artificial intelligence. Indeed, principles of artificial
intelligence have underpinned a range of technologies that have been used in education over the last
fifty years, often in the form of computer-based troubleshooting programmes as described above. A
range of applications have been developed since the 1960s to diagnose students’ understanding of
the skills involved in mathematical and scientific procedures, with systems providing complete
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diagnostic models of common learning errors, against which an individual’s performance could then
be compared.

Although applicable to all stages of education, such technologies and tools are especially popular in
adult and vocational learning. Many of the ‘intelligent learning environments’ currently being used in
work-based training contexts still follow cognitivist lines. A range of simulation-based intelligent
tutoring systems is regularly used in industrial and military settings to train professionals ranging from
pilots to surgeons. Such systems often provide ‘free- play’ simulations that enable individuals to act in
roles in realistically complex work-related scenarios. In addition to simulating models of complex
cause-and-effect relationships, these systems are designed to provide comprehensive and useful
instructional feedback, allowing individuals to reflect on the appropriateness and effectiveness of their
actions and decisions. Many of the latest intelligent learning environments are based around graphical
manifestations of the systems’ intelligence in the form of so-called pedagogical agents. These often
take the form of ‘conversational companions’ such as cartoon characters or more realistic ‘avatars’
who directly talk with the learner on behalf of the intelligent system.

As Gertner and van Lehn (2000) describe, the fundamental principles underlying the design of many
of these intelligent tutoring systems can be best described as computer-based ‘coached problem-
solving’. Often, the computerised system encourages individuals to construct new knowledge by
providing minimal hints that require them to derive the remainder of the solution on their own. In a
similar fashion to behaviourist views of learning, the technology gives immediate feedback after each
action to minimise the amount of time spent on incorrect activity. These systems often offer users
flexibility in the order in which actions are performed – sometimes allowing them to skip steps when
appropriate. Many intelligent tutoring systems are based around a ‘mastery’ model, with individuals
allowed to progress through tasks after mastering a large proportion of a given task. However, in
contrast to the programmed learning technologies described before, individuals using an intelligent
tutoring system are seen to be learning by ‘doing’ rather than learning by being instructed.

Constructivist theories of learning and technology

The computational metaphor of information processing that underpins cognitive psychology offers a
powerful explanation of learning. As the example of intelligent tutoring systems suggests, cognitivist
theory certainly moves the emphasis of technology- based learning beyond issues of behaviour and
introduces an enhanced notion of learner control. However, cognitivist theories can be criticised for
encouraging a strongly individualistic approach to learning and knowing, and perhaps losing sight of
the social nature of human learning. Models of learning are not universal, and differences are clearly
evident between specific cultures and environments (Tenenberg and Knobelsdorf 2014). It is not
surprising, therefore, that while behaviourist and cognitivist theories of learning have continued to
influence the ways in which technologies are used in education, the last forty years have seen
psychological accounts of learning take a distinctly ‘social turn’. In particular, the so-called
constructivist theories of learning came to dominate the field of educational technology during the
1980s and 1990s. Much of this work drew inspiration from well-established learning theories
developed by psychologists like Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner – although, as we shall go on to discuss,
a number of distinctive theories of learning can be classed as being constructivist in nature. It,
therefore, makes sense to consider these theories and the implications they have for technology and
learning in a little more detail.

Much of the enthusiasm for computer-based learning throughout the 1980s and 1990s was driven by
the notion of individuals learning by constructing their own understanding. Constructivist theories –
not least the work of Piaget and his followers – describe learning as taking place best when it is
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problem-based and built upon an individual’s previous experience and knowledge. In this sense,
learning is rooted in processes of exploration, inquiry, interpretation and meaning-making.
Constructivist theories portray learning as a more active process than in behaviourist and cognitivist
accounts. The constructivist learner is not solely receiving and acting upon information that is
transmitted to him or her from others. Instead, individuals are understood as constructing their own
perspective of the world through personal experiences. One of the central ideals of constructivism is
that human knowledge is built through exploration, with individuals constructing new knowledge upon
the foundation of previous learning. Human learning is seen to be highly iterative and exploratory in
nature, often the result of an individual problem- solving in ambiguous situations.

In presenting learning as an iterative process of using current experiences to update one’s previous
understanding, constructivist accounts place great importance on individuals’ ability to reflect upon
their learning. Piaget described the developing mind as in an ongoing process of maturation – seeking
equilibrium between what is already known and what is currently being experienced. From this
perspective, notions of ‘assimilation’, ‘accommodation’ and ‘adaptation’ are seen as crucial elements
of learning. Assimilation refers to the ability to alter and modify incoming information to fit with what
is already known. Conversely, accommodation is the ability to alter what is known in light of new
incoming information. In ideal circumstances, the process of cognitive adaptation involves the
individual using assimilation and accommodation as he or she explores and makes sense of his or her
environment.

As these concepts suggest, constructivist accounts tend to support models of learning that are looser
and more activity-based than is the case with behaviourism and cognitivism. These learning activities
often take the form of problems that can be solved in many different ways according to an individual’s
approach. How individuals approach any learning experience will depend upon their existing
knowledge and how they filter their current experiences through their previous experiences. Attempts
to encourage and support constructivist learning seek to provide individuals with opportunities to
explore and learn through successful and unsuccessful experiences. The role of the teacher is one of
orchestrating and supporting the individual’s exploration rather than directly providing instruction.

In this sense, technology is a key means of facilitating any individual’s exploration and construction of
knowledge. The last forty years have seen a growing belief among educationalists that technology is
one of the most suitable means of supporting constructivist principles in a learning environment. As
David Jonassen (1994) describes, these principles include the following:

• providing representations of real-world settings or case-based learning instead of predetermined

sequences of instruction;

• emphasising authentic tasks in meaningful contexts rather than abstract instruction out of context;

• avoiding over-simplification and representing the complexity of the real world;

• providing multiple representations of reality to be explored and made sense of;

• emphasising knowledge construction instead of knowledge reproduction;

• supporting collaborative construction of knowledge through social negotiation, rather than

competition among learners for recognition;

• encouraging thoughtful reflection on experience.

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These principles can be found in a range of popular digital technologies, not least the early
development of personal computers. In particular, Alan Kay’s work on the ‘Dynabook’ at the beginning
of the 1970s led to the development of many of the core technologies and protocols that underpin
the laptop and tablet computers of today, in particular the graphical user interface with its overlapping
windows, icons and cursor. Such designs were influenced heavily by the work of Piaget, Papert and
Bruner. As Mackenzie Wark details:

Kay and co wanted computers that could be a medium for learning. They turned to the psychologist
Jerome Bruner, and his version of Piaget’s theory of developmental stages. The whole design of the
Dynabook had something for each learning stage. ... For the gestural and spatial way of learning, there
was the mouse. For the visual and pictorial mode of learning, there were icons. For the symbolic and
logical mode of learning, there was the programming language. (2015, n.p.)

Elsewhere, during the 1990s, David Jonassen focused on the learning potential of HyperCard. This
application allowed information (in text, picture, audio or video form) to be stored in a series of ‘cards’
that were arranged into ‘stacks’. Cards could be linked to each other through the use of a built-in
programming language that used plain-English commands. While HyperCard was used in schools to
teach programming concepts, it also allowed users to create interactive learning materials, build
databases and generally support the construction and problem- solving processes that constructivist
learning entails. More recently, attention has been paid towards the use of gaming environments to
support constructivist forms of learning through exploration, problem-solving and reflecting on one’s
experiences. As the games designer Sid Meier reasons:

Learning is going to be part of any good video game: it gives you interesting challenges, and you learn
by doing, not by being passively taught something. Once you’ve played a game, you’re a little smarter,
a little more skilled than when you started. (2015, n.p.)

Constructionist theories of learning and technology

Perhaps the most prominent example of technology-based constructivist learning has come through
the work of Seymour Papert – himself one of Piaget’s students and collaborators. Papert is perhaps
best known among educationalists for developing the notion of ‘constructionism’. This is an extension
of the constructivist theories that describe learning as best taking place through the exploratory
building of objects that are themselves capable of doing something. By building an object and then
manipulating it to do something, Papert reasoned, individuals are able to learn from the process of
thinking about how to get something else to think. Constructionists, therefore, talk of encouraging an
individual’s conversations with an artefact, positioning the technologies as tools to learn with, rather
than learn from.

In his 1980 book, Mindstorms: Computers, Children and Powerful Ideas, Papert reasoned that the use
of computers for self-directed learning could result in the construction of what he called ‘Microworlds’.
These are simplified learning environments that are created as people build things and naturally
encounter problems that require creative solutions. As a result, formerly abstract concepts can take
on a real meaning, and tangible rewards can be experienced for exploring, experimenting and
constructing one’s own solution. As Papert put it, a Microworld can be seen simply as ‘an object-to-
think-with’ (1993, p. 11).

One of the implicit characteristics of the constructionist approach is the use of technology to support
the emotional aspects of learning, especially in terms of encouraging a childlike view of learning
through building, making things and attributing of inanimate objects with their own intelligence.
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Papert talked of ‘animating learning’ and ‘capturing the imagination’ of young and old learners alike.
These characteristics are all evident in the learning artefacts that stemmed from Papert’s development
of the ‘Logo’ computer programming language that was used in many schools during the 1980s. Here,
learners used simple English- language programming commands (such as Forward, Back, Left and Right)
to provide movement and drawing instructions to an on-screen cursor (the ‘turtle’) and its associated
‘floor turtle’ robot with retractable pen. Logo allowed learners to program the computer to produce
line graphics, from simple squares and triangles to more complex geometric patterns.

Rather than being a fancy geometric drawing device, Papert saw Logo as a tool to improve the ways
in which children were able to think and solve problems along constructivist lines. The legacy of Logo
and Turtle Graphics has since been extended to a number of products and applications. These include
the use of sets of ‘Lego’ construction bricks (most recently, the programmable Lego Mindstorms
robotics kits) as well as an online manifestation of ‘Net-Logo’ where Logo-like programming
commands can be used to explore and manipulate models of emergent phenomena (such as the
evolution of a butterfly population or a country’s economic performance). Constructionist learning is
also seen to lie at the heart of online games such as Minecraft and the educational application of so-
called Maker technologies such as 3D printing and e-textiles. By building, testing and refining digital
representations of complex systems and artefacts, all of these technologies involve users in the type
of self-directed exploratory learning that lies at the heart of the constructivist philosophy.

Socio-cultural theories of learning and technology

As the examples of Logo and HyperCard illustrate, much of the appeal of constructivist and
constructionist models of learning stems from their emphasis on individually centred and individually
driven activities and practices. That said, these learning theories can be seen to position knowledge as
something to be acquired from autonomous and, often, solitary investigation. Indeed, all of the
different theories described in this chapter so far tend to present learning as individually centred. In
contrast, growing numbers of psychologists over the last twenty years or so have turned their
attention to understanding the influence of the wider social and cultural environments that surround
any individual’s learning and cognitive development. In this sense, many educationalists would now
share the view that learning is a profoundly social process. While not contradicting the general
principle of individuals constructing their own knowledge and understanding, they now place
increased emphasis on how these learning processes are located within ‘socio-cultural’ environments.

Much of this recent thinking relates to the earlier work of psychologists like Lev Vygotsky and the
development of the so- called socio-cultural theories of learning. Vygotsky is associated with a number
of concepts relating to the social and cultural nature of learning, not least the idea that learning is
mediated through the individual’s culture. Vygotsky saw most human action as involving what he
called ‘cultural tools’ and resources. These tools and resources related to all of the significant things
that could conceivably exist in an individual’s environment – ranging from material objects (such as
pencils or hammers), to symbolic objects (such as language or writing). In this sense, the successful
learner is someone who is able to appropriate and deploy all of these resources in his or her actions.

Vygotsky’s work stressed the integral role of language in learning. In particular, Vygotsky saw cognitive
development as linked inexorably to speech – more specifically, spoken oral language and silent inner
speech. The socio-cultural approach, therefore, stresses the importance of interaction with other
people as a key resource for supporting cognitive activity and learning. In particular, other people are
seen to play important roles in first selecting and shaping the learning experiences that are presented
to individuals, and then supporting them to progress into the next stages of knowledge and
understanding. This view of socially supported cognitive development sees learning as often involving
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a less-able individual participating in ongoing socio-cultural practices and being able to reach shared
meanings with the more- able others in his or her social environment. In this sense, Vygotsky’s concept
of the ‘zone of proximal development’ describes how tasks that are too difficult for a solitary individual
to master could be learnt with the guidance and assistance of more skilled or more knowledgeable
others. As an individual becomes more proficient or knowledgeable, this support can be gradually
withdrawn until it is no longer required – a process referred to by psychologists like Peter Woods and
Jerome Bruner as ‘scaffolding’.

The notion of learning as a collaborative and socially situated process has found particular resonance
with many people working in the area of educational technology (see Luckin 2010). First, many
psychologists and technologists agree that digital technologies can act as powerful social resources in
an individual’s learning context. It is argued, for instance, that people often treat technologies as social
beings, even interacting with digital devices as if the technology is more able and more knowledgeable
than them (Bracken and Lombard 2004). Digital technology is also seen as an effective means of
providing individuals with enhanced access to sources of knowledge and expertise that exist outside
of their immediate environment.

There is now considerable interest in the field of ‘computer- supported collaborative learning’ where
individuals collaborate and learn at a distance via online tools such as wikis, blogs and other online
collaborative workspaces. As Leask and Younie (2001) argue, online technologies can support access
to knowledgeable others beyond the individual’s immediate environment and become an important
part of the ‘scaffolded’ learning process. Many people’s enthusiasm for these forms of digital learning
is rooted in the wider socio-cultural principles of ‘situated learning’ and the associated notion of
‘communities of practice’. These terms describe learning as best taking place in the form of ‘real-world’
activities and interactions between people and their social environment. Learning is seen to be a highly
social activity that takes place in realistic contexts and activities – often centred on the social groups
that are involved in these activities and contexts. This concept is made clearer if we consider how a
worker learns to do his or her job. Most occupations will involve groups of people all involved in the
same work-based activity or practice. Within these communities of people all involved in the same
practice, incoming members will often learn from pre-existing members how to do things. Indeed,

Lave and Wenger’s (1991) original coining of the phrase ‘communities of practice’ originated from
their anthropological study of how butchers, midwives, tailors and navy quartermasters learnt their
occupations ‘on the job’.

Socio-cultural accounts often describe learning that is highly social and often informal in nature. While
some learning may take place as formalised training or instruction, the individual is often socialised on
an informal basis by others into the process of finding, sharing and transferring knowledge ‘artefacts’.
The act of learning a particular skill or understanding specific cultural and social practices is seen to be
largely a tacit process involving an individual imitating what is observed from the actions of others.
Often, individuals will be first shown the ‘big picture’ by a knowledgeable or expert other, then shown
how to deal with it, and then led through the different components of the task. Situated learning,
therefore, relates to learning through active participation and apprenticeship, with an individual
involved in the co-construction of knowledge with more able peers and, importantly, being held to
account for the competence with which they perform. Crucially, this learning is ideally situated in the
‘real- life’ environment where the practice or activity takes place.

The idea that learning involves participation in a full version of what is being learnt has led to growing
interest in the design of educational environments that attempt to approximate the conditions for
participation in ‘authentic’ learning. In these terms, many educators see technology-based
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environments as an ideal means of supporting in situ forms of socially ‘augmented’ learning. For
instance, much interest has been shown in the socio-cultural learning potential of participating in
‘virtual worlds’ and ‘massively multiplayer online games’ such as SecondLife and World of Warcraft.
Indeed, it is now recognised that a number of learning activities and processes are associated with
inhabiting and exploring these online environments. For example, these applications are based on
large groups of users encountering, interacting and engaging with others. These processes often lead
to the formation of informal and formal communities where people will work together in groups with
hierarchies of expertise and learning. As Carr and Oliver (2010) reason, participating in virtual worlds
can involve a range of learning practices – from ongoing processes of developing expertise to learning
socially produced conventions relating to identity, etiquette and trust. Perhaps most significantly,
much of what takes place in a virtual world involves collaborative activities between users (such as
pursuing collective ‘quests’), all of which involve creative and collaborative learning practices. Whether
one is running a virtual clothes shop or learning to be a warrior-king on an alien planet, virtual worlds
and online gaming can support the ‘social dynamic’ that many people now feel is at the heart of
effective learning. As Tom Chatfield concludes:

We are deeply and fundamentally attracted, in fact, to games: those places where efforts and
excellence are rewarded, where the challenges and demands are severe, and where success often
resembles nothing so much as a distilled version of the worldly virtues of dedicated learning and
rigorously coordinated effort. (2010, p. 28)

Contemporary accounts of

technology, information,

knowledge and learning

All of the learning theories described so far have had a substantial influence on people’s expectations
of education and technology. Although educationalists and technologists differ with respect to their
preferred theoretical approach, very few would question the fact that digital technologies are capable
of supporting learning. However, while these theories may provide powerful explanations of how
technologies might be designed and used to support, enhance and even improve learning, they do not
necessarily provide realistic accounts of how technologies are actually being used to support learning.
It should be remembered that none of the theories outlined above were developed specifically with
digital technology–based learning in mind. Many of the descriptions provided so far in this chapter
rely on the adaptation of well-established learning theories in light of technologies that have been
developed many decades after.

Some commentators have, therefore, questioned the ‘goodness of fit’ between twenty-first-century
technologies and twentieth- century theories of learning. Indeed, some people argue that technology-
based learning requires new theories of learning that account directly for what takes place when
individuals engage with digital technologies. In particular, there are growing arguments that digital
technologies are perhaps more commonly used as ‘information tools’ than as ‘learning tools’. It is
perhaps more accurate to say that today’s digital technologies are most significant in terms of the
ways in which they alter people’s relationships with information and knowledge. Put in these terms,
the main relationship between an individual and technology may not be related to processes of
learning per se, but based around his or her relationship with information. Two emerging theories of
technology-based learning are worth exploring further – ‘connectivism’ and ‘connected learning’.

i) Connectivism
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The educational significance of technology-based information is foregrounded in the notion of
‘connectivism’ – the idea that learning now relates primarily to the ability to access and use distributed
information on a ‘just-in-time’ basis (see Siemens 2005). Rather than knowing and retaining
information on a long- term basis, individuals need to develop personal, meaningful networks of
learning, nurturing and maintaining connections between nodes where knowledge is stored. From this
perspective, ‘learning’ can be seen as an individual’s ability to connect to specialised information
nodes and sources as and when required. Similarly, being ‘knowledgeable’ can be seen as the
attendant ability to nurture and maintain these connections. Connectivism, therefore, attempts to
account for the changing nature and increasing complexity of learning in a networked world (see Chatti,
Amine and Quix 2010). One of the interesting features of connectivism is the acknowledgement that
learning is not wholly under the control of the individual learner. Instead, connectivism celebrates
‘non-linearity and unanticipated network effects in the learning process’ (Li and Greenhow 2015, p. 3).

As George Siemens (2005, n.p.) puts it, learning can, therefore, be conceived in terms of the ‘capacity
to know more’ via digital technologies such as the internet rather than a reliance on the individual
accumulation of prior knowledge in terms of ‘what is currently known’. Expanding on this theme,
Neena Thota describes five main tenets of connectivism:

• knowledge is emergent, distributed across information networks, and resides in multiple individuals;

• the acquisition of knowledge rests in the interactions and the diversity of views and opinions within
networked communities of learning and personal networks;

• technology frees learners from the cognitive operations of information storage and retrieval, keeps
learners current in a rapidly evolving information ecology, and enables learners to see the
interconnections in differing fields of knowledge;

• socialisation is evidence of connectedness and the learner is empowered to learn and reflect through
conversation and interaction and through the creation and sharing of meaningful digital artifacts;

• informal and lifelong learning are significant parts of the learning experience that includes work-
related tasks.

(Thota 2015, p. 85)

Of course, these concepts are by no means new. The writer Samuel Johnson was thinking along similar
lines nearly three hundred years earlier when arguing that ‘knowledge is of two kinds. We know a
subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it’ (cited in Boswell’s ‘Life of
Johnson’). Johnson was referring to the use of book repositories and libraries, yet such arguments
accompanied the development of various information technologies throughout the twentieth century.
Vannevar Bush, in his seminal 1945 essay ‘As We May Think’, similarly wrote of how technologies such
as microfilm viewers would render all previously collected human knowledge more accessible. Bush
argued, for example, that ‘the Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox.
A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk’ (1945, p. 113). Fifteen years
later, the technologist Ted Nelson extended this reasoning into his description of Xanadu – a world
where the entire world’s information would be published in an interconnected format and then shared
between all people as equals.

Given such precedents, it is perhaps unsurprising that the idea of ‘connectivism’ has grown in
popularity, especially in light of the development of internet technologies over the last twenty years,
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such as social media and the internet of things. These approaches, therefore, reflect a growing sense
among some twenty-first-century educators that the primary skill of learning is the ability to
successfully identify and retrieve information from online ‘knowledge spaces’ that are non-linear and
non- hierarchical, fluid rather than rigid in structure, and where human cognition can be expanded
and enhanced to the point where people enjoy a ‘new relation to knowledge’ (Levy 1997/9). As such,
the ability to passively retain information is less important than the skills to access and actively
augment information stored elsewhere when required. In this respect, commentators like Marc
Prensky have been prompted to talk of ‘digital wisdom’ instead of intelligence – that is, ‘wisdom arising
from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom
in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities’ (2009, n.p.).

ii) Connected learning

Like connectivism, the notion of ‘connected learning’ marks a significant attempt to better describe
the processes of learning with networked technologies. Unlike connectivism, however, it pays
considerable attention to physical, real-world spaces such as schools, colleges, homes and community
sites, as well as activities and practices that take place in online spaces. Connected learning is perhaps
most accurately described as a framework rather than theory of learning. Its core lies in preceding
learning theories, notably the socio-cultural theories described earlier. Connected learning also draws
on the so-called ecological theories of learning that see learning as being influenced by a variety of
immediate and more distant environments in an individual’s life – from peers and family through to
wider cultural contexts.

As such, connected learning reiterates many ideas and claims already described in this chapter (see
Table 1). As with socio- cultural theories of learning, the basic premise is that learning takes place
through interactions with other people and resources in an individual’s social contexts, including peers
and more knowledgeable mentors. Learning is seen to be dialogic (i.e. deriving from social
interactions), with particular emphasis placed on the ‘co-creation’ of knowledge with others. Echoing
the ideas of constructionism, learning is said to take place ‘by doing’ – particularly through
experimenting and producing things.

Table 1 The connected learning framework (from Ito et al. 2013, p. 12)

Connected learning knits together three crucial contexts for learning:

Peer-supported

Interest-powered

Academically oriented

In their everyday exchanges with peers and friends, young people are contributing, sharing and giving
feedback in inclusive social experiences that are fluid and highly engaging.
Whenasubjectispersonallyinterestingandrelevant,learnersachievemuch- higher-order learning
outcomes.

Learners flourish and realise their potential when they can connect their interests and social
engagement to academic studies, civic engagement and career opportunity.

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Core properties of connected learning experiences include:

Production- centred
Shared purpose

Digital tools provide opportunities for producing and creating a wide variety of media, knowledge and
cultural content in experimental and active ways.

Social media and web-based communities provide unprecedented opportunities for cross-
generational and cross-cultural learning and connection to unfold and thrive around common goals
and interests.

Openly networkedOnline platforms and digital tools can make learning resources abundant, accessible
and visible across all learner settings.

Design principles inform the intentional connecting of learning environments:

Experiences invite participation and provide many different ways for individuals and groups to
contribute.

Everyone can
participate
Learning happensLearning is experiential and part of the pursuit of meaningful activities and
projects. by doing
Challenge is
constant
Everything is
interconnected

Interest or cultivation of an interest creates both a ‘need to know’ and a ‘need to share’.
Young people are provided with multiple learning contexts for engaging in connected learning –
contexts in which they receive immediate feedback on their progress, have access to tools for planning
and reflection and are given opportunities for mastery of specialist language and practices.

New media amplifies opportunities for connected learning by:

Fostering engagement and self-expression Increasing

Interactive, immersive and personalised technologies provide responsive feedback, support a diversity
of learning styles and literacy, and pace learning according to individual needs.

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Through online search, educational resources and communities of expertise and accessibility to
knowledge and learning experiences Expanding social supports for interests Expanding diversity and
building capacity

interest, young people can easily access information and find relationships that support self-directed
and interest-driven learning.

Through social media, young people can form relationships with peers and caring adults that are
centred on interests, expertise and future opportunity in areas of interest.
New media networks empower marginalised and non-institutionalised groups and cultures to have
voice and mobilise, organise and build economic capacity.

The distinctiveness of connected learning, however, derives from how it relates these basic principles
to the highly individualised, fluid forms of learning that take place in online spaces and networked
environments. While these ways of learning are not unique to networked technologies, networked
technology is an ideal means for learning to take place. As Mimi Ito argues, connected learning is ‘not
a new thing; but we believe that today’s technology provides a new opportunity to make that kind of
learning more accessible’ (2014, n.p.).

The distinctiveness of networked technology in supporting such learning can be described along four
different lines. First, technologies are seen as an ideal way of making far-reaching links and dynamic
connections between the different spheres of learning in an individual’s life. This includes making and
sustaining meaningful connections with peers for dialogue, collaboration and co-creation. This also
includes finding and connecting with mentors and more experienced others as well as finding wider
audiences and publics to present one’s work to. Crucially, through the internet, all these connections
are rendered predominantly ‘organic’ in nature, ‘socially occurring’ rather than artificial and forced.

Second, technology-based learning is seen to be individually driven and ‘interest-powered’ – that is,
coming from a personal passion or individual desire to pursue a particular line of learning. This is
usually sparked through informal channels of ‘hanging out’ and ‘messing around’. Descriptions of
connected learning often refer to what was described in Chapter 1 as ‘life-wide’ and ‘life- long’ learning
– that is, learning that reoccurs as part of one’s hobbies and leisure pursuits, social activities, and
through work. In this sense, learning is not something that can be imposed on an individual by an
institution or a teacher.

Third, when one is using digital technologies, learning activities are not confined to just one space or
context. The connected learning model sees digital technologies as providing access to multiple
contexts and diverse groups of people, resources and tools. Through networked technologies, an
individual can switch between online/offline contexts and formal/informal modes of learning, or even
have several running simultaneously. Also, regardless of where he or she is in the world, an individual
will be able to access all of his or her preferred and most valued resources, peers, mentors and
networks from a range of contexts. Connected learning is, therefore, a profoundly mobile process
consisting of ‘a series of boundary-crossings in and across social spaces (home, school, and peer
cultures; in and out of school) and epistemic practices (formal, informal, authorized, unauthorized)’
(Kumpulainen and Sefton-Green 2014, p. 8). Fourth, then, networked technologies are seen to offer a
ready way of connecting an individual’s initial interests to wider ‘real- world’ opportunities, be it more
formally recognised academic studies, opportunities to engage in community and/or civic affairs or
develop employment opportunities and a long-term career path.
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The connected learning model provides a different perspective on how learning takes place through
multiple technology-based environments. For example, the connected learning model assumes that
individuals need to utilise a range of skills and understandings that take time and experience to
develop. These include basic skills of collaboration, self-expression and experimentation. In addition,
one of the key elements of successful learning is the ability to learn by moving between settings (what
is called ‘boundary crossing’). This is dependent on the ability to make connections across experiences
and to ‘translate’ epistemic practices and knowledge domains from one context to other contexts. It
is recognised that most people will require support and guidance in developing the ‘competence in
moving between settings and in taking an active role in learning’ (Kumpulainen and Sefton-Green 2014,
p. 15). As such, connected learning acknowledges the importance of teachers, educational institutions
and other forms of support. Connected learning is not a wholly individualistic process.

Conclusions

It is important to remember that all of these models, frameworks and explanations of learning and
technology are theoretically driven rather than empirically grounded. While such accounts are very
good at telling us why something could or should be happening, they are far less certain of what is
actually happening and why. Here, most academic commentators would turn to empirical
investigations and measures to ascertain precisely what relationships exist between technology use
and learning. Yet, achieving any degree of confidence of a discernable ‘cause-and- effect’ relationship
between technology and learning is difficult, if not impossible.

This has certainly been the experience of researchers who have attempted to apply rigorous ‘scientific’
methods of enquiry to the topic of teaching and learning with technology. Because education and
technology are entwined with many other contextual ‘variables’, it has proved very difficult to design
any kind of experimental study to investigate the influence of technology use in learning settings.
Those researchers who do attempt to pinpoint causal effects of using technology on learning produce
what can be charitably termed as ‘mixed results’. There are a number of large-scale studies that
conclude that technology use can be associated with improvements in learning performance. However,
there are also a number of ‘meta-studies’ (i.e. studies that analyse the results of many other studies)
that find no difference, or even a negative relationship (see e.g. Kulik and Fletcher 2016; Clark, Tanner-
Smith and Killingsworth 2016; Falck, Mang and Woessmann 2015). As a review of various meta-
analyses between 1990 and 2012 was forced to conclude, ‘The correlational and experimental
evidence does not offer a convincing case for the general impact of digital technology on learning’
(Higgins, Xiao and Katsipataki 2012, p. 3).

As such, it is best to see the relationship between technology and learning as a complex issue with no
straightforward answer. Indeed, a mass of conflicting debates and arguments surround this topic,
reminding us of the need to think carefully about the complicated relationships that exist between
education and technology. On one hand, this chapter has highlighted the benefits of using learning
theory to think about why technologies are being used in education. All the theories outlined in this
chapter offer ways of thinking about how technology might be better used to support learning. Yet on
the other hand, these accounts can all be challenged and criticised. In particular, the theoretical
approaches presented in the first half of the chapter make different assumptions about what it is ‘to
learn’ and what it is to be ‘a learner’. As such, they all present different sets of beliefs about the
processes of learning with technology. These include different beliefs about the psychological basis of
learning and cognition; different educational beliefs about pedagogy and the best way to support
learning; and different epistemological beliefs about the nature of reality and knowledge. None of
these approaches can be reckoned objectively to be ‘better’ or more ‘accurate’ than the others.
Instead, these theoretical accounts offer different insights into how technologies can be designed and
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used to fit different types of learning, be it rote learning or problem-solving, ‘knowing what’ or
‘knowing how’.

It is important to bear in mind that debates over technology and learning are often driven by personal
beliefs and opinions, rather than being empirically reasoned and informed. As such, digital
technologies are a key battleground for ongoing debates, ideas and arguments about learning. It is
important to remain aware of the values and ideological assumptions that often underpin claims made
about the potential of digital technology to ‘transform’ learning. Indeed, many debates over
technology and learning appear to be driven by wider beliefs of what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘desirable’
learning. Much of the justification for digital technology use is as a form of a pedagogic corrective –
that is, a means to get certain forms of learning into formal educational settings that are otherwise
seen to be lacking. This could be argued to be as much the case with present-day socio-constructivist
technologies as it was with the behaviourist-inspired teaching machines of the 1950s and 1960s. Some
educational technologists have referred to this as the ‘Trojan Mouse’ approach. This describes the use
of digital technology as a means to ‘leverage’ broader philosophies of teaching and learning into
educational settings. As Eric Klopfer was honest enough to acknowledge when arguing for the learning
benefits of mobile games:

It isn’t all about the technology. Most of the intellectual capabilities previously defined are relevant to
understanding most modern issues and problems. They need not necessarily be associated with
technology at all. Many of these skills are equally relevant to constructivist learning that has been
promoted by education reformers for decades, and could be fostered without technology. Technology,
however, is the vehicle for getting these intellectual capabilities into schools discretely. (2008, p. 12)

With such caveats in mind, it is important to recognise the contested nature of any claims made for
technology and learning. It is perhaps best to see technology simply as a focal point through which a
range of wider debates about learning, information and knowledge are filtered. As Paul Standish (2008,
p. 351) reasons, matters of technology and learning ‘cannot be broached without consideration of the
essentially ethical question of what counts as worthwhile learning’. As this chapter has illustrated,
recent discussions of education and technology are based around assumptions that worthwhile
learning should be active, interactive, learner-centred, social, communal, authentic and so on. While
many readers may sympathise with these assumptions, it is important to acknowledge that such
characteristics involve a commitment to particular sets of values. Moreover, it is important to
acknowledge that these values are often at odds with the nature of the settings and contexts that
learning often takes place in. Against this background, debates over how technology supports learning
look set to continue for some time yet.

Further questions to consider

• How valid is it to use ‘old’ theories of learning to make sense of technology-based learning? In what
ways can knowledge of how ‘traditional’ learning takes place be transferred over to technology-
mediated contexts? In what ways does existing knowledge of ‘traditional’ learning lack relevance to
contemporary digital technology use?

• Why is it so difficult to measure accurately – or even identify objectively – the ‘effect’ of

technology on learning? Is this question even worth asking?
• To what extent are digital technologies used as a means to

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promote particular ways of learning (e.g. child-centred learning, play-based learning, discovery-based
learning, democratic or critical learning)? To what extent are digital technologies a ‘blank canvas’ that
can be used to promote any type of learning one wishes?

Please go to http://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/education-and- technology-second-edition/ to

download and listen to discussion around these further questions.

Further reading

Skinner’s seminal paper on behaviourism and learning technologies can be found easily online. The
full reference is as follows:
Skinner, B. (1958). ‘Teaching machines.’ Science, 128(3330): 969–77.

Some of the classic texts on learning theory and technology are now rather dated, but are worth
seeking out:
Duffy, T. and Jonassen, D. (1992). Constructivism and the Technology of

Instruction. London, Routledge.

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas.

Brighton, Harvester Press.

Pea, R. and Sheingold, K. (eds) (1987). Mirrors of the Mind: Patterns of

Experience in Educational Computing. New Jersey, Ablex.

These books offer overviews of recent thinking about education and technology from socio-cultural
and networked learning perspectives:
Harasim, L. (2016). Learning Theory and Online Technologies, 2nd edn.

London, Routledge.
Jones, C. (2015). Networked Learning: An Educational Paradigm for the Age of

Digital Networks. Berlin, Springer.

Carr-Chellman, A. and Rowland, G. (2016). Issues in Technology, Learning and

Instructional Design. London, Routledge.

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5 Technology and Teachers

Chapter Outline
Introduction
Teachers and technology – potential benefits
Making sense of teachers’ (non)use of technology Rethinking ‘the teacher’ in the digital age
In defence of the teacher – arguments for the continued importance of teachers in the digital age
Conclusions

Introduction

The relationship between teacher and student is a central component of education. The notion of ‘the
teacher’, whether in the guise of professor, lecturer, trainer, mentor or guide, is an integral element
of traditional understandings of what education is, and how education takes place. In a basic sense,
then, a teacher can be defined as a person who educates others – supporting the learning process
usually within an organised setting. Most formal modes of education frame ‘the teacher’ as a
professional and prestigious role – that is, as a high-status vocation grounded in a period of specialist
training and professional socialisation. While teachers are often responsible for groups and classes,
others work with individual students in a tutoring capacity. Within adult education – particularly the
workplace – teachers can take the role of trainers, instructors and coaches. In all these forms, the core
role is one of leading others in their learning.

Against this background, we cannot consider the relationship between education and technology
without taking account of teachers and teaching. Yet, the relationship between teachers and
technology is a contentious area of education discussion and debate. While enthusiastic teachers have
pioneered many aspects of technology use in education, the teaching workforce is blamed frequently
for the slow uptake of digital technologies in schools, colleges and universities. Thus, some
commentators (usually outside of the education profession) argue strongly that technology is
beginning to reduce the role of the teacher, or even does away with the need for teachers altogether.
Conversely, many people working in and around education consider technology to be extending and
enhancing the work of those teachers who are able to take full advantage of it. As discussed in previous
chapters, such debates are rarely cut-and-dried. This chapter aims to make sense of the contested
relationship between digital technology and teachers. To what extent is digital technology compatible
with or contradictory of teachers and teaching?

Teachers and technology – potential benefits

There are plenty of ways in which digital technologies support and enhance the work of a teacher. For
instance, digital technologies have long been seen to support bureaucratic and administrative aspects
of teaching. In this sense, digital technology has been praised for its ‘labour-saving’ potential – that is,
‘freeing’ teachers from the ‘drudgery’ of the many non-teaching aspects of the job (Ferster 2014). For
example, learning management systems now play an important role in reducing teacher workloads
and supporting the tracking and monitoring of student progress, the management of learning
materials and the provision of formative and summative assessments of students.

Besides providing administrative and procedural support, digital technologies are also seen to offer a
number of enhancements to the practices and processes of teaching – in other words, the pedagogical
role of the teacher. It is argued, for example, that digital technologies can provide invaluable support
to teachers in planning and preparing their teaching in more diverse and informed ways. Digital
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technologies are also seen as a means for teachers to enhance their own subject area knowledge and
their professional capabilities and skills (Henderson and Romeo 2015). Crucially, teachers now have
online access to teaching resources and collegial support. In this sense, social media and content-
sharing platforms have been welcomed as ideal means for ‘a large and diverse community of
education professionals’ to share their knowledge, experience and good practice with others around
the world (Farooq et al. 2007, p. 399).

Digital technologies are also seen to provide a range of in-class pedagogical support to teachers. For
instance, classroom-based technologies such as interactive whiteboards and clickers were promoted
heavily during the 2000s as providing opportunities for teachers to diversify their styles of teaching
and modes of delivery. The emergence of applications that support the sharing of content across
multiple devices has allowed teachers to switch between individualised, communal, teacher-led
and/or student-driven forms of pedagogy. This allows the teacher to move from being a director of
learning activities to being an arranger of learning experiences. In this sense, many people working in
and around education are careful to emphasise the continued need for ‘the teachers’ at the centre of
any technology-supported pedagogical process. As a well-worn quotation from Bill Gates put it,
‘Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids together and motivating them, the teacher is
most important’ (cited in Chakravarti 2014, n.p.).

These words might appear comforting – particularly from a high- profile figure in the world of
education reform. Yet, while teachers are often praised when technology is used successfully in a
classroom, they also tend to be held responsible when technology is not seen to ‘work’ as well as
proponents like Gates might expect. As is often the case with debates over the ‘failures’ of education
systems, ‘blame’ for the restricted use of digital technology in schools, colleges and universities is often
attributed to the perceived shortcomings of teachers. In fact, a range of teacher-related rationales
have been advanced over the past thirty years for the poor showing of computers and other digital
technologies in formal education. For example, teachers have been deemed too old, disinterested or
incompetent to integrate digital technology into their practice. Technology use in the classroom is also
seen to be constrained by issues of self-interest, such as teachers’ reluctance to alter habitual ways of
working. It is suggested, for instance, that many teachers have a vested interest in maintaining
arrangements and structures that ensure their continued employment and financial security. In
particular, teachers are thought to be reluctant to alter arrangements that may compromise or
destabilise their authority, status or control in the classroom.

These criticisms may appear harsh, yet they reflect the fact that teachers vary considerably in their
willingness and/or ability to incorporate digital technology into their work practices. While some
teachers are clearly able to effortlessly ‘assimilate’ and incorporate digital technologies into their
teaching, others achieve only a pragmatic ‘accommodation’ of technology into their established
modes of working. At worst, some teachers might be said to engage only in a reluctant use of
technology (John and La Velle 2004, p. 323), or to even resist outright the perceived threats of
technology in their classrooms. As Peter Williams argues:

The conservative profession of teaching has mediated the introduction of new technologies to render
them ‘safe’. ... This may be partly a distrust of novelty and partly a lack of basic familiarity with the
ways of new technology, but a major reason could be the threats the technology poses to teachers’
existing practices and to the perceived maintenance of control. (2008, p. 220)

It is notable that these descriptions place teachers in oppositional positions to technology. Of course,
criticisms of teacher reluctance and recalcitrance are not confined to the integration of technology
into teaching – teachers have long been described as conservative and generally resistant to many
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aspects of change in their work (see Lortie 2002). Yet, many of the accounts just described convey a
sense that digital technologies somehow exacerbate these tendencies within the teaching profession.
At best, then, a substantial proportion of teachers are felt to remain ‘cautious onlookers’ when it
comes to digital technology as opposed to being ‘enthusiastic innovators’ (Crook 2008, p. 34).

Making sense of teachers’ (non)use of technology

Of course, ‘blaming’ teachers for not making extensive and/or efficient use of technology overlooks
the circumstances that different teachers find themselves working under. It is all too easy for
enthusiastic commentators to indulge in ‘teacher bashing’ and portray teachers as outmoded,
obstructive or ignorant. Instead, it is worth considering alternate explanations for the variable
engagement that teachers in all sectors of education seem to have with technology. As we shall go on
to discuss, it could be argued that it is the nature of teachers’ work that discourages the use of different
forms of technology. In other words, teachers are deterred from using technology by structural
aspects of their work. From a more individualistic point of view, however, we should first also consider
a number of popular explanations of the stages of technology adoption that teachers progress through
when implementing technology in their practice. In this sense, technology ‘integration’ is perhaps
something that teachers achieve through experience and increased mindfulness.

i) Models of technology integration

Explanations of stages of technology integration are a familiar feature of teacher education and
professional development. One popular model is Ruben Puentedura’s ‘SAMR’ model. SAMR describes
four possible levels of digital technology integration. The first are the levels of ‘Substitution’ and
‘Augmentation’ – where technology use enhances what a teacher is already doing. More substantial,
however, are the levels of ‘Modification’ and ‘Redefinition’ – where technology could be said to be
transforming what the teacher was already doing. Puentedura describes the first two levels as
‘enhancement’ stages, with digital tools and techniques only leading to functional changes in what
teachers and students are engaged in (e.g. being able to complete tasks more quickly, or in different
ways). In contrast, the third and fourth levels are described as transformative stages. These uses of
technology allow different forms of learning tasks to take place (possibly resulting in different forms
of learning). Here, technology could be said to be supporting teachers to do things that they would be
unable to do without the technology.

Christopher Moersch’s ‘LOTI’ (Levels of Technology Integration) framework is in a similar vein. This
ranges from ‘No Use’ (Level 0) through to ‘Enhancement’ (Level 5) and ‘Refinement’ (Level 6). The LOTI
model highlights the need for technology use in any classroom to be driven by spontaneity on the part
of teachers and students rather than being rigidly scheduled according to organisational imperatives.
It also stresses the need for teachers to focus on learning outcomes, higher-order thinking and the
critical content rather than the technology. A further key element of LOTI is the idea of teachers
allowing students to take control of their learning in experimental and risky ways. Thus, the level of
‘refinement’ describes a situation where

the use of [digital technologies] is seamless and invisible. Students select the ‘best tool for the job’ and
have a large arsenal of technologies and tools available to them. The classroom is learner centric and
learner based, the curriculum is adaptable and flexible. There is no digital divide between students
and they have equitable access. In short, there is no focus of technology as this is ubiquitous.
(EdOrigami 2015, n.p.)

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Perhaps the most elaborate of these models of technology integration is the TPACK model (Mishra
and Koehler 2006). TPACK attempts to explain how teachers integrate technology into their teaching
in terms of the different kinds of knowledge that are involved. This approach draws on the work of Lee
Shulman (1986), who made the distinction between a teacher’s content knowledge (i.e. specific
subject matter) and their pedagogic knowledge of generic practices and methods of teaching (i.e.
independent of content knowledge). Shulman (1986) argued that good teaching stemmed from a
combination of both these forms of knowledge. In adding the ‘T’ of technology to Shulman’s ‘CK’ and
‘PK’, Mishra and Koehler argue that technology is a distinct domain of knowledge that needs to be
combined with these aspects of teaching. As Mishra and Koehler put it, technologies come with their
own ‘constraints’ and ‘imperatives’ that set them apart from a teacher’s general knowledge of how to
teach:

In the case of digital technologies, this includes knowledge of operating systems and computer
hardware, and the ability to use standard sets of software tools such as word processors, spreadsheets,
browsers, and e-mail. TK includes knowledge of how to install and remove peripheral devices, install
and remove software programs, and create and archive documents. (p. 1027)

The TPACK model attempts to make sense of the different forms of knowledge that teachers draw on
when they integrate technology into their classrooms. From this perspective, successful use of
technology in the classroom occurs when teachers are able to combine all three forms of knowledge.
This might include knowledge of how technologies allow for altered forms of teaching – for example,
how technologies can support different representations of content material, and how particular
aspects of subject matter can be differently organised and adapted using technology. As Mishra and
Koehler put it, it is not enough to be either a good teacher, or a subject specialist or a skilled user of
technology – ‘merely knowing how to use a technology is not the same as knowing how to teach with
it’ (p. 1033).

So what can be learnt from these models of teachers’ technology integration? Certainly, such models
and frameworks direct our attention towards some important factors to bear in mind when making
sense of teachers and teaching. For example, these models clearly explain why using technology in the
classroom is not a guarantee of better teaching or more effective learning taking place. Models such
as SAMR and LOTI highlight the limitations of using new technology to support existing practices –
what is sometimes described as ‘Old Wine in New Bottles’. A model such as TPACK also highlights the
inter-related nature of pedagogy, content and technology when any device or application is used in a
classroom. As such, these models suggest that many of the critical issues surrounding technology in
the classroom are not really about the technology at all. Instead, these models point to the importance
of teacher awareness, planning and forethought in the implementation of technology. In other words,
successful technology use requires careful planning. This includes prior awareness of the problem
being addressed, the prior skills and knowledge of students and the nature of the concepts that are to
be learnt – what Mishra and Koehler term ‘thoughtful pedagogic uses of technology’ (p. 1017).

The popularity of these models certainly lies in their inclusiveness and optimism. In particular, SAMR
and LOTI outline steps that any teacher can take given sufficient time and awareness. These models,
therefore, fit well with the popular ‘diffusion of innovations’ understanding of technology change
where technology adoption takes place over time and spreads from a minority of ‘early adopters’ to a
critical mass of ‘mainstream users’ and even ‘laggards’ (Rogers 1995). Yet, such views of technology
adoption and integration are clearly limited in their explanatory power. One obvious criticism of such
models is related to their linearity. Puentedura and Moersch are keen to stress that their models are
not hierarchical – that is, that in some circumstances a teacher might be best advised to ‘substitute’
rather than ‘re-define’; that ‘no use’ of technology might be an appropriate level for some classes. Yet,
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from the ways in which these models are used, it can certainly be inferred that ‘Redefinition’ and
‘Refinement’ are preferable states of technology use. Similarly, the inference from Mishra and
Koehler’s work is that ‘TPACK’ is the preferable condition under which a teacher should be using
technology.

All of these models could also be accused of ‘black boxing’ technology use, reducing the complexities
of technology use to issues of ability to plug in a device and use it. Different technologies are likely to
involve very different technology knowledge above and beyond specific technical skills and know- how.
As we have seen in previous chapters, technology use is shaped by the local contexts and cultures that
it is taking place in. In contrast, TPACK, SAMR and LOTI are notably context-free in their descriptions.
Models such as TPACK can also be criticised for their imprecise definitions of ‘Pedagogy’ and ‘Content’.
Charles Graham (2011) observes that when researchers have tried to measure these different
constructs, it has proved difficult to establish clear boundaries between them. For example, where
does a teacher’s ‘content knowledge’ end and their ‘pedagogical knowledge’ begin? Are there further
distinctions to be made between ‘content knowledge’ and ‘curriculum knowledge’? Perhaps the most
substantial caveat is the rather unsophisticated way that these models tend to be used. For example,
Graham argues that often these models are applied by educators in a vague and empty manner,
leaving a complex concept such as TPACK as simply just ‘another generic term for technology
integration’ (Graham 2011, p. 1958).

ii) Technology and teachers’ work

All told, such models of incremental technology adoption can be criticised as lapsing into a reductionist
way of understanding education and technology. If we think back to the ‘social shaping’ approach
outlined in Chapter 2, then it makes sense to also consider the contextual issues that might influence
the nature of technology use in education. In this sense, the main significance of technology could be
said to lie in its relationship to the ‘work’ of being a teacher. From this perspective, it is sensible to
consider

education as being a site of labour as well as a site of learning. Thus, if we want to fully understand the
relationship between technology and teaching, then we need to consider how digital technology
interacts with the work of a teacher.

From this perspective, the use of digital technologies in schools, colleges and universities should be
understood (at least in part) in terms of the ongoing negotiations that teachers are involved in during
their day-to-day work. In other words, we should understand teachers as having to engage in an
ongoing process of making sense of the various technologies that they encounter during their working
day and then fitting these technologies with their ‘job’ of being a teacher and, conversely, fitting their
‘job’ of being a teacher with the demands of digital technology.

If we think back to our discussions of social shaping of technology in Chapter 2, then these negotiations
are likely to be complex. For example, teachers will be often constrained by the complex social
contexts of classrooms, schools and wider school systems. Take, for example, the varied expected
roles of the teacher within the organisational culture of a school. Of course, these roles include the
teacher acting as an authoritative source of information and supporter of learning. Yet, the teacher is
also placed in the role of a disciplinary agent – enforcing hierarchies of knowledge and expertise,
regimes of assessment and ranking, and routines of physical and temporal confinement. Teachers also
play a valuable socialising and pastoral role, acting in loco parentis. All told, there is a mass of factors
underlying how digital technology interacts with the ‘job’ of being a teacher. Conversely, there are a
number of different reasons why teachers may (or may not) make use of digital technology.
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First, a teacher’s use of digital technology during his or her work can be seen partly as a strategic
concern. In this sense, a teacher’s use of digital technology is often based on a combination of tactical
and habitual decisions that allow teachers, in David Tyack’s words, to ‘discharge their duties in a
predictable fashion and to cope with the everyday tasks that school boards, principals and parents
expected them to perform’ (Tyack and Tobin 1995, p. 476). In contrast to the criticisms of reluctance
and conservativeness outlined at the beginning of this chapter, teachers could be argued to often be
pragmatic, strategic users of digital technologies, only utilising technologies in ways that ‘fit’ with the
wider ‘job’ of being a teacher and appearing to ‘resist’ technology use only when it is of little direct
benefit to their job. In these terms, the (non-)use of digital technologies needs to be understood in
light of teachers’ concerns of ensuring that students achieve ‘good’ grades in external and internal
assessments of learning, or that classroom activities follow the prescribed curriculum and meet the
varied expectations of managers, administrators, parents, future employers and other educational
‘stakeholders’. As Larry Cuban argues, ‘In some situations with some innovations, teachers and other
educators may have ample justification to say no to a new policy, a new device or software’ (2015, p.
428).

A number of writers and researchers have discussed the idea that digital technologies tend to be used
where there is a perceived ‘complementarity’ and ‘workability’ with the concerns of the teacher and
the job of teaching (Lankshear and Bigum 1999). For example, it has been observed that digital
technologies tend to be used less where there is a perceived poor ‘fit’ with the immediate working
concerns of the teacher. One prominent example of this is the pressures of time that many teachers
face during their work. Studies of teachers’ work will often highlight the issue of time as an over-riding
concern for many teachers. As Dan Lortie was led to conclude from his exhaustive study of teaching
as a labour process, ‘Time is the most scarce resource’ in educational institutions (2002, p. xii).
Although ‘teacher time’ is laden with concerns of being ‘productive’ and ‘effective’, it is important to
recognise that technology use can intensify as well as reduce the pressures of time. At best, digital
technologies are often used to simply cope with the increasing time-related pressures of teaching –
as Michael Apple put it, ‘Getting done is substituted for work well done’ (Apple and Jungck 1990, p.
235).

While teachers’ practices have to be adjusted in light of the perennial pressures of ‘teacher time’,
these practices are also increasingly shaped by teachers’ accountability in terms of test scores,
retention rates, levels of student engagement and a whole list of other indicators of ‘success’ and
‘effectiveness’, what Stephen Ball (2003) referred to as ‘the terrors of performativity’. Alongside the
official auditing and measuring of their work, teachers’ actions are influenced by concerns over the
need to maintain relationships of authority between themselves and students. It has been argued that
teachers are keen whenever possible to avoid the ‘de-centering of the teacher as a voice of authority’
(Muffoletto 2001, p. 3). This can be seen, for example, in the pushback from some teachers to allow
students to bring their own devices into classes. While some teachers will strive to fulfil these demands
and pressures through their use of digital technology, others may be left with feelings of reluctance
and even resistance.

It is important, then, to pay attention to the ways in which digital technology might diminish and
detract from the work of the teacher. In particular, much has been written about the role of
technology in contributing to the ‘de-professionalisation’ and even ‘alienation’ of teachers as
professionals. Even before the mainstream use of the internet, educational computing was being
described by some critics as supporting a fragmented and atomised educational ‘assembly line’
(Sarason 1990, p. 123). In this sense, digital technologies have been argued to contribute to the
ongoing degradation of teaching as a profession – something that some teachers will understandably
resist and even reject.
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Many of these concerns centre on the role of digital technology in rationalising and standardising the
job of being a teacher, and thereby supporting the separation of the ‘conception’ of teaching from the
‘execution’ of teaching. This can be seen in the struggles over ‘ownership’ of online teaching materials
once a teacher leaves a school or university. While this fragmentation of the teaching process may
make technical and/or economic sense, it can have significant consequences for the teacher. As the
sociologist Michael Apple has observed:

When complicated jobs are broken down into atomistic elements, the person doing the job loses sight
of the whole process and loses control over her or his own labor because someone outside the
immediate situation now has greater control over both the planning and what is actually to go on.
(Apple and Jungck 1990, p. 230)

Apple was critiquing the 1980s trend of wheeling pre-programmed computers into classes on trollies
(what he termed ‘curriculum on a cart’). However, much of this ‘deskilling’ analysis holds true in the
current context of learning management systems, digital portfolios and shared learning resources. Of
course, these arguments are rooted in the historical criticism of the increased automation of factories
and production lines during the twentieth century. In his analysis of the deskilling of factory workers,
Harry Braverman (1974) noted how technologies that appeared to be ‘helpful’ were used in a variety
of ways to enhance methods of controlling the workforce. For example, technology has long been
used in the workplace to eliminate the need for direct supervision of workers, with management
controlling workers by automating work or breaking down jobs into fragmented work processes that
require little conceptual ability. So too in education, digital technologies such as the learning
management system could be seen to depend on the deskilling of teachers and their students,
engendering a ‘tool’ mentality towards the mechanisms of teaching and learning (Monahan 2005).

Rethinking ‘the teacher’ in the digital age

As with any debate in education, all of these perspectives could be said to partially explain the uneven
use of digital technology by teachers across different levels of education. Clearly, many teachers are
able to ‘progress’ on to more sophisticated, thoughtful and successful forms of technology use as
outlined in TPACK, SAMR and other models. Yet, the ‘job’ of teaching and being a teacher undoubtedly
remains fraught with demands and tensions that can mitigate against the extensive use of technology.
However skilled and enthusiastic they might be, many teachers’ technology use remains in lockstep
with the pressures of assessment, curriculum, timetabling and discipline. Even the most exciting and
innovative forms of technology use remain constrained by the ‘situationally constrained choices’ that
were identified in Chapter 3 as restricting the uses of educational technologies during the twentieth
century. As history reminds us, then, many teachers are inevitably constrained and compromised in
what they can do with technology, regardless of how willing and able they might be to reach optimal
levels of ‘thoughtful’ or ‘transformative’ technology use.

This apparent mismatch has led growing numbers of experts, policymakers and commentators to
argue for a fundamental rethink of the nature of ‘teaching’ and what the role of ‘the teacher’ should
entail. While many people agree that the traditional notion of the teacher requires updating, opinions
differ on what alternatives are required. While some argue for a displacement of the teacher’s
authority, others argue for the replacement of teachers altogether. While they differ in their
recommendations, the logic of these arguments is similar. Rather than continuing to encourage
teachers to reconfigure their practices to make more extensive use of technology, would it perhaps
be more appropriate to reconfigure the notion of the teacher to better fit the technology? This line of
thinking can be seen in two different trends in recent discussion and debate on education.

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i) Displacing the teacher – a ‘guide

at the side’ and ‘peer at the rear’

The first set of arguments will be familiar to many readers – reflecting the much-used aphorism that
the teacher needs to move from being an authoritative ‘sage on the stage’ to a more supportive ‘guide
at the side’, or even ‘peer at the rear’. These ideas were reflected in a study by the Pew Research
Center canvassing the opinions of technology experts and analysts on expected trends and changes
associated with digital technology use in 2025. In terms of teacher and education, the expectation was
for the following:

A future free from the one-size-fits-all broadcasting-from-the- front-of-the-room teaching model that
disserves so many learners who assimilate information differently. (Pew 2014, p. 21)

Time in school will need to radically change since the talking- head, expert teacher is less and less
valuable. The role of teacher-coach will be even more important yet require a different emotional and
intellectual skill set than that which most educators now possess. (Pew 2014, p. 14)

This talk of the ‘teacher-coach’ who does not ‘broadcast’ from the front of the classroom reflects the
belief that digital technology necessitates the role of the teacher to be recast into one of facilitator
and supporter. For example, commentators like Marc Prensky (2008, p. 1) argue for a ‘new pedagogy
of kids teaching themselves with the teacher’s guidance’. This sense of allowing young people the
opportunity to determine the direction of their own learning is reflected in Don Tapscott’s (1999, p.
11) advice to ‘give students the tools, and they will be the single most important source of guidance
on how to make their schools relevant and effective places to learn’.

This role of guide or facilitator is markedly different from the traditional notion of the didactic teacher
or lecturer. For example, the notion of the teacher as facilitator implies that teaching and learning are
more collective endeavours, with teachers and students addressing and solving problems and
engaging in open- ended enquiry together. At best, the teacher is required to take an ‘active facilitation’
approach characterised by a high degree of participation and involvement in assisting groups of
students. While some may welcome these shifts in emphasis, teachers certainly face a challenge in
terms of what they do, and the status of what it is they are doing.

From this perspective, a key point of contention is what role the teachers are expected to play if they
are no longer the leading components in the teaching and learning process. Many social-
constructivist-led accounts of education would see the human teacher as often being of secondary
importance in light of the learning that can take place among peers, community members and (of
course) the use of technology to access distributed sources of knowledge. This is particularly the case
with the collaborative, creative and inquiry-based learning that is associated with social media
technologies. All of these forms of technology-enhanced learning are seen to present a fundamental
challenge to traditional notions of teacher-led instruction. As David Gauntlett (2008) reasons, one of
the major ‘problems’ with contemporary education is that personal devices and social media now
demand a shift from a ‘sit down and be told’ culture to a more creative ‘making and doing’ culture.
Many of the ‘connectivist’ and ‘connected learning’ descriptions of learning outlined in Chapter 4
similarly challenge the need for expert mediation or assistance with the act of retrieving information.
Amidst all of these debates and arguments, many commentators expect networked, social and
collaborative trends in technology development to alter the role of the teacher considerably over the
course of the next few decades.

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That said, these are not wholly new discussions. There is a long history in education technology of
arguments for the technology- led displacement of the authoritative ‘sage’ teacher in favour of a more
active, facilitative ‘guide’ role. If we think back to Chapter 4, then some of the earliest learning theories
associated with the use of technology in education could be said to imply significant alterations to the
nature and role of the teacher. For instance, behaviourist approaches to technology-based learning
could perhaps be best described as theories of teaching rather than theories of learning. In one sense,
Skinner’s notion of the teaching machine and programmed learning implied the technological
displacement of the teacher. As the reinforcement theorist Fred Keller (1968) put it in a provocative
article titled ‘Goodbye Teacher ...’, the behaviourist-inspired model of programmed learning left little
room for the teacher to continue in his or her role of provider of instruction. According to Keller, at
best the teacher was expected to take the role of ‘proctor’ or ‘assistant’ – accompanying the use of
tape recorders, computers and textbooks as small segments of instruction were given to learners at
their own pace and with frequent feedback. As Keller contended:

The work of a teacher is at variance with that which has predominated in our time. His public
appearances as classroom entertainer, expositor, critic, and debater no longer seem important. His
principal job is truly ‘the facilitation of learning in others’. He becomes an educational engineer, a
contingency manager. ... A new kind of teacher is in the making. To the old kind, I, for one, will be glad
to say, ‘Good-bye!’ (1968, pp. 88–9)

As Keller’s celebration of the ‘new kind’ of teacher implies, such thinking was certainly not ‘anti-
teacher’. Indeed, it could be argued that the behaviourist-inspired development of teaching machines
was actually intended to assist teachers with the burdens of mass instruction. Some behaviourists
were keen to argue that the teaching machine was intended to relieve rather than replace the teacher
– freeing teachers to engage in more specialist and individualised aspects of pedagogy. As Skinner
himself argued:

Will machines replace teachers? On the contrary, they are capital equipment to be used by teachers
to save time and labor. In assigning certain mechanisable functions to machines, the teacher emerges
in his proper role as an indispensable human being. He may teach more students than heretofore –
this is probably inevitable if the world-wide demand for education is to be satisfied – but he will do so
in fewer hours and with fewer burdensome chores. In return for his greater productivity he can ask
society to improve his economic condition. (1958, p. 8)

Thus, it is important to recognise that what might appear to be ‘anti-teacher’ sentiments within
discussions on education and technology often recognise the continued value of the teacher’s role in
the learning process. As Seymour Papert reflected, it is perhaps more accurate to expect the role of
the conventional ‘classroom teacher’ to be recast along different lines through the use of technology
in education. As Papert argued when responding to the question of whether ‘teacher’ would still be a
word that people would use in the future:

Yes. Will they have adult professionals to facilitate the learning process? Yes. Will these teachers be
people who are in a privileged position as the ones who know and the source of knowledge? I do not
think so. Not at all. They will have a very different role. Sensitive, well-informed adults who understand
deeply about learning processes and social interactions will be able to give advice. They will be able to
spot that this kid has a problem, or this kid needs more interesting challenges, or put pressure on them
and make suggestions. (Papert, interviewed in 1996)

As Papert intimates, the popular notion of learning as a process of ‘co-constructing’ knowledge sees
the individual encountering and engaging with many different resources. The use of digital technology
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in supporting this type of learning can therefore be seen to herald the reconfigured – but certainly not
redundant – role of the teacher.

ii) Replacing the teacher: ‘rock-star

teachers’ and robots

While the role of teacher-as-facilitator still involves expertise, leadership and guidance, other
commentators contend that technology-based forms of education actually allow the teacher’s role to
be reduced to little more than stewarding the delivery of instruction. According to this line of thinking,
digital technology is well able to take care of the pedagogic elements supporting learning (i.e. the
‘teaching’), leaving teachers to be primarily involved in ensuring and coordinating processes of
‘delivery’. This is certainly the ethos long implicit in the use of technology for ‘teacher proofing’ the
provision of education – that is, ‘the practice of limiting the autonomy of individual teachers to
produce a more uniform and controlled experience’ (Ferster 2014, p. 1). Take, for instance, recent
enthusiasms for in-school use of online lectures and assessment packages such as those produced by
Khan Academy (Schwartz 2014). Here the idea is that lessons, lectures and tutorials from one ‘rock-
star teacher’ can be consumed by hundreds of thousands of students. The role of the local ‘teacher’
in making use of this content is, therefore, one of technician – what was described earlier as a ‘proctor’.

Of course, technology is by no means the only area of education to witness such shifts. The autonomy
of teachers to control the content and form of their teaching has been weakened over the last twenty
years or so through the imposition of standardised curricula, high-stakes testing, compliance regimes
and expectations of ‘best practice’ (Mockler and Groundwater-Smith 2015). Yet, alongside these
broader shifts, computers and other digital technologies have consistently been seen as enabling the
displacement of the teacher. This viewpoint is evident, for instance, in the arguments of the
technologist Patrick Suppes, whose early enthusiasm for computer-assisted instruction was discussed
briefly in Chapter 3. Suppes gained prominence in the 1960s when arguing for the introduction of the
‘computer tutor’ as a means of compensating for the shortcomings of the human teacher workforce.
Suppes’ arguments were eloquent if not a little exaggerated. He reasoned, for example, that computer
technology had the potential to provide all students with a quality of learning comparable to that
envisaged by the ancient Greek philosophers:

We should have by the year 2020, or shortly thereafter, computer-assisted instruction courses that
have the features that Socrates thought desirable so long ago. What is said in Plato’s dialogue
Phaedrus about teaching should be true in the twenty- first century, but now the intimate dialogue
between student and tutor will be conducted with a sophisticated computer tutor. (Suppes 1984, p.
306) Suppes’ enthusiasm for the ‘computer tutor’ was shared widely throughout the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s. Indeed, people have anticipated the displacement and disappearance of the teacher for as long
as computer-assisted instruction has been considered viable. From a cognitivist perspective, for
example, much of the enthusiasm for ‘intelligent tutoring systems’ during the 1970s and 1980s
centred on the possibilities for computer-driven expert systems and technology-supported tutoring.
At best, it was argued that human interaction might serve as a ‘congenial and effective backup’ to
technological methods (Sleeman and Brown 1982). In a similar manner, the constructivist,
constructionist and socio- cultural theories of learning outlined in Chapter 4 have all been used by
some educationalists and technologists to deliberately place the learner at the centre of the
educational process at the expense of the teacher. As far as much contemporary thinking about
learning is concerned, the teacher is reduced to a peripheral element of the learning process.

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More extreme still are arguments for the complete replacement of the teacher with technology – that
is, negating the need for physical teachers altogether through the technological automation of the
teaching and learning process. One growing area of interest along these lines is the use of
recommender systems for online learning resources, which support the ‘adaptive sequencing’ of
learning resources in light of a student’s previous performance (see Manouselis et al. 2014). One such
example of this is the Knewton ‘adaptive learning system’. This is an online ‘recommender system’
that uses large-scale data techniques to calculate what form of online tuition each of its enrolled
students should be taking part in, the education resource or service they should be using, when and
how they should be learning. Once a student logs onto a course or tutorial through the Knewton
system, the company’s data engine collects data on every interaction the student has with the
computer. This data is used to model various aspects of the students’ learning, such as their motivation
and proficiency, and more contested measures such as ‘learning style’. These profiles of the students’
learning are then used to recommend the most appropriate educational resource that they should use
next. The strength of this approach is seen to lie in the vast quantity of data being analysed, claimed
to exceed one million data points for each student. This allows the system to know more about a
student’s learning than any ‘real-life’ teacher could ever hope to.

Perhaps the most radical form of teacher replacement lies in the implementation of artificial
intelligence and robotic technologies in schools and universities. One form of this can be seen in the
use of automated software tutors and teachers in online learning systems. For example, we discussed
in Chapter 4 how the artificial intelligence of many intelligent tutoring systems is presented to students
in the form of ‘pedagogic agents’ – coded personifications of a teacher or guide that offer the students
advice and support. The use of coded ‘teacher’ interactions is expected to increase as ‘virtual assistants’
and ‘artificial agents’ become a more common feature of domestic digital technology use (Dredge
2015).

Another form of this technology is the continued interest shown by technologists in classroom robotics
technology. Perhaps the most sustained examples of this sector of educational technology are ongoing
efforts in Japan (and to a lesser extent in South Korea and Taiwan) to develop roboticised teachers
and teaching assistants as part of the broader development of ‘care-giving robots’ in areas such as
nursing, childcare, cleaning, security and surveillance. As such, the notion of the ‘teaching robot’ is an
obvious combination of many of these functions. Early machines such as the ‘IROBI’ robotic teaching
assistants were relatively rudimentary – little more than machines with monitors in their bodies that
students could interact with. Yet, the 2000s saw the development of more deliberately ‘humanised’
teacher robots, typified by the ‘Saya’ robot. Originally designed as a receptionist robot, the teacher
version of Saya was designed to resemble a female primary school teacher – with a fully prosthetic
rubberised face and hands, skirt suit, brown hair and facial make-up. Saya’s face was programmed to
express basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and anger. This robot was
trialled successfully with ten- and eleven-year-old students – it took class registers, monitored
students’ behaviour and issued behavioural orders (such as ‘be quiet’) when appropriate. Roboticists
at the Tokyo University of Science promoted Saya as ‘just a tool’, giving children ‘the opportunity to
come into contact with new technology’ and providing teachers for remote rural areas as ‘there are
few teachers out there that can teach these lessons’ (Kobayashi 2009).

A more recent approach has been the development of ‘care- receiving robots’ where students learn
by instructing robots that are intentionally ‘weakly designed’ to require external support. In addition
to these classroom machines, relatively cheap but powerful consumer robots are being marketed for
home use with similar care-receiving educational content. For example, Softbank’s $2000 ‘Pepper’
consumer robot includes tutorial software where children can learn through teaching the robot to
complete tasks, synchronising movements and interacting haptically with the robot. Thus recent forms
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of teaching robots are seen to offer an effective alternative to ‘real-life’ physical teachers. As Hodson
argues with regard to the use of language-teaching robots in kindergarten settings:

Robots represent a powerful new way to enhance children’s education. Unlike educational TV shows,
say, the robots are physically present and have some of the same social skills as humans. That gives
them the potential to tap into a child’s appetite for one-to-one communication and help kids learn in
many of the same ways a human teacher does. (2014, n.p.)

Clearly, these examples highlight the need to think carefully about how we see the relationships
between humans and technology. As Sian Bayne (2015) reasons, responses to technology use in
education tend to be expressed from an anthropocentric point of view. For example, technology is
usually described as a means of enhancing human capabilities and human productivity, or else as a
threat to the ‘human-ness’ of education. Alternatively, the rise of teaching robots and intelligent
agents perhaps suggests a need to view teaching and technology from a ‘post-humanist’ perspective,
which positions technology as an equal participant – that is, simply as a non-human teacher rather
than a source of assistance and/or threat to the dominant human. Indeed, Bayne’s work with
automated ‘teacherbots’ in online courses shows how different forms of interactions and learning can
occur when students interact with coded-teachers as opposed to their human equivalents. In this
sense, automation of teaching could be seen as ‘pedagogically generative’ as opposed to pedagogically
challenging (Bayne 2015).

In defence of the teacher – arguments for the continued importance of teachers in the digital age

Whether one is convinced by the educational significance of robot teachers or not, the breadth of
alternative forms of technology- based teaching just outlined certainly implies a considerable
challenge to traditional notions of what ‘the teacher’ is. There are many issues to consider in making
sense of everything that has been covered so far in this chapter. Above all, there is a need to more
clearly define and defend the role of the teacher in technology-based education. In contrast to all the
technologies just presented, what reasons are there for the teacher to have an enhanced rather than
diminished role in the learning process? For most people, this question will invoke an almost instinctive
response. Many educators, parents and students would argue that it simply ‘feels right’ and ‘natural’
that learning is a face-to-face process that involves a teacher. It could be argued that learning at all
levels of education is fundamentally a ‘human process enhanced by human beings’ (Volungeviciene
and Leduc 2006, p. 26), with teachers playing a large part in this arrangement.

This point of view has long underpinned criticism of the ‘disembodied’ nature of technology-based
learning. Nearly fifty years ago, for example, Lewis Mumford (1964) bemoaned the fact that there
appeared to be little or no room for ‘the human personality’ within the ‘complex mechanism’ of what
he described as the technology-driven ‘automation of knowledge’. Mumford pointed to the lack of
human presence within ‘humanless’ courses with ‘their cybernetic apparatus, their computers, their
TV sets and tape recorders and learning machines, their machine-marked Yes or No examination
papers’ (1964, p. 15). Over fifty years later, much of this critique still remains relevant. Yet, while such
commonsensical notions may ‘feel’ intuitively correct, they do not form the basis for a robust defence
of the continued place of the teacher in the educational process. We, therefore, need to move beyond
simply relying on romantic notions of teaching being a ‘human process’ and, instead, consider the
specific reasons why teachers should continue to be an integral element of any technology-based
learning arrangement.

i) The educational benefits of the

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teacher

In making these arguments, we are not looking back to a misremembered ‘golden age’ of omnipotent
teachers standing in front of chalkboards and dictating to silent rows of students. As Gert Biesta argues,
very few people would see sense in defending the ‘authoritarian’ model of teaching as a form of
control and ‘in which the student can only exist as an object of the interventions of the teacher’ (Biesta
2016, n.p.). However, this is not to say that teachers should automatically be reduced to an opposite
extreme – for example, as a non-directive ‘facilitator’ of learning. As Biesta reasons, learning ‘as a
process of interpretation and comprehension’ cannot be simply ‘facilitated’ (2016, n.p.). Any situation
of learning something that is unknown means that the student cannot exist as a fully capable
autonomous being. As Nicolaus Copernicus wrote in the eighteenth century, ‘We do not know what
we do not know.’ Thus even the most exploratory and collaborative forms of learning as ‘participation’
require leadership and governance. Anything that students ‘participate’ in usually needs to be
orchestrated and scaffolded by more capable and knowledgeable others.

In this sense, a role clearly remains for teachers as expert ‘designers’ of learning. As Peter Goodyear
(2015) argues, learning does not just occur spontaneously. Instead, learning requires the setting up of
the conditions of learning and making sure that opportunities to learn arise over the course of any
educational episode. Goodyear reasons that most people do not possess the skills, motivation and/or
confidence to do this themselves. Instead, there are clear benefits in learning in the presence of an
‘expert’ or ‘more knowledgeable’ other. It is important to note, however, that it is not possible for a
teacher to ‘design’ learning – learning is not something that can be controlled or forced to occur.
Instead, the role of a teacher is to design for learning – as Wenger (1998, p. 229) puts it, ‘Learning
cannot be designed: it can only be designed for.’ This design work can include establishing learning
tasks, supportive environments for learning and conducive forms of social relations between students
and teachers.

One of the key contributions that a teacher makes to any educational episode is an ongoing process
of ‘design for learning’ – that is, planning, interacting, evaluating and reflecting. Goodyear is keen to
stress that learning design is not a simple case of ‘planning’ before a class. Instead, it is an ongoing
process of preparatory work, in-class facilitation and improvisation of learning activities, accompanied
by post-hoc forms of reflection, evaluation, assessment and improvement. The added value of a
teacher, therefore, is to provide ‘careful forethought, imagination, empathy and planning’ (Goodyear
2015, p. 31) – what is often referred to as orchestration. As Goodyear concludes:

Everything else is merely a stimulus or scaffold for their activity. Most of the work students do – much
of their learning activity – takes place without direct supervision from their teachers. Hence, teachers
need to design good learning tasks and to communicate task specifications clearly to their students.
(2015, p. 33)

When designing learning episodes, it is also important to not discount the value of occasional direct
instruction from a teacher. This reflects the value of what Schwartz and Bransford (1998) describe as
‘a time for telling’ – where teachers take responsibility for outlining the major concepts that any
student will experience, as well as providing illustrative examples, explanations and opportunities for
clarification. In this sense, there continues to be ‘a place for lectures and readings in the classroom if
students have sufficiently differentiated domain knowledge to use the expository materials in a
generative manner’ (Schwartz and Bransford 1998, p. 475). Indeed, there is growing support in some
sectors of education for the privileging of ‘explicit instruction’ where teachers fully explain ideas and
concepts rather than requiring students to pose questions and find out things for themselves. This is
seen to be especially important with topics where students are not particularly knowledgeable – as
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Greg Ashman puts it, ‘If you want to think critically about physics, then first learn a lot of physics’ (2015,
n.p.).

This practical point chimes with the more abstract notion that there is something special about ‘the
experience of being taught’ (Biesta 2016, p. 376). As Biesta reasons, being addressed by another
interrupts the students’ ego-centricism and, therefore, draws the students out of themselves. Similar
benefits can be attributed to the ‘broadcast’ format of classes, where the teacher will deliver a lecture
to a receptive class of students. Even if the speakers are uninspiring and uncharismatic, the benefits
of a lecture lie not in the simple transmission of information, but as an event where students can learn
in the presence of others. Much learning can result from watching an expert think out loud and
expound an idea in real time as well picking up cues from other students. As Charles Crook puts it, ‘A
live lecture cultivates students’ capacity for sustained attention to a narrative unfolding in real time,
and also reinforces habits of prompt and effective note-taking’ (2015, n.p.).

ii) The need for teachers when

using technology in education

These rationales certainly extend to situations where technology is being used to support learning. To
repeat a point just made, technology-based learning is unlikely to occur spontaneously but, instead,
requires the involvement of more knowledgeable, expert others to ensure that learning takes place.
Extending the arguments made in the previous section, the importance of the teacher to any instance
of technology-based-learning can be described along a number of different lines.

The first is the argument that many aspects of education are social and embodied in nature, and that
these qualities are not easily mediated through technology. The philosopher Herbert Dreyfus (2001)
touched upon this point when arguing against the dominance of online learning. Here, Dreyfus
reasoned that many forms of learning and expertise are dependent on being in the physical presence
of a more knowledgeable other. As Dreyfus concludes, technology-based teaching without the
accompaniment of a teacher ‘will produce only competence, while expertise and practical wisdom will
be out of reach’ (2001, p. 49). Issues of co-presence and embodiment are subtleties that are perhaps
lost in some technology-mediated environments. It could well be, then, that any discussion of
technology replacing the teacher should consider the ‘blending’ of learner-centred and learner-led
modes of technology use with teacher-led, face-to-face instruction. Even with well-educated adult
learners, growing numbers of educators are now reaching the conclusion that technology is best used
only as part of ‘the thoughtful integration of classroom face-to-face learning experiences with online
learning experiences’ (Garrison and Kanuka 2004, p. 96).

Second, it could be argued that, in addition to benefitting from the experience of being taught by a
teacher, learners benefit greatly from the teacher orchestration and coordination of technology-based
education. As Charles Crook observes, the increasing complexity and sophistication of emerging digital
technologies introduces ‘significant distractions and obstructions’ that individuals must confront. In
this sense, teachers play an important role in supporting students’ supposedly self-directed activities.
In particular, teachers are often the most suitable people to provide the initial impetus for the
collaborative activities that underpin much contemporary technology-based learning. As Crook puts it,
teachers can play a key role in ‘arranging the furniture’ of technology-based learning. Without the
‘good core’ and ‘initial governance and impetus’ of teacher guidance and support, the use of digital
technology such as social media can often result in little more than ‘an intermittent but relentless low
bandwidth exchange that is more “coordination” than “collaboration”’ (Crook 2008, p. 33). These
points are reflected in the growing popularity of ‘pedagogic design’ as a focus for people working in
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the field of educational technology. For example, Diana Laurillard’s (2012) ‘Conversational Framework’
offers a model for how educators can best design technology-based learning drawing on different
modes of digital media use – from narrative, interactive and communicative uses of technology, to
adaptive, productive and collaborative uses. All of these different modes of technology use are seen
to require planning and orchestration.

The third is the need to recognise the importance of teachers in online education – that is, teaching
through technology as opposed to teaching with technology. With the growing prominence of e-
learning, virtual schools and MOOCs, there is growing recognition of the importance of the online
teacher. It is beginning to be argued that, although students are able to learn autonomously in online
education, the role of the online teacher and online tutor is just as important as a teacher in ‘traditional’
face-to-face classrooms. Moreover, the argument can be made that online education demands a
considerably different set of pedagogical practices.

These differences are seen to stem from the different nature of online as opposed to offline spaces.
As we saw in the discussion of ‘connected learning’ in Chapter 4, many people see the internet as
primarily social and driven by networked practices and interactions rather than as a one-way delivery
of content. In this sense, commentators like Sinclair and MacLeod (2015) contend that teaching online
is a ‘social’ job, with learning taking place through conversations, dialogue and student-centred
experiences. Online teaching is a situation ‘when the ideas of narrative, communication and
interactivity come into play – and effective teachers will realize that they draw on such narratives in
creating their own students’ experiences’ (Sinclair and MacLeod 2015, p. 95). These ideas of narrative
and interactivity imply a different form of pedagogy, where learning is seen to arise from involvement
in experiences rather than from receiving instruction. It also implies a different form of teaching,
where the teacher has less direct control.

One recurring theme in discussions of online teaching is that of orchestration. It is reasoned that an
online teacher has to set up, arrange and manage the educational experiences that learners will
encounter and engage in. This involves stimulating, provoking and ‘inserting probes’ into teaching
situations, but also leaving spaces and gaps for students to work things out for themselves. Online
teaching is an active process of curation – ‘experience itself does not necessarily result in learning,
which is why it has to be managed’ (Sinclair and MacLeod 2015, p. 94). The range of metaphors used
to describe online education tend to depict teachers much as creative directors in the performing arts
or as designers, planners and architects. Some people talk of online teachers as conductors, as well as
curators. Alternatively, Sinclair concludes with the suggestion that perhaps online teachers need to be
seen as ‘experience designers’ – treating learning like a story with a setting, plot, narrative, characters,
props and intended conclusion. The teacher is, therefore, positioned in the role of a director of a semi-
improvised play, steering the cast towards where they want them to end up.

Conclusions

This chapter has covered a great deal of ground, and there are many issues that require further
thought. From a practical point of view, however, it is unlikely that digital technology will soon lead to
the complete disappearance of the teacher. Indeed, teachers fare relatively well in calculations of the
likely automation of different types of jobs over the next twenty years (Frey and Osborne 2013). Here,
researchers modelled the tasks and skills required by over 700 different jobs, and then modelled the
engineering issues involved in the potential computerisation of these tasks and skills. It was estimated
that about 47 per cent of total US employment is at risk of computerisation – most likely, telemarketers
and insurance underwriters. The jobs least likely to be automated were those that involved human-
to-human interaction and high levels of judgement (such as therapists and social workers). As such,
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teaching roles were generally calculated to be at a relatively low risk of automation. Elementary school
teachers were ranked as the #20 least likely jobs out of 702 to be automated (just below dentists who
were ranked at #19). Secondary school teachers were ranked #41 (just above the clergy, ranked at
#42). Slightly less secure, however, were post-secondary teachers (#112) and teaching assistants
(#317). In terms of these numbers, then, some of the more alarmist predictions outlined in this chapter
might not be as imminent as some people might believe.

It is also unlikely that digital technology will lead to the displacement of the teacher. Indeed, many of
the issues raised in this chapter relate to the long-running argument on whether teaching should be
approached as a ‘science’ or as an ‘art’. For instance, it could be argued that many of the most visible
aspects of teaching are best classed as a science, especially in terms of the systematic and procedural
ways that teachers often convey information and communicate with learners. Conversely, other
aspects of teaching can be seen as more artistic in nature, involving great amounts of intuition,
improvisation and expressiveness. It is often argued that effective teaching depends on high levels of
creativity, sound judgement and insight. Some people contend that the artistic aspects of teaching are
highly complex, nuanced and dependent on human judgement (Eisner 2005). Again, these are qualities
that are difficult to automate or design into a technology.

Instead, it is perhaps more likely that teachers will continue to play an integral role in education and
learning. We shall return to consider the part that teachers can play in the future shaping of
educational technology in Chapter 8. In the next chapter, we will move on to considering the issue of
institutional priorities and organisational constraints. Here we will consider the role of the educational
institution in light of digital technology. Does digital technology imply the partial reconfiguration of
the structures and priorities of educational institutions? Or does digital technology imply the
displacement of educational institutions altogether? While we may be able to construct a case for the
continued relevance of the teacher, what can be said of our schools, colleges and universities? Is there
a need for educational institutions in the twenty-first century?

Further questions to consider

• What can digital technology do in a classroom that a teacher cannot? Conversely, what can teachers
do in a classroom that digital technology cannot?

• To what extent does digital technology contribute to the ‘deskilling’ of teaching as a profession? Is
it valid to compare the deskilling of teachers with the deskilling of machine-using

factory workers? What strategies of resistance do teachers

display to technology-based teaching?

• What is lost (and what is gained) through the ‘mediation’ of

teaching that takes place fully online? How easy is it to use technology to replicate the qualities of
face-to-face, personal interaction with a teacher?

Please go to http://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/education-and- technology-second-edition/ to

download and listen to discussion around these further questions.

Further reading

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There are many good chapters and articles on the changing role of the teacher in the twenty-first
century. One readable collection is:
Henderson, M. and Romeo, G. (2015). Teaching and Digital Technology: Big

Issues and Critical Questions. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 4 of Seymour Papert’s book contains a good overview of how the teacher’s role is believed to
be changing in the face of constructivist and socio- cultural technology-based learning. Although
sometimes polemic, Papert’s writing typifies how many educational technologists think about teachers
and teaching:

Papert, S. (1993). The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. New York,
Basic Books, pp. 57–81.

In their article Paul Kirschner and Jeroen van Merrinboer discuss the cognitive need for guidance and
teacher support, thereby discussing some of the limitations in arguments for the diminishment of the
teacher’s role:
Kirschner, P. and van Merrinboer, J. (2013). Do learners really know best?

Urban legends in education. Educational Psychologist, 48(3): 169–83.

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6 Technology and Educational Institutions

Chapter Outline
Introduction
The growing use of technology in schools
Arguments against the continuation of ‘school’ in the digital age
Reschooling – alternate models of technology-driven schools Deschooling – using technology as an
alternative to schooling Conclusions

Introduction

As has been noted throughout this book, digital technology is often described as supporting new and
improved ways of doing things. This is especially the case when people talk of technology use in
organisational and institutional settings. Digital technologies are seen to be capable of having a
profound impact on the ways that most organisations and institutions go about their business, from
individual households to transnational corporations. As we saw in Chapter 2, many commentators
have welcomed the ways in which digital technologies appear to be ‘disrupting’ organisational
hierarchies and structures. Contemporary institutions and organisations are often described as
operating in ways that are more open and ‘networked’ than before, largely as a result of computerised
and telecommunications technology.

Such changes are evident across many sectors of society – from government and the economy to
leisure, entertainment and the domestic sphere. Take, for instance, the different ways that digital
technology has influenced governments and civic affairs, from the ways that elections are run to the
ways that citizens can engage with government services. Elsewhere, military organisations around the
world now recruit hackers, cryptographers and remote drone operators as their focus shifts
increasingly towards ‘cyber warfare’ rather than conventional warfare. Increasing amounts of
commerce and trade now take place through online ‘e-tailing’ rather than the out-of-town shopping
malls. Perhaps most obviously, the leisure and entertainment industries are undergoing wholesale
restructurings – with the TV industry, newspaper industry, music industry and book publishing all
struggling to maintain relevance in a world where free and open access to online ‘content’ is seen by
many technology users as an inalienable right.

This digitally driven ‘reorganisation’ is seen to be significantly influenced by the relationships that
individuals have with the institutions and organisations in their lives. For example, many people now
experience very different ways of interacting with banks, public services, retail organisations and their
places of work. Moreover, the online provision of entertainment and leisure is also noticeably more
fluid, ‘client-centred’ and ‘on demand’. Yet, while we might be accustomed to dealing with the likes of
Amazon.com in terms of watching television and buying consumer goods, such changes are less clear-
cut in education. It could be argued that educational organisations and institutions have undergone
less obvious change over the last few decades. As Dan Lortie (2002, p. vii) reflected at the beginning
of the 2000s, ‘Education does not change at a rapid pace – the major structures in public education
are much the same today as [30 years ago].’

As we approach the 2020s, there remains little reason to disagree with Lortie’s observation of
educational inertia. In particular, many people would argue that a slow pace of change is especially
evident with the ‘traditional’ institutions of education, not least the school. In this chapter, we shall
consider the significance of educational institutions in contemporary education. How can educational
institutions such as the school be said to be coping with the demands of digital technology? Is there a
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continued need for formal institutions in education? Does digital technology perhaps render
educational institutions obsolete? In the digital age, is there anything more ‘old school’ than the idea
of school itself?

The remainder of the chapter will consider these questions in terms of ‘compulsory’ schooling – that
is, the elementary and high schooling that is provided free of charge by the state and is generally
mandatory for all children and young people. Compulsory schooling is one of the few common
experiences for people in the developed world. Nearly all readers of this book will have attended a
school over much of their childhood and adolescence. For better or worse, students and teachers
continue to spend upwards of six hours per day at school for up to 200 days of the year. Such is the
familiarity that stems from this personal experience that most people rarely stop to think about what
schools actually are and how they operate.

Before considering the relationship between digital technology and schools, it is important to clearly
define our terms of reference. In particular, we should distinguish between the concepts of school and
schooling. In the most basic sense, schools can be understood as the institutions where children and
young people receive education, usually learning under the guidance of a teacher. Schooling, on the
other hand, refers to the processes of teaching and/or being taught in a school. While this distinction
may appear pedantic, it highlights the need to approach schools and digital technology in terms of
structure and in terms of process. For example, with regard to defining the ‘structure’ of schools, most
people would think of the material aspects of schools as places – that is, their buildings, corridors and
classrooms. In this sense, schools are physical structures whose architectural design and organisation
of space influences what goes on inside them. Yet, we should also think of the structures of schools in
a non-material sense. In particular, schools are based around a range of social and cultural structures.
These include the hierarchical roles that people assume within the school organisation, the hierarchies
of knowledge that constitute the school curriculum and the organisation of time that constitutes the
school timetable. While often out of sight and rarely talked about, all of these structures are integral
elements of the organisation of schools and schooling.

On the other hand, with regard to the ‘processes’ of schooling, most people would think immediately
of explicit processes such as teaching, learning, communication and decision making. However,
schooling should also be seen as involving processes of socialisation, regulation and control. Again, all
these processes are often out of sight and rarely acknowledged, yet they form a core part of the
‘business’ of schools as organisations. All of these processes and structures highlight the fact that
schools should certainly not be seen as neutral contexts within which digital technologies are
implemented and then used. Instead, we need to consider how digital technologies ‘fit’ with these
structures and processes. How do digital technologies complement or challenge the established
organisational processes and structures of schools? In what ways do digital technologies appear to
support the ‘reconstitution’ of schools and schooling?

The growing use of technology in schools

Digital technologies are now an integral feature of schools and schooling, and in ways that would have
been hard to imagine at the turn of the century. Indeed, many of the innovative and cutting- edge
technologies featured in the first edition of this book are now expected and largely unremarkable
features of the contemporary school. As Barack Obama proclaimed during his second term in office,
‘In a country where we expect free Wi-Fi with our coffee, we should definitely demand it in our schools’
(2014, n.p.). Of course, as we saw in Chapter 3, the integration of new technologies into school settings
is by no means a new phenomenon. Indeed, one cannot expect to fully understand the present-day
complexities of schools and digital technologies without considering the steady introduction of various
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technologies in schools over the last decades. While usually overlooked in discussions of educational
technology, the 1970s were a vibrant period for the emerging fields of ‘computer-aided instruction’
and ‘educational micro- electronics’. Then in the 1980s, computers began to be established as a
mainstream element of school provision. The 1990s then saw the introduction of networked – rather
than stand- alone – computing, leading to the widespread use of intranets and internet-based
computing. The 2000s was an era of ‘learning management systems’ and other online forms of
schooling, alongside the use of classroom technologies such as interactive whiteboards and tablet
computers.

As discussed in Chapter 1, the 2010s then saw the continued development of personal media devices
coupled with the shift from the ‘read/write’ web to the participatory context of social media. Now we
have reached the point where digital technology is a core element of nearly every educational
institution regardless of history and tradition. This point is illustrated by the fact that the United
Kingdom’s most prestigious school – the 580-year-old Eton School – has partnered with a venture
capitalist ‘start-up accelerator’ to fund and support Ed-Tech start-ups. As Eton’s head of technology
put it, ‘It would be very foolish of us to bury our heads in the sand and assume that education in
schools will carry on in the traditional way’ (Mirani 2014, n.p.).

Indeed, present-day schools are predicated around the use of digital technology. Devices such as
tablets, laptops and smartphones support a diversity of learning practices within the schoolhouse, at
home and all points in-between. Classrooms and other formal learning environments are awash with
digital hardware and software, and a growing amount of pedagogic work is conducted on a ‘virtual’
basis. Students now combine face-to- face and online lessons, and the trend for ‘flipped’ modes of
delivery has seen instructional elements of courses increasingly delivered through preparatory videos,
leaving classes free for discussion and interactive forms of learning. In addition, the day- to-day
management and administration of schools is underpinned by software systems that support and
structure the actions of students, teachers, administrators, leaders and parents in a variety of ways.
Some of the oldest processes and practices of schooling are now digital in nature. Paper-based
textbooks have been replaced by digital textbooks, e-books and flex-books. Examinations, tests and
other forms of assessment are moving away from being taken in paper-and-pencil form, to being
administered online.

The fast-changing nature of the digital landscape in schools is reflected in the ever-escalating
imperatives that have surrounded computing over the last four decades. The early 1980s promise of
‘a computer for every school’ was superseded quickly by ‘a computer for every classroom’, ‘a laptop
for every teacher’ and, then in the 2000s, by a considerable enthusiasm for a ‘ubiquitous’ state of
‘one-to-one’ access (i.e. a computer for every student and teacher). More recently, this emphasis on
institutionally provided devices has been overtaken by the increasing presence of the personally
owned and highly portable forms of computing being brought into schools by individuals. The once
radical notion of BYOD (‘bring your own device’) has been replaced quickly by talk of ‘BYOT’ (‘t’ for
technology), thus stressing the distinction between the physical hardware ‘device’ and the assemblage
of applications, software, preferences and settings that go to make up one’s own ‘technology’. Now
talk is shifting yet again, in terms of ‘Bring Your Own Devices’ (plural), ‘Bring Your Own Connectivity’
and ‘2:1’ and ‘3:1’ computing – all recognising the ability of students, teachers and administrators to
come into schools with their own smartphones, tablets and laptops and, crucially, connecting these
devices through their own mobile networks.

For many enthusiasts, the evolving nature of schools’ use of digital technology is cause for excitement.
Yet, the situation in most schools is more complex than this. In contrast to the changes just described,
many commentators are highly critical of how technology is actually being used in schools. Some
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observers bemoan the narrow uses of digital technology in schools, characterised by one
commentator in terms of ‘visualism, linear thinking, a type of aliteracy, and teacher proofing’
(Rochester 2015, p. 3). Elsewhere, policymakers, funders and some educators have grown increasingly
frustrated by the lack of any tangible impact of digital technology use in terms of the standard
‘outcome’ measures usually applied to schools. Even the OECD – traditionally a proponent of
technology use – has warned against the ‘mixed impact’ of increased technology use in school, and
the lack of ‘noticeable improvement’ in standardised test results for reading, mathematics or science.
As Andreas Schleicher (OECD education director) concluded:

There have always been a lot of false hopes related to technology, people think that we can just add
technology to what we do in schools and it is going to transform learning. (2015, n.p.)

The uneven nature of schools’ uses of digital technology is certainly apparent if we consider the
succession of policymaking in this area over the last forty years or so. This was encapsulated in Michael
Hammond’s (2014) overview of repeated government attempts to introduce computers and other
digital technologies into UK schools and schooling, stemming back to the first ‘Computers in the
Curriculum’ project of 1973. The United Kingdom offers an interesting case study of trends that have
recurred the world over. As Hammond reminds us, the United Kingdom has long considered itself as a
world-leader in educational technology policymaking. This national pride started with the central
government’s ‘Micros in Schools’ scheme in 1981 under Margaret Thatcher with its aim to provide ‘a
computer for every school’. These ambitions were later dwarfed by the £3.4 billion ‘ICT for Schools’
drive by the Tony Blair government during the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the latter was less
lavishly funded, this policy emphasis has continued via the push during the 2010s for the wide-scale
promotion of computer coding in primary and secondary schools. Unlike most other educational
fashions and fads, digital technology has certainly enjoyed sustained political attention and support
within UK education.

Yet, despite these urgent imperatives and well-resourced incentives for schools to ‘harness technology’
(to borrow the title of a phase of policymaking in the United Kingdom during the 2000s), much of this
effort appears to have resulted in surprisingly little noticeable change to the core functions and
structures of what ‘school’ is, and how schools operate. While the surface appearance of any school
in the United Kingdom may now well be replete with tablet computers, whiteboards, learning
management systems and Wi-Fi connectivity, the underlying nature, form and essential character of
these schools are often less high-tech and innovative.

In making sense of this disjuncture, Hammond points to the ‘consistent rationales’ that have been
used to promote schools’ use of digital technology. Echoing the external and internal ‘imperatives’
that were discussed in Chapter 2, UK governments have long promoted the belief that digital
technology ‘can impact on standards’ (p. 192); the notion that digital technology can bolster economic
efficiency and the vocational skills of the workforce; and the more aspirational notion that digital
technology can act as ‘a catalyst for curriculum reform’ and therefore lead to ‘radical changes in
teaching and learning’ (Hammond 2014, p. 193). The questionable nature of these imperatives,
Hammond reasons, has led to a rather distorted, harried approach towards implementing digital
technology in UK schools that is ‘largely aspirational’, preoccupied with the adoption of technology at
all costs, and unwilling to engage with the obvious complexities of the actual implementations of
digital technologies in situ. Notwithstanding the billions of dollars, thousands of teacher hours and
column inches devoted to it, digital technology in UK schools finds itself – to borrow a phrase from
Larry Cuban (2001) – in the predicament of being ‘oversold and underused’. All this leaves digital
technology in UK schools in a rather forlorn, unfulfilled and, ultimately, frustrated state. As Hammond
concludes:
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The claims made for the implementation of [digital technology] into school do not stand up to critical
scrutiny ... rather than promote meaningful change, the use of technology has generated ‘if only’
narratives: if only the framework for teaching and learning could be changed; if only governments had
acted differently; if only a threshold in access could be crossed; or ... if only teachers could change
their minds about the nature of teaching and learning. (p. 196)

Hammond is by no means the only observer to have noted these trends, and the United Kingdom is
by no means the only context to have experienced a recurring cycle of over-selling and under- use
within its school systems. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a national school system that has not had
similar experiences in terms of the ‘inconsistent’ showing of digital technology. Indeed, if one looks
past the noisy enthusiasms for the potential of digital technology that tend to dominate discussions of
educational technology in many countries, there is a well-established counter- narrative outlining the
limitations of technology use in everyday school contexts, all pointing to the school as an impediment
to the effective use of digital technology.

Arguments against the

continuation of ‘school’ in the

digital age

Despite the central place that technology now occupies in schooling, there is a growing sense within
many discussions of education and technology that current models of schooling are no longer ‘fit for
purpose’. The argument is often made, for example, that conventional schools are ‘broken’,
‘twentieth-century’ and frustratingly ‘cookie-cutter’ in nature and form – that is, outmoded and
obsolete products of a bygone era. Commentators speak with exasperation of the ‘industrial-era
classroom’, schools as factories, ‘ivory tower’ educators and so on. In short, the sense is growing that
schools as they currently stand have had long enough to adapt to the imperatives and opportunities
of digital technology. As Greg Whitby argues:

The current model of schooling has been tweaked long enough. It’s time for a new model, and I fear
that if we don’t move on this, schooling will become increasingly irrelevant in the lives of the young
people and the society it serves. (Whitby 2013, p. 9)

The connotations of such terms and phrases are clear. Take, for instance, the metaphor of the school
as ‘factory’. As Larry Cuban points out, at the beginning of the twentieth century, this comparison was
used as a term of approval, praising modern schooling for its ‘standardization, efficiency, and up-close
connections to the economy’ (2014, n.p.). Now, however, the term is taken firmly as an indictment of
the harmful and outmoded conditions that persist within schools – for example, standardisation of
knowledge and learning, and relentless testing and accountability of both students and teachers. The
idea of schools being ‘broken’ also refers to a variety of specific dissatisfactions among those looking
to promote the reform of education, For example, as Todd Hixon (2014) wrote in the financial journal
Forbes, education ‘is now ground zero for disruption’. In particular, Hixon argued that the main value
of education for students and their parents – what he described as a ‘ticket to upper-middle-class life’
– is no longer guaranteed by continued participation in education. It is, therefore, sensible for students
to seek ‘new ways to education’. According to Hixon, traditional models of education offer the
following:

A product that does not work, ridiculous costs, and an antiquated business model. For many years we
accepted this because we see extraordinary value in education. Now, most middle and upper-middle
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class parents find they cannot give their children the education they enjoyed. Technology has recently
put a spark to this fuel: on-line education works and dramatically improves costs and access. This is a
big opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors. (2014, n.p.)

It is worth considering the provenance of these arguments in a little more detail. Looking back over
the issues and debates covered so far in this book, it would seem that people’s enthusiasms for
different forms of technology-based education are usually driven by two inter-related beliefs. The first
is the widely held assumption that digital technology offers a better way of ‘doing education’ – what
could be referred to as a technological ‘pull’ factor. The second is a general dissatisfaction with the
current types of schools and schooling – what could be described as an institutional ‘push’ factor.
Together, these beliefs can be seen as underpinning most people’s desire for the technology- driven
redefinition of schools. It makes sense to give further consideration to the ideas, beliefs, values and
agenda that inform these arguments. Is the school as it currently stands really a dysfunctional
institution? Do digital technologies really offer a better way of organising and providing educational
opportunities?

In this first respect, the outmoded nature of schools is often described in comparison to the different
forms of learning that digital technology can support. These issues were evident, for example, in the
descriptions of connected learning and constructionism reviewed in Chapter 4. Indeed, one of the
main implications of connected learning is the need to rethink the traditional spaces, places, contexts
and institutions of learning. In essence, the connected learning framework suggests three design
principles, that is, the idea that

• learning starts from (and is sparked by) a shared purpose and shared interest;

• learning is centred around practices of production; • learning takes place through open networks.

These principles clearly suggest the need to rethink the shape and form of what a ‘school’ is. For
instance, if we take the idea of connected learning seriously, then there is an imperative to better
imagine how school relates to other contexts and settings – for example, popular culture, home and
community. How might schools be reorganised to offer constant opportunities for students to ‘bring’
learning in from other spheres? While in the school setting, how might students be offered pathways
to cross over into other settings/contexts? In short, connected learning points to forms of schooling
that are more porous and less isolationist.

While ideas of connected learning still retain a place for schools in the ‘ecology’ of learning
opportunities, other viewpoints are less accommodating. Many of the most forceful arguments for the
outmoded nature of schools are based on assumptions of different forms of organisation and
innovation that digital technology can now support. In Chapter 2, we highlighted the idea of ‘disruptive
innovation’ and cited Jeff Jarvis’ assertion that ‘education is one of the institutions most deserving of
disruption – and with the greatest opportunities to come of it’. This sentiment highlights the growing
dissatisfaction among technologists and the entrepreneurial sector with the institutionalisation of
education. This encompasses individual schools and universities, as well as the state-run education
systems and the bureaucratic agencies and organisations that surround them.

Such frustrations centre on the mismanagement of education by monolithic institutions that are seen
to be inherently undemocratic. In contrast to the ‘flattened’ forms of organisation that many people
feel characterise digital technology use, schooling is criticised as a sector where ownership, control
and power is concentrated in the hands of elites – from state education departments and education
professors, to school district superintendents, tenured teachers and their unions. As with many large
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administrations and bureaucracies, these are seen to be institutions that are unresponsive,
incompetent, untrustworthy, ungrateful, self-serving and greedy (Downes 2010). As such, these are
institutions that clearly ‘deserve’ to be swept away. As Newt Gingrich (2014, n.p.) put it:

If, as the popular saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting a different result, the people who run our public schools fit that description. For several
generations now, schools have been failing students the same ways over and over and expecting a
different result. Teachers lecture, students sit and some listen. Class happens at the same time, with
the same material, and at the same pace for everyone. This is an 1890s model of education – teaching
to the ‘average’ student, rather than the individual. In an age when most information and knowledge
is transmitted digitally and is increasingly personalized – think about how Netflix, Pandora, Twitter and
Facebook work – we should be able to do much better than that.

Reschooling – alternate

models of technology-driven

schools

These are persuasive arguments and, even if one does not agree fully with their tone, such debates
highlight the need to consider the possibility of rethinking how schooling is arranged and organised.
So what needs to be done? One popular response to the apparent shortcomings of schools is the
reconfiguration and reinvention of what ‘school’ is. These moves can be described as attempts at
‘reschooling’ – that is, remodelling the major institutional structures and organisational processes of
schooling within the existing physical and spatial environments of the school. In other words, although
schools may continue to look the same from the outside, what goes on within them is substantially
different from before. As Greg Whitby puts it, ‘Schooling needs a remodel, not a simply DIY renovation
with a few shiny new appliances but a rethink of the structures, architecture and functions of schooling’
(2013, p. 139).

These arguments have a long tradition in the field of educational technology. Take, for instance, the
writing of Seymour Papert, who was highlighted in Chapter 3 as one of the originators of
constructionist learning theory. It could be argued that Papert promoted a reschooling agenda
throughout his works. For example, Papert famously argued that schools and schooling were ‘relics
from an earlier period of knowledge technology’ and that new technology will ‘overthrow the accepted
structure of school, the idea of curriculum, the segregation of children by age and pretty well
everything that the education establishment will defend to the bitter end’ (Papert 1998, n.p.). Perhaps
Papert’s most memorable proclamation in this respect was as follows:

The computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes,
teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum – all of that. The
whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible with the presence of the
computer. (1984, p. 38)

As these comments imply, many of these proposals for technology-driven reschooling centre on the
reconfiguration of curriculum and assessment. For example, efforts have been made in many countries
to design forms of technology-based assessment to support students – especially in terms of assessing
student competencies in areas such as decision making, adaptability and cooperation. Attempts have
been made to develop technology-based forms of ‘peer assessment’ as well as the assessment of
collaboratively produced work. In some countries, students have been permitted access to the
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internet during school examinations. Similarly, in terms of reconstituting the school curriculum many
educationalists are striving to find ways of foregrounding technology-based knowledge co-creation
and content curation. Discussions in the educational technology literature will include proposals and
manifestos for the redefinition of curriculum and pedagogy, with talk of ‘mash-up pedagogy’ and a
‘remix of learning’ (e.g. Fisher and Baird 2009; Mahiri 2011).

Besides redefining issues of curriculum and assessment, some educators are also making attempts to
recast educational institutions as sites of technological exploration. An obvious area for change has
been the remodelling of physical boundaries of schools to fit with the needs and demands of modern
technology. The idea of redesigning and rebuilding the physical environment of schools to better
accommodate digital technology use continues to be a recurring debate over the future of schools.
For example, it has been suggested that the planning and design of new schools is less rigidly ‘zoned’,
with schools becoming ‘learning spaces’ that are ‘blended’ in with other spaces and sites within the
community (Harrison 2009). All told, the reconstitution of the physical work environment of the school
to accommodate the demands of digital technology use is seen to be long overdue.

While such arguments might appear radical, they are already being implemented around the world.
Indeed, these ideas have resulted in some notable alternate school models that have gained
considerable publicity. A range of tangible alternatives to the ‘industrial-era’ school have been set up
and sustained over the last decade or so. These provide contrasting working models of ‘school’ that
are proving capable of educating thousands of students through the innovative use of digital
technology. Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not these institutions turn out to be
forerunners of system-wide reform. For the time being, though, such schools have certainly become
standard bearers for those wishing to push for the rethinking of what ‘school’ is in the digital age.

The implications of these alternate models are evident if we consider a few celebrated examples. Take,
for instance, ‘Quest to Learn’ – a New York City public school that caters for sixth- to twelfth-grade
students. This school has been designed explicitly around principles of games-based learning and game
design. Here, students progress between ‘levels’ rather than year groups, tackle ‘missions’ rather than
set curricula and gain ‘points’ rather than grades. Young people attending Quest to Learn do not study
passively, but are expected to assume the identities of explorers, historians and evolutionary biologists,
and then immerse themselves in the adventures, quests, challenges and explorations that ensue.
These are the principles of ‘hard fun’ and ‘serious play’ writ large – thereby prompting claims of
‘harness[ing] strategic thinking around gaming and game design as an innovative curricular and
learning paradigm and actively seek[ing] to change the way institutions of learning are conceived of
and built’ (Salen et al. 2011, p. xvi).

On the other side of the Atlantic are the similarly unconventional ‘Steve Jobs Schools’. These Dutch
schools were established by the ‘Onderwijs voor een Nieuwe Tijd’ (‘Education for a New Era’)
Foundation with the aim of realising a set of similarly ambitious digitally driven school reform
principles. These include the flexible scheduling of learning across the school day and school year, the
positioning of teachers in a coaching role and an overarching emphasis on personalised learning. The
spirit of Apple founder Steve Jobs is evoked through the schools’ reliance on iPad tablet computers.
Every pupil in a Steve Jobs School is given his or her own iPad through which he or she has access to
his or her own ‘virtual school’. Framing educational activities within the familiar design features and
aesthetic of Apple’s consumer electronic products, ‘school’ is reconfigured as ‘sCool’, with the iPads
allowing students to immerse themselves in ‘sCool Spaces’ and ‘sCool Projects’ as and when they see
fit.

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A more radical reimagining of the digital-era school is the ‘42’ institution. This was established in the
17th arrondissement of Paris, its name referencing the ‘Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy’ series of
books. Publicised as a school for young adults who might have previously ‘failed’ in the conventional
school system, ‘42’ was established by a French internet entrepreneur looking for ways to increase
the supply of local programmers, coders and software developers. While enrolment is keenly
competitive, ‘42’ has no standard entrance requirements, is free of charge for those students who are
awarded a place and has no fixed curriculum, opening hours or teaching staff. Instead, the school is
based around a combination of self-education and open access to high- grade computers, high-speed
internet connectivity and high- capacity storage. Students are expected to collaborate on technology
development projects and hone their skills through peer-to-peer learning. As the school prospectus
boasts, ‘With its unique pedagogical approach and accessibility to all, completely free of charge, 42 is
the most daring response yet to the challenge of information-technology skill development, as well as
a source of innovation for the future’ (42 2013, p. 1).

As far as many commentators are concerned, these types of school highlight the failure of traditional
forms of school to make the most of digital technology. Indeed, alternative forms of digitally driven
schooling such as these can be found around the world. In the United States, for example, networks
of ‘Rocketship’ and ‘High-Tech High’ schools have been established with the aim of supporting
personalised high-tech learning. Conversely, virtual ‘Schools in the Cloud’ have been set up to cater
for previously school-deprived young people in India. While all relatively modest endeavours in their
own right, such experimental institutions serve collectively to provide ‘proof of concept’ for the
ambitions, expectations and dreams of many education reformers and technologists. These are
schools that are intended to provide glimpses of a possible better future, and thereby stimulate wider
change and reform.

Deschooling – using

technology as an alternative to

schooling

While these ideas of reschooling have obvious merit, other academics, educationalists and
technologists have chosen to pursue even more radical agendas of change – what can be loosely
termed a digitally driven ‘deschooling’. From this perspective, digital technology is seen to provide an
alternative to the physical and spatial confines of school, as well as providing an alternative to the
major structures and processes of schooling such as curriculum, assessment and qualifications. These
forms of technology-based deschooling take a variety of guises, yet all rely on what Joseph Todd
describes as ‘the creation of networks, as opposed to institutions, that are temporary, autonomous,
and non-hierarchical, and facilitate a variety of diverse models of learning and community interaction’
(2012, p. 78).

These models reflect the growing interest in the educational opportunities that lie beyond convention
school systems. For example, a number of online platforms and services now exist that seek to use
digital technologies to bypass traditional educational institutions. This approach is evident in platforms
such as the ‘Free World U’, developed as an alternative learning community for home-schooled young
people and offering online ‘accelerated learning’ resources to be shared between communities of
parents and learners. The development of online alternative schooling is an increasingly significant
part of the efforts of conservative and religious groups in the United States to support alternatie forms
of homeschooling outside of state control of the curriculum. As Michael Apple observed at the
beginning of the 2000s, ‘There are scores of websites available that give advice, that provide technical
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and emotional support, that tell the stories of successful home schoolers, and that are more than
willing to sell material at a profit’ (2000, p. 71). Thus, as Dave White (2011) has described it, digital
technology sustains a vast ‘learning black market’ that operates beyond the reaches of the traditional
education system. It is now possible for someone to pass over the offer of studying for a conventional
degree or diploma and, instead, curate his or her own education as he or she sees fit.

The idea of deschooling, therefore, promotes the ‘unbundling’ of education from the confines of a
single educational institution, with individuals free to develop networks of learning as they see
appropriate (thereby echoing the concerns of the connectivist and connected learning approaches
described in Chapter 4). This is seen to be supported by the abundance of education provision that
can be supported through technology, as opposed to the condition of ‘scarcity’ that traditional
educational institutions operate under. For example, a conventional school is only able to teach a finite
number of students and hold a finite number of resources. Instead, as Kevin Carey reasons, ‘We are
now headed into a time of abundance when it comes to educational resources. All the books in the
world are now available on your iPad or your phone or your computer, or will be soon’ (2015, n.p.).

One notable example of such ‘abundance’ is the variety of freely distributed and professionally
produced learning resources that can be found online. For instance, video lectures and other
instructional content are available freely through respected channels such as Khan Academy,
alongside thousands of lesser- known equivalents. Now, it is argued, anyone can provide online
courses without the institutional support of a recognised school or university. Platforms such as
Udemy host thousands of such ‘renegade professors’ (Young 2015). Many of these platforms are
recognised as offering high-quality learning opportunities equivalent to those of the elite providers of
previous eras. For example, TED talks have been described in glowing terms as ‘a new Harvard – the
first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years’ (Kamenetz 2010).

As these examples and arguments illustrate, the idea that technology-based learning could replace the
idea of school altogether is becoming an increasingly serious proposition. Yet, as with all the debates
in this book so far, it is important that we take time to properly consider and challenge these proposals
and assumptions. Suggesting that the concept of formal schooling is abandoned altogether is a
substantial proposal, and not to be taken lightly. It is worthwhile to consider the roots of these
contemporary arguments for the digital ‘deschooling’ of society, in particular their ideological origins.

Clear parallels can be drawn between current calls for a digitally driven deschooling and the work of
the philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich. Illich led debates towards the end of the 1960s as
educationalists began to consider the emergence of what was being described as ‘post-industrial’
society. In his 1971 book Deschooling Society, Illich challenged the structures, myths and rituals that
underpin all of contemporary capitalist society (see Hoinacki 2002), not least institutions such as
schools, colleges and universities. Above all, much of Illich’s work and ideas resonate with – and often
inform – present debates over digital technology and education.

At the heart of Illich’s thesis was the argument that students become over-reliant on educational
institutions and quickly become complicit with a ‘hidden curriculum’ of schooling that is based around
perpetuating the commodified consumer society, structurally increasing inequalities, privileging the
already privileged and discouraging individuals ‘from taking control of their own learning’ (1971, p. 8).
In short, Illich contended that individuals in educational institutions are discouraged from taking
responsibility for their self-development, and also from engaging with other potential opportunities
for learning within their immediate communities. In making these points Illich’s key interest was in
finding alternatives by drawing upon all the opportunities offered by what he termed the
‘technological age’. Yet, Deschooling Society also acknowledged the ways in which technology was
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often implicated in the perpetuation of the ‘tyranny’ of institutionalisation – and therefore could also
be part of the problem rather than the solution. As such, Illich recognised that new forms of technology
were needed to address the many problems of institutionalised schooling.

In this spirit, much of Deschooling Society set out proposals for providing educational opportunities
along what Illich called ‘convivial’ rather than ‘manipulative’ lines, with the moral purpose of education
one of ‘facilitating activity’ rather than ‘organizing production’ (1971, p. 53). These proposals
recognised the value of what we have referred to in Chapter 1 as ‘informal education’, that is, learning
that occurs outside the aegis of a prescribed, compelled curriculum. Following this line of thinking,
Illich proposed that coordinated efforts could be made by the educational community to facilitate and
support forms of ‘casual’ learning, proposing a form of what can be best described as ‘planned
unplanned learning’. These forms of individually led casual learning could be supported, Illich argued,
through the creation of what he termed community-based ‘learning webs’ or ‘opportunity webs’ of
individuals, resources and tools that may be drawn upon to learn. In this sense, education was
conceived as a mutual process, involving all members of a community matching their skills and
interests with each other as appropriate. Illich encapsulated this view in the memorable phrase
‘education for all means education by all’ (1971, p. 22).

Even at the beginning of the 1970s, new technology was seen to play a key role in Illich’s proposals for
the reconstruction of education along convivial and communal lines. Deschooling Society outlined
alternative arrangements where technologies were not merely conduits for the mass consumption of
instruction. Instead, Illich argued for the development of new technologies with new values. He talked,
for example, of individuals being matched with opportunities to learn that best suited their needs
through ‘computer systems’ and ‘computer-arranged meetings’ and peer-matching networks. Of
course, Illich’s imagination was bounded within the technologies of his time. While some of his
examples were decidedly low-tech (such as the connection of rural hamlets with a ‘spider web’ of trails
and communal three- wheeled mechanical donkeys), other examples anticipated contemporary digital
practices. This can be seen, for example, in Illich’s notion of a sophisticated ‘read/write’ network of
tape recorders:

The money now tied up in TV installations throughout Latin America could have provided every fifth
adult with a tape recorder. In addition, the money would have sufficed to provide an almost unlimited
library of pre-recorded tapes, with outlets even in remote villages, as well as an ample supply of empty
tapes. This network of tape recorders, of course, would be radically different from the present network
of TV. It would provide opportunity for free expression: literate and illiterate alike could record,
preserve, disseminate, and repeat their opinions. (1971, p. 77)

Even in these crude terms, Illich’s faith in the notion of placing new technology at the heart of
communities is clear. Technology was, therefore, seen as a ready way to give people the opportunity
to access a range of educational content and ‘educators-at-large’. Indeed, many of Illich’s suggestions
for establishing ‘educational webs’ (1971, p. 77) within communities were remarkably prescient to
recent debates over education and technology. Throughout Deschooling Society, for example, Illich
stressed the value of learning through games or distributed ‘educational artifacts’ throughout
community settings including ‘storefront learning centers’, jukeboxes and museum-based centres.
These are all ideas that continue to be proposed in varied forms over forty years later (McLaren and
Jandrić 2015). Thus, as Juan Suoranta concludes:

Illich’s utopia is turning out to be more of a topical scenario for our so-called information age than
anyone imagined. Illich’s learning web metaphor is in itself interesting. It represents nicely the current

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trend that it is as if all the best minds in education are found in the virtual world of the worldwide web.
(Suoranta and Vadén 2010, p. 19)

Conclusions

Clearly, digital technologies offer a ready basis from which to develop alternatives to established ideas
of schools and schooling. All the examples just outlined will continue to grow in number and
sophistication. Yet, it would be foolhardy to imagine the imminent demise of the school. Indeed,
despite the alternative agendas of ‘Steve Jobs Schools’ or a ‘learning black market’, school systems the
world over continue to be based around the ‘cookie-cutter’ model of the two-semesters-per-year,
highly structured and regulated institutions. At best, such alternate models might develop to the point
of supporting a ‘mixed economy’ of school provision over the next few decades, where digital
technologies offer alternative choices to traditional schooling. Yet, the future of the traditional form
of school would seem to be safe for a few years yet.

In many ways, all of the discussions and arguments covered in this chapter reflect the complex and
contested nature of questions over education provision and education reform. Doubts over the
continuation of schools and schooling have been raised for many decades, and will undoubtedly
remain for many more decades. As this chapter has illustrated, such debates are often ideological in
nature and driven by wider arguments over ideal educational and societal arrangements. As such,
ideas of deschooling tend to appeal as much to free marketeers as they do to anarchists. As Levinson
and Sadovnik observe, debates over school reform ‘are a Pandora’s box for visualizing a number of
conundrums currently facing liberal democratic societies’ (2002, p. 2).

In particular, while the idea of a digitally driven reform of schools might be justified on the technical
grounds of increasing the efficiency, economy and/or conviviality of education, there are a number of
other arguments for not radically altering schools and schooling. While it is easy to denounce the many
frustrations of the ‘industrial-era’ school, we should be wary of allowing technological concerns to
outweigh other social, cultural and political concerns. Of course, schools as they stand are clearly not
perfect. Indeed, large numbers of students (and teachers) can experience schools as generally
unpleasant and uncomfortable places. As Beatriz Preciado reasoned, few people are likely to ‘cry over
the end of ... the patriarchal-colonial-heteronormative school’ (cited in Zamora 2014, n.p.). Yet, it
could be argued that the core ideals and ideas of ‘school’ are clearly not completely ‘broken’ or defunct
in the ways that some technologists would like to presume.

As such, it could be argued that the promise of digital technologies should not be allowed to
overshadow the basic social goods that should be derived from established forms of schooling. For
example, it could be argued that, for all their faults, current forms of mass schooling play a significant
role in the improvement of life chances for all children and young people. Take, for instance, the
democratic role that public schools could be said to play in society. As Larry Cuban reasons, ‘Schools
have custodial and socialization functions (e.g. becoming productive citizens, abiding by community
norms, thinking critically etc.) that are crucial to a democratic society’ (2015, p. 431). Similarly, as
Michael Young has argued, academic commentators should remain mindful that schools fulfil a
societal purpose as a valuable source of high-status ‘powerful knowledge’ and social mobility that
many children and young people could not acquire easily at home or in the community (Young and
Muller 2009).

That said, we should not ignore altogether the concerns and criticisms raised throughout this chapter.
Many of the issues raised in this chapter point towards the need for some degree of change in order
for schools and other educational institutions to make the most of digital technology. It could well be
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that these changes can be achieved through relatively modest ‘readjustments’ to technological
practices that do not disrupt existing institutional structures and boundaries. Thus, we should be wary
of giving up on the entire notion of the industrial-era school or university as it currently exists. Instead,
it may be more productive – and certainly more practical – to set about addressing the ‘problem’ of
formal education and technology in less ‘disruptive’ ways than radically altering educational
institutions, or even disposing of them altogether. In this sense, we need to think carefully about the
future shape and form of education provision in terms of individual and collective concerns. These
issues are now addressed in the next chapter.

Further questions to consider

• What immediate changes could (or should) be made to existing forms of school curriculum and
assessment to help realise the potential of digital technology? Think in particular about the nature of
digital information and knowledge. What implications would these changes have for what is learnt in
schools and how this learning is assessed?

• Are we heading towards a digital deschooling of society? If so, how can learning be provided to all
individuals regardless of circumstance? Are twentieth-century ideas of deschooling simply too
idealistic to come to fruition in the twenty-first century?

• Might schools have future value as places where young people do not have to communicate, interact
and work through digital technology ... as places where young people can switch off, slow down and
properly engage in face-to- face, social activities?

Please go to http://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/education-and- technology-second-edition/ to

download and listen to discussion around these further questions.

Further reading

This book offers an in-depth portrayal of technology use in a contemporary urban school:
Livingstone, S. and Sefton-Green, J. (2016). The Class: Connections and

Disconnections in the Digital Age. New York, New York University Press.

This book offers an argument for the decreased significance of formal schooling in twenty-first-
century society:
Collins, A. and Halverson, R. (2009). Rethinking Education in the Age of

Technology. New York, Teachers College Press. 202

Following our discussion of reschooling, this book considers how the structures and processes of
contemporary schooling could change:
Zhao, Y., Zhang, G., Lei, J. and Qiu, W. (2015). Never Send a Human to Do a

Machine’s Job: Correcting the Top 5 EdTech Mistakes. Thousand Oaks CA, Corwin Press.

These two articles provide a thorough overview of the nature of school organisation and culture.
Although written over twenty years ago, both articles develop powerful analyses of why schools
appear to ‘resist’ technological change:
Hodas, S. (1996). ‘Technology refusal and the organizational culture of

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schools.’ In Kling, R. (ed.), Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts

and Social Choices. San Diego, Academic Press.

Tyack, D. and Tobin, W. (1995). ‘The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been

so hard to change?’ American Educational Research Journal, 31(3): 453–79.

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7 Technology and the Individualisation of Education

Chapter Outline
Introduction
Different forms of technology and individualised education The wider provenance of technology-led
individualisation of education
The limitations of individualised learning
Conclusions

Introduction

As previous chapters have discussed, digital technology is associated with making education more
individually driven and ‘learner centred’. Certainly, the educational potential of digital technology is
often seen to be limited by the depersonalised nature of institutionalised education provision. As
Marshall McLuhan contended fifty years ago, the potential for individuals to use technology to learn
for themselves might far exceed what is possible within the institutional confines of a school:

The electronic environment makes an information level outside the schoolroom that is far higher than
the information level inside the schoolroom. In the nineteenth century the knowledge inside the
schoolroom was higher than knowledge outside the schoolroom. Today it is reversed. The child knows
that in going to school he is in a sense interrupting his education. (McLuhan 1967, cited in Cremin
1990)

Contemporary commentators continue to believe that learning takes place most successfully when
individuals are able to use technology to participate on a flexible and autonomous basis. In this spirit,
digital technologies continue to be developed in ways intended to support ‘individualised’ and
‘personalised’ forms of education. Many observers now see digital technologies as leading to a distinct
era of flexible education participation based around individuals’ specific needs and interests. As Yong
Zhao and colleagues reason:

Technology has made it both a necessity and a possibility to realize some of the long-standing
proposals for child-centered education and learning by doing. Personalized education that grants
students autonomy and respects their uniqueness has become a necessity for cultivating the abilities
required for living in a society when machines are rapidly taking jobs away from humans. Technology
has made it possible to enable personalized learning and to have students take more control of their
own learning. (Zhao et al. 2015, n.p.)

This chapter examines such thinking (and its application), as well as the implications that individualised
use of technology has for established notions of education that are built around collective aims and
concerns. Before considering some key debates around digital technology and individualisation, it is
important to acknowledge their historical provenance. For example, much of what is currently being
argued with regard to technology corresponds closely with John Dewey’s work in developing ideas of
‘progressive education’ over a hundred years previously. Pre- empting the arguments of many
present-day educational technologists, Dewey advocated an individually centred approach ‘where
students learned by experimentation, using their imaginations to develop individualized solutions to
problems and learning in a social environment’ (Ferster 2014, p. 53). Around the same time as Dewey’s
writing, the Montessori Method also promoted the benefits of learning through self-directed activity
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and personal initiative. Support for individualised forms of education provision continued throughout
the first half of the twentieth century in the guise of ‘programmed instruction’ and ‘mastery learning’
(Benjamin Bloom’s philosophy of self-paced learning where individuals do not progress to subsequent
parts of an education programme until they have thoroughly understood previous instruction). Such
principles maintained their popularity during the 1950s and 1960s through Fred Keller’s ‘Personalized
System of Instruction’. As Grant and Spencer (2003, n.p.) describe, this advocated allowing ‘students
to adapt their course work to other activities in their lives, rather than the reverse ... students take an
active role in managing their own learning and scheduling their own assignments, providing them with
the opportunity to function as independent learners’. As such examples suggest, recent claims for the
individualisation of education engagement through digital technologies are by no means
unprecedented.

It is also important to recognise the support that persists outside of educational technology circles for
individual autonomy and self- management of learning. For example, ‘differentiated learning’ and
‘self-regulated learning’ have become popular pedagogic approaches in schools that are tasked with
accommodating the diverse needs and capabilities of students (Tomlinson 2014; Prain et al. 2013).
Similarly, adult and community educators often acknowledge the importance of ‘learning journeys’,
‘learning careers’ and ‘learning pathways’, thereby highlighting the highly personal ways in which
individuals engage with the educational opportunities in their lives. Such descriptions reflect a growing
interest among educators to look beyond ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches associated with mass
education provision. Now, it is received wisdom in most areas of education that access needs to be
provided to educational opportunities that are tailored around personal needs and preferences.
Crucially, as the remainder of this chapter will discuss, digital technologies are seen as a ready means
of achieving such aims.

Different forms of technology and individualised education

This chapter will first consider briefly the different ways in which technology is used to support
individualisation across education contexts and modes of engagement.

i) Individualised classroom learning

While individualisation is often presented as an alternative to schools, colleges and universities, there
has been considerable interest in developing digital technologies that support individualised learning
within institutional settings. In particular, a range of classroom technologies have been designed and
developed over the last forty years with a deliberate ‘learner- centred’ and ‘learner-driven’ ethos. In
essence, the notion of a student being allowed to use and control a digital device within a classroom
context implies a commitment to increased individualised control over what takes place. This can be
seen in many of the technologies covered in previous chapters – from the Logo programming language
to the development of educational games and simulations.

Such principles are certainly apparent in recent technology designs that aim to support the
‘personalisation’ of students’ engagement with education. As Gamrat et al. (2014) describe, efforts to
support personalisation of learning through technology tend to focus either on issues of decision
making or on those of customisation of content. In the first sense, various technologies have been
developed to offer students more choice in deciding how and what they learn in the classroom. As a
result, there is growing interest in students being able to use technology to construct ‘tailored learning
journeys’ and educational activities that are ‘just enough, just-in-time, just-for-me’ (Peters 2007). This
is a key element, for example, of Sugata Mitra’s work around ‘self- organized learning environments’,

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where students are encouraged to use information and communication technologies to support open-
ended enquiry-based learning (Mitra 2012).

Whereas these technologies are built around the idea that students are best placed to make decisions
about subject matter, learning goals and modes of delivery, other recent developments have explored
the possibility that these decisions might be best made by the technology itself. For example, analytic
platforms and applications have been developed to adapt different individuals’ engagement with
learning content according to their specific needs, capabilities and past performance. This includes
‘adaptive learning systems’ that draw upon the artificial intelligence and machine learning principles
outlined in Chapter 3. By monitoring a student’s online interactions with online education content,
data is generated and processed that allows the system to best select subsequent activities that either
build upon successful learning or address any shortfalls. In this way, the technology identifies and
facilitates individually tailored ‘adaptive learning paths’ for each student. This represents an
application of ‘learning analytics’ where digital data collection and processing is used for ‘predicting
student learning success and providing proactive feedback’ (Gašević, Dawson and Siemens 2015, p.
65). The basic premise of such systems and applications is that all students will eventually achieve
similar educational outcomes. Yet, unlike traditional classroom environments, the content and
activities that each student will have engaged in in reaching this endpoint will differ considerably.

ii) Individualised online learning

While these previous examples are predominantly school- focused, enthusiasms for technology-based
individualised learning also abound in post-compulsory education. In particular, online courses and
other forms of e-learning are seen to enhance the capacity of individuals to take responsibility for
curating and managing their own educational engagement. In this sense, digital technology enables
individuals to play active roles in determining the nature, place, pace and timing of their learning.

Mike Keppell (2014) describes such forms of technology-based personalisation as allowing individuals
to ‘take charge’ of their learning. Keppell argues that post-compulsory education is most meaningful
and engaging for adults when it offers ‘seamless learning’ opportunities that satisfy each individual’s
personal ‘desire paths’. He also points to the need to use digital technologies to support ‘life-long
learning’ and ‘life-wide learning’. As outlined in Chapter 1, life-long learning relates to the different
forms and modes of learning that individuals find themselves engaging in during different stages of
their life (ranging from workplace training requirements through to hobby-related learning). Second,
life-wide learning relates to how an individual’s interests and requirements will be situated across a
number of contexts at any time, such as employment, formal education, community and family. Digital
technologies are a ready means of providing access to education that is appropriate for individuals’
specific life-stages, life-styles and life-circumstances.

These principles have begun to be adopted throughout post- compulsory education. For example,
some universities now release the complete content of courses online from the first day of the
semester. This is seen to offer students increased choice over how they consume and engage with
teaching and learning opportunities. This has prompted talk of ‘binge learning’ along similar lines to
the continuous viewing of entire on-demand television series or DVD box sets (Deakin 2015). The logic
here is that while some individuals might opt to ‘binge’ immediately on the complete content of a
course, some might prefer to adhere to a weekly schedule, while others might postpone engaging until
near the deadline. Crucially, the position of having access to all content at all times places decisions of
scheduling, timing and mode of engagement under the control of each individual student rather than
the institution. Alongside advantages of convenience and choice, such techniques are also seen to
make learning more personally engaging and challenging. Sebastian Thrun (one of the founders of the
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Udacity online education provider) reasons that individually directed online learning ‘exposes the
students’ by putting them in a controlling role, akin to playing a video game. As Thrun concludes, ‘We
take the focus away from the professor and put the focus back on the student’ (cited in Bromwich
2014, n.p.).

Similar principles informed the design of the ‘Massive Open Online Courses’ (MOOCs) that emerged
during the first half of the 2010s. In essence, MOOCs were (and continue to be) university- affiliated
courses offered to masses of online learners for little or no cost. While many MOOCs followed a set
schedule of topics, participants were often free to engage with content and materials (usually video
lectures, online quizzes and discussion forums) as they pleased. As such, the experience of taking a
MOOC was expected to differ considerably from individual to individual.

Studies of MOOC student behaviours have found some individuals to engage in sporadic and
superficial ways, while others chose to self-organise additional face-to-face and online learning
activities to supplement the official content (Knox 2014).

The idea of individually directed consumption is also an established feature of distance education.
Indeed, distance education has a long and rich history of using technology to support different forms
of ‘lone’ study. This ranges from the growth of print-based ‘correspondence’ courses at the beginning
of the twentieth century to later forms of ‘multimedia’ teaching through audio and video tapes as well
as broadcast television programmes (Nipper 1989). Current forms of distance education tend to
involve blends of digital and analog methods. While ‘old technologies’ of paper-based printed
materials retain a central role in the delivery of many courses (Guri-Rosenblit 2005), distance
education provision also makes varied use of social media, content management systems, digital video
and computer- mediated communication. Now it is expected that an individual distance learner is
positioned at the centre of a network of online and offline educational opportunities that he or she
can engage with as and when he or she chooses.

iii) Online aggregation and curation

of learning

While online courses and adaptive learning systems involve the overseeing presence of a formal
provider (e.g. a school, university or company), other forms of online education are more devolved
and disaggregated. All the examples outlined so far in this chapter relate to how technology can
support the interactions of many individuals with the same education provider. In contrast are efforts
to use technology to support the same individual’s interactions with many education providers. In
other words, technology is used to ‘aggregate’ disparate instances of education achievement over
time. A key concept here is the ability of individuals to use technology as a means of ‘curating’ their
learning – that is, researching and selecting new educational opportunities that build upon their
previous engagement. In all these ways, then, the individual is given responsibility for what Terras and
Ramsey term as ‘sense making, way finding, and managing uncertainty’ (2015).

One instance of this self-management approach is ‘digital badges’. The aim of digital badges is to bring
an element of visibility and standardisation to online education experiences. Following the logic of
‘badging’ in Boy Scout troops, these are digital rewards awarded by specific websites or groups to
signify specific online learning achievements – such as completing a course, reaching a certain level of
experience or gaining specific skills. As such, a digital badge is ‘a symbol of personal achievement that’s
acknowledged by others’ (Watters 2011, n.p.). This external validation is seen to give badges
transferable value, with each badge capable of containing metadata describing the nature and quality
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of the learning. In this way, a collection of digital badges can detail learning-specific information to
third parties (such as prospective employers) in ways that conventional qualifications might not
(Gamrat et al. 2014). A distinctive feature of digital badges is that they are free to be issued by any
organisation, group or individual:

The idea that badges are ‘open’ is the fundamental principle on which the system is built. The
infrastructure is open (anyone can become an issuer) and the technology is open (open source). Users
control their own data and the system permits individuals to create their own badges which an issuer
can endorse. (Glover and Malone 2015, p. 4)

Digital badges are part of a wider trend of using technology to establish alternate credentialling of
informal education through the awarding of ‘micro-credentials’ and ‘nano-degrees’ that offer
recognition and credit for diverse and otherwise undocumented online learning activities. Relating
back to some of the visions of technology-driven education change outlined in Chapter 2, such uses of
technology are seen as ‘disrupt[ing] higher education’s traditional, formal educational processes for
financial and educational accountability’ (Lemoine and Richardson 2015, p. 36). Indeed, digital badges
have begun to be used by some notable online education providers. For example, Khan Academy uses
a system of digital badges to recognise successful completion of its content, alongside some MOOC
platforms and even a few traditional education providers (such as University of California Davis).

Another interesting example of technology-based aggregation of informal learning is the idea of

‘personalised learning environments’ (PLEs). This describes the diversity of tools, resources and people
that every individual draws upon when learning online. Indeed, most people utilise assorted ways of
obtaining information, interacting with others, creating their own content and publishing their work.
One might interact primarily on Twitter, publish short videos on YouTube, write a blog or organise links
on a particular social bookmarking site, while also regularly using a number of other niche tools and
services. The idea of a PLE is as a means of allowing individuals to bring together and organise the
various online tools, services and resources that they use in the course of their learning.

Often taking the form of a web space or ‘node’ where online learning activities and materials can be
aggregated, PLEs allow individuals to develop and reflect on their learning and connect with other like-
minded individuals. In this sense, PLEs were conceived as a means of helping individuals develop a
better overview of their online learning, and to take responsibility for organising educational activities
in more connected and collaborative ways. In other words, PLEs place each individual learner in the
‘orchestrator’ and ‘designer’ roles that were outlined towards the end of Chapter 6. As Rahimi, van
den Berg and Veen (2014, p. 790) reason, PLEs ‘put the students in a higher level of learning, socializing
and decision making in the educational process by acknowledging and corroborating their role as
active learners, contributors and designers’. Crucially, then, a defining characteristic of technologies
such as PLEs and digital badges is that they are not institutionally bound or institutionally controlled.
As Stephen Downes describes the philosophy of the personalised learning environment:

It becomes, not an institutional or corporate application, but a personal learning center, where
content is reused and remixed according to the student’s own needs and interests. It becomes, indeed,
not a single application, but a collection of interoperating applications – an environment rather than
a system. (cited in Coyne et al. 2008, p. 248)

Such principles are also evident in the use of digital technology to engage in completely ‘DIY’ forms of
education. In this sense, the internet is seen to provide a means of freely accessing high- quality
educational opportunities beyond formal educational institutions, systems and structures. For
example, platforms such as TED, iTunesU and YouTube.Edu are all heralded as supporting rich and
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varied opportunities for self-directed and interest-led learning. Elsewhere, online forums from Twitter
to Reddit are seen to offer opportunities for informal exchange of expertise, knowledge and folk-
wisdom between communities of like-minded individuals. Specialised online resources and platforms
are recognised as increasingly appropriate sources of skills and knowledge development, particularly
in areas such as computer programming, software development, design and digital arts. The continued
growth of such resources has prompted calls for individuals to now look beyond the time and expense
of traditional collegiate pathways and, instead, ‘hack your education’ – that is, to collate and curate
learning experiences and education engagement from a variety of freely available online (and offline)
sources. As Dale Stephens (2013, p. 9) from the ‘UnCollege’ organisation argues, ‘If you want to learn
the skills required to navigate the world – the hustle, networking and creativity – you’re going to have
to hack your own education.’

The wider provenance of

technology-led

individualisation of education

While clearly challenging traditional models of education provision, such forms of individualised
learning are attracting increasing interest and support. Many of the online modes of education just
outlined have been heralded as instances of the ‘disruptive innovation’ discussed in Chapter 2. This
has led to impassioned talk of the impending democratisation of education, with flexible forms of
online education set to ‘upend a cornerstone of the American meritocracy, fundamentally altering the
way our society creates knowledge and economic opportunity’ (Carey 2015, n.p.). It is argued, for
example, that dominant cultural expectations of ‘the student’ are moving steadily away from receiving
collective instruction in a passive manner towards being able to individually (re)construct the place,
pace, timing and nature of any engagement with learning. As such, digital technologies are frequently
described as reconfiguring contemporary forms of education as performative event[s] in the hands of
the student, thereby repositioning the student in relation to institutional networks. To this extent, the
[individual] student is anything but marginal; as both the operator that enacts the class and the target
that receives course content, the student occupies a metaphorical and experiential center for the
performance of the course. (Nunes 2006, p. 131)

Such claims might seem a little far-fetched when contrasted with the day-to-day realities of school
and university systems that continue to define most people’s educational experiences. Yet, these ideas
and expectations are now given increasing credence, especially outside of the education
establishment. In particular, many commentators see the technology-led individualisation of
education as reflecting general trends in the way digital technologies are being used throughout
society. As such, it is presumed by employers, industrialists, policymakers and the general public that
such (re)arrangements of education are necessary in light of the technology-driven change elsewhere
in society. In other words, the forms of digital education described so far in this chapter could be seen
as instances of the broader logics of digital technology and digital society coming to bear on education.

Indeed, there are many precedents for the individualisation of education through digital technologies.
For example, the idea that digital devices and applications should be based around the needs and
interests of the individual user has long been at the heart of technology design. From the development
of the early ‘personal computer’ to the ‘personal digital assistant’, the design of digital technologies
has long emphasised producing artefacts that fit flexibly around the lives and requirements of
individual users. As Alan Kay (one of the originators of the personal computer) put it, much of the
formative technology development of the 1970s was focused on the development of ‘personal
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dynamic computing’ through machines ‘designed in a way that any owner could mold and channel its
power to his own needs’ (Kay and Goldberg 1977, p. 31).

These principles are certainly evident in the ongoing development of the internet. From the
establishment of ARPANET in 1969, the internet was envisaged along permissive and ‘free’ lines. Early
incarnations of the internet allowed individual users to send content anywhere across its networks,
while also providing a freedom of association based on mutual respect and collective endeavour.
Integral to the later design and development of the worldwide web were principles of decentralisation,
openness and a belief in ‘let[ting] users choose’ (Berners-Lee 2014, n.p.). While ambitious and
idealistic, such principles persist in the design of recent social media applications. One of the main
attractions of social media is the widely held belief that such applications and platforms are somehow
able to ‘liberate’ the individual user from organisational structure and hierarchy, boosting individual
freedoms and reducing centralised controls over what can (and what cannot) be done.

Many of the education technologies detailed in this chapter also reflect recent trends throughout
society towards harnessing data generation and processing of digital data for individual benefit. For
example, it is expected that expanded access to digital data will allow individuals to operate more
efficiently, effectively and equitably. This has led to claims that increased data access can democratise
decision-making processes, make institutions more ‘transparent’ and render elites more ‘accountable’
for their actions. Specific benefits are seen to stem from the connections that individuals are able to
make between previously disparate and disconnected sources of information. Many of these
perceived advantages reflect an underlying belief that digital data renders social processes and social
relations more knowable and, it follows, more controllable. These ideas are manifest, for example, in
the growing popularity of the ‘quantified self’ movement, based around the development of digital
technologies for individual self- tracking and recording personal data to inform future behaviours in
areas such as health, fitness, sleep and nutrition. In this way, the idea of using personal data as a means
of individual self- improvement has become commonplace and widely welcomed, that is, using ‘data
as a way to help inform our own life choices through providing us with a means of collecting
information about ourselves over time, and sharing and comparing this data with others if we wish to
do so’ (Eynon 2015, p. 407).

The forms of digital education detailed in this chapter also chime with the changing perceptions of
technology-based socialisation, participation and interaction. PLEs, MOOCs and digital badges all
reflect the ‘networked’ nature of digital technologies that many commentators now see shaping the
way people conduct themselves online. For example, Barry Wellman and colleagues have spent the
past fifteen years or so researching the notion of ‘networked individualism’ as an explanation for such
shifts in thinking and behaviour. With digital technologies, Wellman argues, individuals are less likely
to remain ‘embedded’ in face-to-face groups that are small, tightly connected and relatively
unchanging (such as families, households, work teams or classes). Instead, individuals are more likely
to interact, communicate and work with loosely bounded, broader networks of digitally connected
individuals. As Rainie and Wellman put it, ‘In the world of networked individuals, it is the person who
is the focus: more than the family, the work unit, the neighborhood, and the social group’ (2012, n.p.).
Crucially, these arrangements are described as an ‘operating system’ where ‘the individual is at the
autonomous center just as she is reaching out from her computer’ (Rainie and Wellman 2012, n.p.).

Finally, it is also important to acknowledge how moves towards individualised education also reflect
wider shifts in popular and political assumptions of the heightened primacy of the individual.
Specifically, the past forty years have seen increased support in most countries for individually directed
rather than institutionally dictated forms of social organisation. Such shifts in thinking have occurred
across the political spectrum. For example, ideals of self- sufficiency and the ability of individuals to
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make and provide for themselves have been central to environmental and social sustainability
movements. Conversely, the idea of individuals being able to choose for themselves within a free
market context is a central tenet of neoliberalism, seen by many as the dominant ideology throughout
much of the world. In this sense, individuals are expected to act ‘entrepreneurially’, unconstrained by
state intervention or interference from monopoly interests. Despite ideological differences, many of
the leading political, cultural and social movements of recent times have privileged the individual as
the main component of how society should be arranged:

Since the early 1970s [a] spotlight has been shined on individuals. ... Our society today is founded on
a new form of production that originates from individuals, from their own expression, from their own
presentation, from their own performance and self promotion. A production through affect, and
behavior, and comportment. We are all makers of our own presence in the world. (Galloway 2015,
n.p.)

These values and ideas are particularly evident in the activities of ‘Silicon Valley’ technology companies
such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and others. The culture of these companies’ activities is
clearly influenced by the so-called hacker ethic, which privileges creativity and ingenuity of sole
programmers acting in opposition to authoritarian institutions. In addition, the approach of many US
technology companies is bolstered by an implicit sense of ‘American individualism’ – that is, ‘the belief
that “the good society” is one in which individuals are left free to pursue their private satisfactions
independently of others, a pattern of thinking that emphasizes individual achievement and self-
fulfillment’ (Andre and Velasquez 1992, n.p.). All told, the development of many of the digital
technologies outlined in this book has understandably been driven by a belief in the values of personal
freedoms and individualisation of action.

The limitations of individualised learning

Against these broader issues and agendas, the increased individualisation of education through digital
technologies is perhaps to be expected. After all, these are trends to be found across many different
parts of society. However, this is not to say that these assumptions about the individually centred
reorganisation of education are above being challenged or criticised. In fact, it could be argued that
the increased individualisation of education is one of the most significant – and problematic – changes
in the whole field of education and technology. Certainly the logics of what has been described so far
in this chapter imply a substantial reorientation of how education is arranged and provided. Therefore,
these new forms of educational technology demand our attention and scrutiny. While ‘adaptive
learning systems’ and ‘hack your education’ might make intuitive sense, there are certainly a number
of reasons to be cautious, if not hostile, towards such ideas.

i) Recognising the institutional agendas of ‘individualisation’

First, it could be argued that much of what is described as ‘individualised’ and ‘personalised’ is not
concerned with refocusing education provision around the different needs of individual learners per
se. Indeed, some critics dismiss the idea of technology-driven personalisation, flexibility and
individualisation as little more than a ‘window dressing’ for the interests of larger institutions and
organisations (Nicoll 2006). As Stephanie Schulte observes, interest in digital personalisation often
stems from institutions seeking to increase engagement with their services and products, rather than
necessarily ensuring the development of genuinely diverse and bespoke individual practices:

The presumption of increased agency with personalization often neglects the ways in which
personalized practices and ideologies are nonetheless vulnerable to institutional uses (i.e.
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governmental and corporate). These institutions, in turn, promote an ideology of personalization
entirely compatible with the economic and cultural values of late-capitalism. (2016, n.p.)

In these terms, a number of powerful arguments have been advanced against the increased
expectations of ‘flexible’ educational engagement. Rather than working in the interests of individual
students per se, many attempts to use technology to support flexible education, it is argued, are driven
primarily by concerns of efficiency and/or profit. As Harrison et al. (2003, p. 94) conclude:

Here flexibility stands for more ‘business-like’ ways of working, including rationalization of provision,
enhanced institutional responsiveness to the market and short term contracts of employment ... to
provide more flexible forms of learning to service the requirements of the economy.

This is certainly reflected in the (lack of) diversity of educational opportunities that tend to be provided
through digital technologies.

In many cases, digital provision has resulted in offering ‘more of the same’ types of education, rather
than necessarily supporting a genuine diversity of varied opportunities. The provision of more esoteric
(but less popular and profitable) forms of education remains rare, even in light of the opportunities
available through user-generated, grass-roots informal learning. The internet may be supporting a
greater volume of educational opportunities, but these are often homogenous and interchangeable
with each other. As Rudy Hirschheim (2005, p. 101) describes it, digital technologies could be said to
be leading simply to ‘a more standardized, minimalist product targeted for a mass market, [that] will
further “box in” and “dumb down” education’.

Similarly, many of the personalised systems and applications described earlier in the chapter are
perhaps characterised most accurately as supporting processes of mass customisation. These are
technologies focused on varying individuals’ engagement with what is essentially the same service or
product, with the aim of achieving the same (or similar) outcomes. Whereas the idea of
individualisation implies a notion of unlimited free choice, customisation suggests that users can
choose from a large (but still finite) number of options. Thus, any ‘individualisation’ or ‘personalisation’
involves fitting individuals around preconfigured outcomes and expectations rather than offering
genuinely bespoke education. In other words, an individual ‘participant’ is not actively self-
determining but conforming to the requirements and expectations of a mass system. It could be
argued that many of the forms of personalised and adaptive education outlined in this chapter are
based around ‘ideal’ types of learner and ‘optimum’ forms of learning, ‘which may not adequately
account for, or properly reflect, [each] individual’s strengths’ (Eynon 2015, p. 408).

ii) Recognising the difficulties of

self-directed online learning

While rarely acknowledged in talk of ‘self-organised learning’ and ‘personalised environments’, the
process of individuals taking control of their own online learning requires specific aptitudes and
abilities that differ from participating in traditional forms of education. Of course, online learning
involves a familiar set of skills that could be termed as ‘digital literacy’, such as the ability to ‘evaluate’
information and then synthesise and integrate it into one’s thinking (Pangrazio 2016). In addition,
there is, however, what Terras and Ramsey describe as ‘participatory literacy’, that is, ‘the
collaborative and production-based skills that are required across a range of digital media that draws
upon key abilities such as creativity, reasoning, focus, critical thinking and analysis’ (2015, p. 476).

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The ability of individuals to sustain engagement with self-directed online education over time is
another key factor. This is clearly dependent upon an individual’s level of ability and interest in the
learning content, alongside the quality and quantity of support that is available. In terms of ability,
Terras and Ramsey highlight the importance of ‘metacognition’ – in other words, the ability to reflect
on how one thinks and learns. In this sense, another key element of self-directed individualised
education is an individual’s capacity for self-regulation:

The burden of regulating learning is carried by the student rather than the teacher. Learners must take
increased responsibility for engagement, study, learning and reflection and, as outlined previously,
must possess the necessary skills to do so. (Terras and Ramsey 2015, p. 478)

Another crucial factor in this respect is an individual’s awareness of time. This includes awareness of
the a-synchronous nature of online learning, how the meaning of online content can change over time,
and the need to self-monitor and plan for the future. Terras and Ramsey, therefore, point to the
importance of individuals being able to deal with the ‘distributed nature’ of online learning over time.

These observations draw attention to the risk that some individuals may not possess the skills and
aptitudes required to engage successfully with these forms of technology-based education. As Mike
Keppell puts it, ‘We can’t assume learners have the knowledge, skills and attitudes to be able to
identify and effectively utilize appropriate learning spaces’ (2014, p. 4). Conversely, assumptions of
the benefits of individually driven learning are also compromised by the fact that online education
providers often pay little attention to issues of online pedagogy and the specific psychological
demands of online learning. As Terras and Ramsey argue, online courses could be accused of
facilitating learning more by accident than by design – what they describe as ‘a black box approach to
e-learning’ (2015, p. 481).

iii) Recognising the social and

emotional limitations of online education

Another set of caveats relates back to the question of ‘what is being lost’ with new forms of
technology-based education. In this sense, it is worth considering what ‘human’ aspects of education
are being marginalised in moves towards individually driven and individualised learning. One possible
limitation is the diminished social and emotional benefits that can derive from learning with other
people in the same space, place and time – what is sometimes referred to as ‘co-presence’. For
example, it was noted in Chapters 1 and 4 that much ‘informal’ learning in the workplace continues to
occur through a process of ‘learning on the job’. This is sometimes referred to as ‘sitting with Nellie’ –
that is, learning from sitting next to more experienced colleagues while they do their job. The
continued prevalence of this type of learning points to some of the limitations of online education.

In theory, the internet offers access to a vast collection of videos of people demonstrating their
expertise to others on topics ranging from plumbing a sink to changing a carburettor. Now, any
individual can learn how to plumb a bathroom or strip a car engine by watching online videos of expert
demonstrations, and perhaps then discussing what he or she has seen with other viewers. Yet, despite
the conveniences of ‘hacking’ one’s learning in this manner, many people still prefer to develop such
skills in the physical company of (more expert) others. In part, this relates to the benefits discussed
towards the end of Chapter 6 of learning in the presence of an expert. Such benefits range from
personalised feedback and ‘nudges’, through to the reassurance that a more capable other can step
in if something goes wrong. These are all qualities that are not easily transferred over into online
contexts.
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Another key issue to consider is the possible moral diminishment of education as a social, supportive
and shared endeavour. It could be argued that the ideal of the completely autonomous and wholly
self-sufficient individual ignores the realities of social life and social practice. As Marc Augé reasons,
whatever any individual does ‘always has a social dimension: it depends on others. ... It is sometimes
said that an individual ‘constructs’ his future, but others participate in that enterprise which is
primarily a manifestation of social life’ (2014, p. 2). This raises considerations of how education might
perhaps be most successful when it takes place as a shared, collective, mutual and reciprocal
endeavour. It could be argued that education is not a wholly individualistic pursuit, based on
competition and rivalry and what is best for oneself. Instead, there is something to be said for learning
in ways that are not the most comfortable, familiar and convenient for oneself. Perhaps there is
something to be said for learning with other people who might not be to one’s choosing or tastes.
Learning is not something that is easy and/or solely about oneself. In this sense, as Augé concludes,
‘An absolutely solitary individual is unimaginable’ (2014, p. 2).

iv) Recognising the inequalities of

individualised learning

Alongside these concerns are key questions of the fairness and equity of arranging education along
individualised lines. Despite prevailing claims of democratisation and empowerment, it seems that
many forms of technology-based education are not of equal benefit to all people. For example, the
optimistic claims surrounding the rise of MOOCs at the beginning of the 2010s contrasted with the
rather uneven outcomes that tended to result. Generally, these courses are found to be of most
benefit to well- resourced individuals who already have successfully engaged in higher education, and
are therefore well equipped to progress through university-level learning (Hansen and Reich 2015). As
Hood, Littlejohn and Milligan (2015, p. 83) suggest, graduate participants are best able to ‘self-regulate’
the required ‘self- directed, non-linear nature of learning engagement in MOOCs, which requires
individuals to determine and structure their learning largely independently’.

The patterns of participation often associated with such forms of digital education suggest a tendency
for digital education to replicate what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Matthew Effect’ – that is, doing
most for those who are already educationally engaged and advantaged. In other words, while digital
technologies might increase opportunities for individuals who are well resourced, motivated and
already educated, such benefits tend to be experienced unevenly across the general population. This,
in part, highlights the different understandings and expectations that underpin claims of ‘flexibility’,
‘democracy’ and ‘empowerment’ in many discussions of education and technology. As Larry Cuban
observes:

Keep in mind that using the word ‘democracy’ can mean different things to different people: an
individualistic-driven version, a communitarian one and a deliberative form. Such definitions matter
and need to be made explicit. (2015, p. 432)

Broadly speaking, claims surrounding the capacity of digital technology to make education fairer for
individuals relate to two differing understandings of ‘fairness’. On one hand, technology can be
celebrated as a ready means of addressing inequalities of educational opportunity. Put simply, the idea
of ‘equality of opportunity’ refers to the choices and chances that individuals have in life. This approach
to equality is based on the belief that every individual should have an equal chance to access resources
and opportunities. In this sense, digital technology is seen as an ideal means of providing individuals
with the freedom to choose from a diversity of educational opportunities. This emphasis on choice
and diversity is linked to the notion of ‘meritocracy’. In a meritocratic society, all individuals should
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have an equal right to compete against one another to succeed, regardless of prior circumstance and
background – as Sheldon Richmond (1974) put it, to have an ‘equal chance to become unequal’.

A more radical approach is the use of digital technology to address inequalities of educational outcome.
The idea of ‘equality of outcome’ refers to the conditions and circumstances that individuals face, with
it being seen as fundamentally unfair that large differences in circumstances exist between individuals
or groups in a society. This approach to equality is linked to what is often referred to as ‘social justice’
– that is, the concept of creating a society with greater degrees of egalitarianism in terms of what
people actually have. In this sense, digital technology can be seen as a ready means of supporting
progressive interventions that attempt to redistribute resources, power and prestige, and thereby
seek to achieve equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. This use of technology attempts to
move beyond the meritocratic idea of allowing people an equal chance to compete with one another.
Instead, technology is used as a part of interventions to force changes that are often talked of in terms
of ‘affirmative action’ or ‘positive discrimination’. Clearly, these latter values are not reflected in many
of the forms of education described in this chapter. At best, most of these forms of digital education
are concerned with providing an equality of opportunity coupled with the expectation that individuals
will be able to decide and act for themselves.

Conclusions

All the examples in this chapter contrast the potential for individualised and personalised uses of
technology in education with a number of practical limitations and deep-rooted social problems. One
of the key questions underpinning all these forms of technology is whether they can support
individuals in developing and sustaining new patterns of engagement with education. Indeed, this is
an issue that has recurred throughout this book, challenging expectations that digital technology can
universally improve educational experiences. For instance, claims are often made that the ability to
engage flexibly with online education (rather than within the confines of ‘bricks and mortar’
educational institutions) will encourage individuals who had ceased to participate to re-engage on
their own terms. These are similar to claims of digital technology being able to widen and enhance
public engagement in other areas such as politics and health services. Yet, in most cases it seems that
technology- based services and interventions benefit some individuals more than others. Despite
substantial efforts to ‘empower’ all individuals, it appears that there are still some who are
‘superserved’ and others who are ‘underserved’ by digital technology.

Many of the examples of digital education featured in this chapter suggest that technologies often fit
around (and are shaped by) the existing patterns of people’s lives. In this way, whether or not someone
engages with an online course or TED talk is likely to reinforce – rather than disrupt – what he or she
has done previously in his or her life. This suggests that new forms of digital technology are likely to
do little to alter pre-existing educational behaviours and dispositions. From this perspective, it is
perhaps understandable that access to digital technology often ‘fails’ to make individuals any more
likely to participate in education and (re)engage with learning (White and Selwyn 2012). It could be
concluded that digital technologies, at best, increase educational activity among individuals who were
already educationally active. However, digital technology is far less likely to widen participation among
individuals who had previously not taken part in formal or informal learning.

Relating back to discussions from previous chapters, it would seem that the purported benefits of
technology-supported individualisation of education relate to wider issues of values and ideology. The
forms of individualised and personalised education outlined in this chapter all reflect wider ideological
beliefs regarding what education is for, and how education should be arranged. The desirability of
‘adaptive learning’ or ‘hacking your own education’ depends very much upon how we see matters of
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‘fairness’, equality and justice, as well as how we perceive the notion of ‘individual’. On one hand,
there is much to be said for helping those who are most willing and/or able to learn in ways that better
fit their needs, circumstances and interests. On the other hand, it can argued strongly that education
is a part of society that needs to benefit the diverse interests of millions of not just unique ‘singular’
individuals, but also the ‘universal’ or ‘generic’ individual (Augé 2014). In other words, more attention
needs to be given to developing the ‘best’ educational uses of technology in terms of the greater good
(instead of simply the personal gain of some individuals).

This is a provocative conclusion to reach, and certainly goes against the spirit of contemporary
technology design as well as the increasing individualisation of society in general. Yet, if we genuinely
want to develop forms of education and technology that are of benefit to all, then we need to think
beyond current forms of technology that are likely to most benefit those individuals who already do
well in terms of engaging in education and/or using digital technology. Of course, it would be naïve to
imagine that fully equitable forms of educational participation can be engineered for all, yet it should
be possible to strive for similar possibilities to exist for the large majority of people. As Marc Augé
concludes, ‘The object of democracy is not to ensure happiness for all, but to create the conditions for
it as a possibility for each individual by eliminating the most obvious sources of unhappiness’ (2014, p.
2). At present, it might be reasonable to conclude that individualised and personalised forms of
technology-based education fall short of such ambitions.

Further questions to consider

• How genuinely individualised and personalised can education applications, systems and software be?
To what extent are

‘individualised’ forms of digital education inevitably built around ‘ideal types’ of learners and learning?

• What are the advantages – and disadvantages – of placing responsibility for education on individuals
rather than institutions? Who else might be expected to take responsibility for the success of
technology-based education – particularly in terms of those individuals who are less able to take
advantage of online opportunities?

• Should we simply accept that some individuals will do better than others when left to organise and
direct their own education engagement? Can ‘DIY’ principles ever work in education or are they simply
too idealistic?

Please go to http://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/education-and- technology-second-edition/ to

download and listen to discussion around these further questions.

Further reading

There are many good books on the topic of digital technology and the individualisation of society. One
of the best examples is the following: Rainie, H. and Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The New Social
Operating

System. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

There are also many books on the topic of education, individualisation and personalisation. One such
introduction is the following:
Zmuda, A., Ullman, D. and Curtis, G. (2015). Learning Personalized: The

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Evolution of the Contemporary Classroom. New York, Josey Bass.

This book – by the singularly named Professor Kinshuk from Athabasca University – offers a learning
design perspective on the form and theory of adaptive and personalised education systems:
Kinshuk (2016). Designing Adaptive and Personalized Learning Environments.

New York, Routledge.

This edited collection offers a broad overview of digital badges:

Muilenburg, L. and Berge, Z. (eds) (2016). Digital Badges in Education. New York, Routledge.

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8 Education and Technology: Where Now?

Chapter Outline
Introduction
Looking towards the future of education and technology Reconsidering future visions from the past
Reconsidering future visions from the present day Recognising the contested nature of the future
Lessons learnt about education and technology
Education and technology: towards better discussions and debate
Conclusions

Introduction

This book has considered a number of key issues and debates that underpin the ever-changing field of
education and technology. Of course, the scope of our discussions has been determined in part by
what can be fitted into two hundred pages of a book. As such, no book can provide a complete analysis
of every aspect of education and technology. In narrowing the scope of this book down to eight
substantive areas of debate, inevitable gaps and issues remain that would merit further consideration
if we had the time and space. For example, the book has not addressed many of the educational
psychology debates on topics such as ‘techno- phobia’ or ‘learning styles’. There is certainly more that
could be said on the subject of ‘digital literacies’ and the ‘multimodalities’ of technology use. The book
has also shied away from some of the high-profile issues that have dominated recent discussions
among practitioners and policymakers, such as e-assessment, internet safety and so on. The book has
also had relatively little to say on the matter of the production, development and design of educational
technologies.

Some of these omissions have been deliberate. Many current ‘hot topics’ have only been mentioned
in passing in order to lend our discussions some longevity and relevance in years to come. Readers in
the latter half of the 2010s may be surprised to see relatively little mention of ‘flipped classrooms’,
‘Maker movement’, ‘predictive analytics’ and so on. However, readers in the early 2020s might be
struggling to remember what these concepts were. Similarly, in order to engage as wide a range of
readers as possible, there has been relatively little reference to debates that are predominantly of
academic concern. In sociological terms, for example, the perennial preoccupations of identity, power,
modernity and so on have only been addressed on occasion. There has been relatively little attention
given to the role of ‘grand’ theory in explaining some of the fundamental issues covered in this book.
All of these deficits can be addressed by engaging with the specialist academic literatures on
technology, new media and society.

These omissions notwithstanding, this book has certainly addressed many of the fundamental issues
and tensions that lie at the heart of technology use in education. We have focused on the recent
history as well as current realities of technology use in education. In particular, we have developed a
framework for looking at education and technology that takes account of the ‘wider picture’ beyond
the immediate technical and practical concerns of technology use. Based on this more ‘holistic’
understanding, it should now be possible to make better sense of why technologies are used (and not
used) in the ways that they are in education. More importantly, it should also be possible to have a
better idea of how technologies could be used in the future.

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The last seven chapters of this book have covered a great deal of ground. First, we established that
technological devices, tools and gadgets are perhaps the least important aspects of education and
technology to think about. While it is understandable that people who are interested in technology
tend to devote most of their attention to the ‘artefacts’ of educational technology (i.e. hardware
devices, software applications and services), it is equally important to try to make sense of what people
do with technologies (i.e. the activities and practices). It is also important to comprehend the wider
contexts, social structures and relationships that surround these activities and practices. To fully
understand how digital technologies are used in education one has to consider a multitude of issues
– what has been termed ‘the milieu’ of education and technology. This way of thinking encompasses
issues ranging from specific instances of individuals using digital technology to learn something, to the
wider economic, political and commercial structures that underpin these issues.

Of course, this ‘warts and all’ approach to conceptualising education and technology goes against
many of the common- sense ways that people tend to think about technology. For instance, we have
deliberately attempted to look beyond the widely presumed ‘transformative’ qualities of digital
technologies – that is, the idea that the ‘digital’ results unproblematically in more efficient and/or
elegant ways of doing things than was previously possible. We have also tried to move beyond
conceiving of education and technology only in terms of learning. Hopefully, anyone having read this
book will be well able to think about education and technology in ways that look beyond the narrow
concerns that tend to dominate how the topic is discussed.

Of course, taking this broad approach means that we are unlikely to reach any straightforward answers.
Many of this book’s chapters have reached conclusions that suggest that technology use does not
inevitably involve a ‘change for the better’. Moreover, we have seen how many of the changes
associated with digital technologies are not intrinsic to the technology per se. Instead, we have seen
how the educational changes associated with technology are socially shaped as well as technologically
driven. While this observation can be made of any aspect of technology and society, this seems to be
an issue that is especially relevant to educational contexts. Many of the ‘outcomes’ and ‘effects’ of
technologies in education are shaped heavily by the characteristics of the educational contexts and
settings these technologies have been used in. In this sense, the outcomes of technology use in
education are certainly not consistent and often result in unintended consequences and subtle side-
effects. The complicated and often compromised picture is certainly reflected in the long history of
inconsistent technology use in educational contexts – not least throughout the rapid technological
developments of the twentieth century.

As such, much of this book has been concerned with attempting to account for gaps between the
‘clean’ rhetoric and ‘messy’ realities of technology use in education. One theme recurring throughout
each chapter has been to look beyond the simplistic claims that are often made for technology use in
education and, instead, explore the complex issues and wider tensions relating to the wider politics of
education. For example, Chapter 4 considered in detail how digital technologies have the potential to
be used to support different forms and types of learning. Yet, we also saw that using technology to
support different forms of learning often does not necessarily equate with ‘better’ forms of learning.
In fact, Chapter 4 concluded that it is difficult – if not impossible – to ‘prove’ with any degree of
certainty that technology leads to enhancements in learning. As is often the case in education debates,
it is wise not to conflate correlation with causation.

As mentioned earlier, many of the chapters in the book have attempted to situate technology within
the broader social contexts and social relations that constitute ‘education’. For example, Chapter 6
described in detail how educational institutions – such as schools, colleges and universities – are
complex social contexts where digital technologies are embedded, shaped and given meaning. We
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saw in Chapter 5 how structures and processes of education can have a significant bearing on how
teachers use technology. Matters of curriculum, assessment, timetabling and the monitoring of
performance mean that some technological practices ‘fit’ better than others with the ‘job’ of being a
teacher. In a similar vein, Chapter 3 described the shaping of many efforts to use technology over the
last hundred years by non-technological issues – again highlighting the notion of ‘goodness of fit’
between ‘new’ technologies and longer-standing social contexts of the classroom, school and
education system.

All of these issues contribute to a strong sense that technology – in and of itself – does not provide a
ready panacea for educational problems. As we also saw in Chapter 7, technological interventions are
often less likely to help those who need help most, and more likely to advantage those individuals who
are already advantaged. Like many things in life, educational technologies often tend to benefit people
who are already more able, competent and confident. Similarly, in Chapters 5 and 6 we saw how
technology does not simply offer a straightforward alternative to the perceived shortcomings of
teachers and educational institutions. Of course, there is a clear need to continue to adjust and
reassess how education is organised and provided. Yet, educational institutions and professional
educators look set to remain to play large parts in education for many years to come. If anything,
digital technologies should be seen as involving more (rather than less) work and responsibility for
educational institutions and those who work within them.

These issues, debates and arguments about the current state of education and technology provide a
strong basis from which to now turn our attention to the future. While it is difficult to refute the
present ‘messy realities’ of education and technology, many people would contend that we should
not be too hasty in reaching definite conclusions. It could be argued that the full effects of digital
technologies are only now beginning to be felt. In fact, many commentators would consider it too
early to judge the use of digital technology in education. While the history of education and technology
has undoubtedly been fraught with difficulty and disappointment, many people remain optimistic –
contending that the next ten years or so look set to finally witness the technological transformation of
education. In this respect, many people anticipate the near future of education and technology to be
very different from the current state of affairs and recent history as described in this book. So before
we reach any final conclusions, it is perhaps worth thinking back to one of the issues that emerged
towards the end of Chapter 3. Could it be that there will be something intrinsically different about
emerging digital technologies? If so, what are the likely future forms of education and technology?
Now that we have considered all that has come before, what is likely to be coming next?

Looking towards the future of education and technology

As has been implied from the beginning of this book, discussions of education and technology are
often drawn inexorably towards a forward-looking, ‘leading-edge’ perspective. Much of the
educational technology literature focuses on what could be termed ‘state-of-the-art’ issues, asking
questions of what could happen, and what should happen once the latest technologies and digital
media are placed into educational settings. A great deal of excitement tends to be reserved for the
short-term, imminent changes in education and technology (the ‘next big thing’ that is ‘just around
the corner’). Moreover, there is also considerable interest in the speculative forecasting of what might
happen in the medium- to long-term future.

Of course, commenting on the possible future of either education or technology can be a perilous
pastime. Our overview in Chapter 3 of the history of technology in education showed how even the
most informed commentators find technological forecasting to be a tricky business. Take, for instance,
the assertion in 1943 that there would only ever be ‘a world market for maybe five computers’ (a
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quotation attributed to Thomas J. Watson – the then chairman of IBM), or fifty years later, when the
internet was dismissed by Bill Gates as ‘a passing fad’. It seems that even those at the sharp end of
technological change are often reduced to guessing games when it comes to predicting the future. In
the same vein, the nature of educational change has proved to be just as difficult to forecast accurately
– as was evident in the many (now ludicrous sounding) depictions of the ‘classroom of 2000’ offered
throughout the second half of the twentieth century. All told, predicting the possible new shapes and
forms of education and technology is fraught with difficulty.

Although making predictions continues to be an imprecise business, the need to assess accurately the
potential impacts of technology on society remains an important part of attempting to manage and
control technology. The twentieth century saw a rise in ‘technological forecasting’ by many different
individuals and organisations, not least a popularist strand of technology assessment that became
known as ‘futurology’ or ‘future studies’. This area of study is based on the scrutiny of past and present
trends in order to forecast future developments. While they are often speculative and descriptive in
nature, it is useful to consider the ways in which writers working in the area of future studies are
envisaging the main issues for education and technology over the next ten to thirty years – what is
often referred to by futurologists as ‘near future’ predictions.

Reconsidering future visions from the past

Futurology and future studies rose to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the
concept of futurology first came to mainstream attention through the work of authors like Alvin and
Heidi Toffler, John Naisbitt and others. Throughout the Cold War and the economic crisis–ridden 1970s
and 1980s, various best-selling books offered optimistic visions of technology- led societies – a trend
that was repeated in the run-up to the year 2000. While it is easy to dismiss these accounts as fanciful
and popularist, early examples of futurology such as Toffler’s Future Shock and Naisbitt’s Megatrends
introduced wider audiences to many key aspects of how we now think about contemporary society.
In particular, Toffler highlighted many issues that later came to be important elements of debates over
the digital society, such as ‘telecommuters’, ‘prosumers’ and the ‘crack-up of the nation’.

One of the prescient ‘past’ future portrayals of education and technology took the form of a
competition held by Apple Computers in 1988 asking some of the top US universities to forecast the
state of education, technology and society in the year 2000. The winners of the ‘Project 2000’
competition took a twofold approach to considering the technologies that could be produced and,
perhaps more importantly, what they described as ‘how this technology can be used meaningfully by
people’ (Young et al. 1988, p. 62). In terms of technology devices and artefacts, Project 2000 foresaw
the widespread use of touch screen tablets with handwriting and speech recognition, infra-red
network connections, built-in GPS and portable one-gigabyte ‘Laser Card Mass Storage Units’. Looking
back thirty years later when Apple’s iPads are best-selling devices, these predictions of the
technological artefacts of the future are remarkably accurate.

However, the Project 2000 was less accurate when describing the educational activities and practices
that tablet computing would be used for. Here, the winning experts foresaw a form of ‘tele-university’
education where students no longer specialised in the arts or sciences but took a variety of subjects
that were learnt through simulated exploration and experimentation. Children and adults were
imagined as accessing simulated learning on a time- shifted, ‘on-demand’ basis, dipping in and out of
face-to-face exchanges as they saw fit, and communicating with peers and tutors via video email and
bulletin boards. Of course, while much of this mirrors how educational technologists continued to talk
about the potential of education and technology throughout the 1990s and 2000s, it did not turn out

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to be an especially accurate portrayal of actual mainstream uses of the technology. On- demand
simulated ‘tele-education’ remains as much of a peripheral educational activity now as it was in 1988.

Similar ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ are apparent in the forecasts of future forms of education and
technology that were made throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Tom Stonier and Cathy Conlin’s
(1985) Interlude in the Year 2010 offered an imaginative take on the technological and social aspects
of life in the future – forecasting the widespread use of household robots, holographic video-boxes
and wrist-computers. These authors also predicted that twelve-year-old students would be going on
six-month cultural exchanges and study visits to Pakistan and Russia, sustained by computer-phone
contact with their families. In particular, Stonier and Conlin saw education as being profoundly de-
institutionalised. Technology was used to support home-based education for school students, built
around the provision of daily programmes of work experienced as games or stories. Adult education
was seen to take place through expert systems, with teachers on hand only to provide ‘the human
touch ... a kind of fatherly reassurance that the students were really clever enough to handle the
system’ (1985, p. 177).

The UK technologist Christopher Evans was also ‘particularly confident’ that ‘the printed word would
be virtually obsolete’ by the year 2000 and that ‘computer education would have made great inroads’
(1979, p. 201). Evans gained many plaudits at the time for his predictions that intelligent machines
would soon underpin most of human activity. In line with other futurologists of the 1970s and 1980s,
Evans foresaw a de-institutionalised version of education. As he put it, ‘The average child [will] own a
portable teaching computer of great power, more knowledgeable and, in certain aspects, more
intelligent than any human teacher’ (Evans 1979, p. 205). As with many of these futurologists, Evans
was convinced of the technological capacity for change but less clear of the human commitment
towards realising technology’s potential. As Evans concluded in his book The Mighty Micro, the ‘most
potent limiting factor of all could be Man himself’ (1979, p. 204).

Reconsidering future visions from the present day

As all these past ‘future visions’ demonstrate, the popularity of such ideas does not necessarily reflect
a capacity to provide an accurate or balanced view of the technological future. Criticism of futurology
has long centred on the limitations of its models and the subjective nature of its projections. In
particular, many futurology accounts of the ‘inevitability’ of technological ‘progress’ are limited by an
implicit technological determinism. Whereas most of the predictions outlined above proved in
hindsight to be reasonably accurate in their imagining of the technological artefacts and devices of the
future, they proved less successful in anticipating the social activities and arrangements that
accompanied the technologies. With this caveat in mind, we should perhaps consider briefly some of
the present-day attempts to forecast the near future of education and technology across the first half
of the twenty-first century.

Whereas many of the writers of the 1970s and 1980s focused on the year 2000 as the most evocative
‘event space’ to imagine the future, recent future-orientated writing has tended to focus on the years
2025 and 2030. It is reasonably straightforward to make credible predictions about the artefacts and
devices that might emerge during this time. One of the most respected sources of such predictions
are the New Horizons reports that are compiled annually by the New Media Consortium. Since 2004,
these reports have identified with reasonable accuracy the technologies that look set to be integrated
into education settings in the short, medium and long term (which the reports define as a time frame
of ‘five years or more’). In 2004, the New Horizons reports were anticipating the educational potential
of ‘Knowledge Webs’ and ‘Context-Aware Computing’. The former has certainly come to pass in the
forms of networked and social education described throughout this book. The latter technology
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remains to be realised in any significant form. Most recently, these reports have focused on
developments in the areas of ‘adaptive learning technologies’ – ‘software and online platforms that
adjust to individual students’ needs as they learn’ (NMC 2015, p. 42); and the ‘internet of things’ – ‘a
network of connected objects that link the physical world with the world of information through the
web’ (NMC 2014, p. 42). Alongside these technologies are associated activities and new forms of
education provision. Here, the New Horizons reports are notably tentative. While they shy away from
predicting the end of schools and universities, there is much talk of ‘rethinking how schools work’ and
institutions adopting more ‘agile’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ approaches (NMC 2015, p. 8).

The New Horizons reports are certainly considered with as credible sources in education circles. Yet,
even if we assume the majority of issues identified in these reports to be of future significance, they
still tell us little about the contexts, arrangements and cultures of education – that is, what ‘education’
will be in such altered technological conditions. These are questions that most sensible commentators
tend to steer clear of. That said, in 2015 I was approached by a reporter from The Straits Times to
comment on an op-ed piece on ‘what schools might look like in the next fifty years’. With Singapore
celebrating fifty years of independence, the paper was running a series of articles on what the country
might look like in 2065. On the one hand, looking forward fifty years is a fool’s errand. On the other
hand, it did prove to be an interesting exercise in making sense of the issues that matter most when
thinking about education and technology – not least, the social, cultural, political and economic issues
highlighted throughout this book. For what it is worth, here are my responses to the question:

Looking ahead fifty years is very tricky. There is a saying that anyone claiming to know what will happen
in the future is speculating, or simply stating what he or she wants to happen. Even people who
consider themselves futurists tend to limit themselves to the ‘near future’ – that is, ten to twenty-five
years. So anything we can say about 2065 must be taken with a huge pinch of salt.

The main question here is whether we will even have schools at all. I am willing to imagine that there
will be some form of school system, but not in the shape that we know now.

The main reason we might still have schools in 2065 is not to do with technology but to do with the
economy. Schools play a key role in child care – as places that look after children and young people
while adults go to work. Until someone comes up with an alternative, this is going to be a key driver
for schools to continue to exist. Of course, more people will be teleworking in 2065, but many jobs will
still involve going somewhere else and doing something, so these classes of people will need their
children to be looked after.

It may well be that we get a two-track system of schools. On one hand, there will be a cheaper blend
of online classes and some face-to-face tuition for the masses. On the other hand, there will be an
elite system of ‘traditional’ face-to-face schooling for those who can afford to pay handsomely for it.
Technology already allows for mass tuition, so having the attention of a teacher face to face for five
days a week will be a luxury product. This is already happening in the United States where cyber-
schools and virtual classes are becoming an established feature of the public school system, especially
in underserved areas.

Technology-based education works well for older students, but young children need face-to-face
nurturing and learning environments. I can still see most (if not all) children going to kindergarten and
primary school for all of the important social elements that we know underpin successful learning and
development.
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• Education in 2065 will undoubtedly be a highly commercial affair. Technology is already allowing big
businesses and for- profit organisations to provide education, and this trend will increase over the next
fifty years. Whatever companies are the equivalent of Pearson and Kaplan in 2065 will be running
schools, and we will not think twice about it.

• For a taste of what this might look like, it is interesting to look at a company such as Knewton that
provides personalised learning and ‘recommender systems’. These forms of technology-based
learning all work on principles of big data and algorithms. Even now machines and coding are deciding
what a student learns and how he or she learns it!

• The most interesting technologies to think about in 2065 are not digital technologies but bio-
technologies. Much work is taking place in the areas of neuro-education and the cognitive sciences,
meaning that the human brain is now the main area of cutting-edge technological advance.
Pharmaceutical research has already developed a range of smart-drugs and cognitive enhancements.
HCI (human–computer interfacing) is now morphing into BCI (brain–computing interfacing). These are
all areas that should have come to fruition by 2065, and will change the way we think about education
and learning.

• Another big technological shift to consider for 2065 is environmental. All of what I have just outlined
assumes that our natural environment will remain intact to allow for human life to continue as we
know it. One could come up with a more dystopian scenario where it is not safe to leave the small
areas of the planet where life can be sustained, and where we need technologies to support more
rudimentary forms of teaching and learning. In this case, not having schools might be the least of our
problems!

Recognising the contested nature of the future

As the earlier overview of predications from the 1970s and 1980s suggested, any ‘current’ future
scenarios and trends are by no means assured. My own speculations for 2065 are no more valid or
certain than those from any reader of this book. We should remain mindful that such forms of ‘future’
forecasting are usually informed by a politically driven desire to see ‘better’ forms of society. As such,
it is understandable that futurologists will use education and technology as a means through which
idealised societies can be proposed. Yet, it is important to see these future scenarios and forecasts as
prescriptive rather than predictive in nature. As Audrey Watters reflects:

All the visions of the future of education, the future of teaching, the future of work, the future of
learning are ideological. They are also political. ... Predictions about the future are not neutral. They
are not objective. They are invested. Invested in a past and a present and a future. Invested in a certain
view of what learning looks like now, what it has looked like before and what – thanks to whatever
happens in the future – what it might look like going forward. (2015, n.p.)

Echoing this line of thinking, Nick Zepke (2008) suggests three different types of future prediction of
technology and society. These include ‘the science of the probable’ (based on the rigorous forecasting
of preceding trends), ‘the art of the possible’ (the creative imagination of alternative futures) and ‘the
politics of the preferable’ (based on the values, assumptions and preferences of specific groups of
people). Clearly, many of the technology- focused predictions outlined in this chapter fall into the
category of ‘the science of the probable’. However, predictions of the socio- technical arrangements
of future education fall more readily into either the creative imagination of ‘the possible’ or, more
often than not, the value-led ‘politics of the preferable’. As Larry Cuban puts it, such predictions ‘tell

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[us] more about the values and aspirations of the author(s) than predicting what will occur’ (2015, p.
427).

Indeed, many of the recent visions of education and technology of 2025 (or even 2065) are largely
driven by matters of ideology rather than objective forecasting. In other words, much of what is said
about the future of education and technology relates to what is believed about the education and
society of today. As Marc Augé reasons, when we talk about the future of others we are generally
talking about the present situation that we find ourselves in – that is, talking ‘without much thought,
of our presumed inadequacies ... or our hopes’ (2014, p. 1). It makes little sense to search for definitive
answers to what the technological future of education will definitely look like. Instead, it makes more
sense to recognise the contested nature of these future-orientated debates. Above all, it is important
to treat any claims made on behalf of the future of education and technology with an appropriate
degree of caution and scepticism. With these thoughts in mind, we can now conclude by moving away
from the vagaries of futurology. Instead, we should return our attention to the present-day realities
of education and technology. What have we learnt about education and technology from the previous
seven chapters, and what bearing do these lessons have for educators and education provision?

Lessons learnt about education and technology

So what can be said about education and technology after eight chapters of considering the key issues
and debates? Above all, this is an area that continues to be associated with a strong (but often
unrealised) faith in the capacity of technology to facilitate substantial change. For example, many of
the enthusiasms for technology in education over the last fifty years have been driven by a belief that
technology is capable of enhancing learning in particular ways. It would seem that many people
involved in promoting technology use in education would quite like to replace ‘industrial-era’
educational institutions and the professionals who work within them. In a general sense, many
arguments for the increased use of technology are driven by the belief that technology can lead to
better forms of education provision and education engagement – regardless of how one may choose
to define ‘better’. Despite past failures, these hopes and assumptions continue to thrive – as Yong
Zhao and colleagues recently asserted:

Technology has been traditionally conceived as a tool to enhance and improve existing practices within
the existing educational setup, but it has become a tool to enable a grand education transformation
that has been imagined by many pioneering thinkers such as John Dewey. The transformation is not
about technology, but about more meaningful education for all children. Perhaps finally we can escape
the cyclic amnesia we have suffered in using technology to improve education. (Zhao et al. 2015, n.p.)

However, one of the main conclusions to emerge from this book is that continuing to cling to black-
and-white conceptions of technology and education change somewhat misunderstands the complex
nature of the topic. Many of these popular accounts of education and technology run the risk of
overlooking crucial issues that shape education and change. From the opening chapter onwards, this
book has discussed how digital technologies are often instinctively associated with expectations of
significant improvement of existing educational processes and/or the transformation of education into
new forms. Yet, we have also seen how digital technologies are more often than not linked to the
continuation and perpetuation of existing and deeply entrenched patterns. In fact, educational
technology usually appears to be a case of ‘more of the same’ rather than radical change or
improvement. Despite the excitement and hyperbole that surrounds it, there is often little that is truly
‘new’ about new technology. The most important issues and debates about education and technology
concern not what people think may happen but what is actually happening. Looking back to the
suggestions of Neil Postman in Chapter 2, one of the key questions that should always be asked of
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education and technology is the simple question: ‘What is new here?’ In other words, what is
technology making possible that was not possible before?

Developing rich understandings of education and technology therefore requires the development of
a critical approach towards what concepts such as ‘new’ and ‘change’ actually mean. Here it is useful
to return to the issues and arguments relating to technology and change considered in Chapter 2.
From this perspective, we would not expect technology to completely alter or change pre-existing
circumstances and situations. While digitally based activities may well borrow from, refashion and
occasionally surpass their earlier pre-digital equivalents, it is highly unlikely that there will ever be a
complete break with what came before. In fact, it could be argued that the notion of ‘totally new’
technology is an impossible concept. As Alexander Galloway and colleagues observe, ‘Much of the so-
called new media are not, after all, particularly new’ (2014, p. 1).

Much of what has been discussed in this book has therefore pointed to the need to approach issues
of technological change and technological novelty less in radical terms of ‘revolution’ and more in
incremental terms of ‘remediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999). This sense of the ‘digital remediation’ of
everyday life and social processes refers to the fact that digital technologies appear to be reconfiguring
many – if not all – social processes and practices. Yet, this is not to say that ‘new’ digital forms are
usurping all practices and processes that have gone before. Instead, digitally based activities are best
understood as borrowing from, refashioning and often surpassing preceding technologies.

The idea of digital technology and digital media gradually translating old forms into new forms has
recurred throughout our discussions. As Mackenzie Wark observes, successful new technologies are
generally designed to ‘do things that people want to do, and in ways that they [a]re used to doing
them, initially at least’ (Wark 2015, n.p.). This certainly accounts for the recurring sense throughout
this book that new technologies in education are not necessarily leading to novel ways of doing things
or particularly different forms of education. The key question to consider for the future, therefore, is
the extent to which currently dominant ‘ways of doing’ education will persist in the next wave of new
technologies. To what extent will old forms of education fade and genuinely new ‘digital’ forms of
education be established? Alternately, how enduring can the familiar cultural habits of the textbook,
chalkboard, lecture and multiple-choice quiz be?

This reappraisal of the ‘new’ corresponds with one of the main conclusions that has emerged
throughout this book – that is, that the claims made for educational technologies are highly symbolic
and often ideologically driven in nature. It would be naive to see debates over education and
technology as somehow neutral and disinterested accounts of an inevitable future. It would be
foolhardy to ignore the fact that many of the enthusiasms and many of the concerns expressed for
digital technology in education are driven by people’s wider beliefs, values and agendas. Indeed, most
of the chapters in this book have reached the conclusion that the idea of ‘educational technology’ is
used as a site for wider debates, contests and struggles over education. In this sense, much of what is
said and believed about education and technology relates to what is said and believed about education
and society.

For example, how technology is seen to relate to learning depends very much on what assumptions
we make about the nature of desirable learning. Here a number of values and positions are apparent
– for example, a belief in the value of individually driven learning as opposed to institutionally dictated
instruction; a belief in the relative value of exploration and experimentation as opposed to
predetermined instruction; and a belief in the value of learning within social and communal
environments. Similarly, many of the debates over the continued relevance of the teacher relate to
assumptions about the changing nature of authority and expertise in contemporary society. Many of
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the debates over the continued relevance of the school relate to assumptions about the efficiencies
of market forces in providing services as opposed to the inefficiencies of government. As we have seen
throughout this book, people’s enthusiasms for technology in education are often based around
combinations of these values and beliefs. It would certainly be reasonable to conclude that many of
the claims made for education and technology are often more of a matter of faith than a matter of
fact.

Education and technology: towards better discussions and debate

There is a pressing need to develop and promote more sophisticated discussions and debates of
education and technology. Of course, it would be churlish to deny the educational potentials of digital
technologies altogether – technology is obviously having a major influence in a range of educational
contexts. Yet, as we have seen throughout this book, any changes, improvements or even
‘transformations’ are never consistent or straightforward and rarely turn out to be the inevitable and
holistic improvements that many people would have us believe. In this sense, we need to develop and
promote better understandings of the realities of education and technology. Why is it that digital
technology has not yet made a radical difference to the quality and reach of education in the ways
that we are often told that it will?

In order to address this question, there is a clear need to develop a greater realism about education
and technology. This involves paying more attention to the social, cultural, political, economic and
historical aspects of education and technology. Of course, we should not lose sight of the fact that
current digital technologies have obvious educational potentials and ‘advantages’. Undoubtedly, the
next wave of emerging digital technologies will also have obvious educational potentials and
advantages. Yet, any understanding of the significance of these technologies must take into account
the long history of gradual and often unpredictable changes in education that tend to result from
technology implementation and use. There is a need to be relentlessly realistic as well as occasionally
optimistic about the relationship between education and technology.

In particular, it would seem important to foster discussions of the ‘here-and-now’ realities rather than
future possibilities and potentials of technology in education. There is limited practical significance in
only taking forward-looking perspectives on education and technology, tending to underplay social
influences and relations, and offering little useful insight into how present arrangements may be
improved or adjusted. Instead of focusing on the ‘state of the art’, more efforts should be made to
develop debates concerning what actually takes place when digital technologies meet educational
settings and how this compares to what has taken place in the past. These questions fall broadly into
three basic forms: What is the use of technology in educational settings actually like? Why is
technology use in educational settings the way it is? What are the consequences of technology use in
educational settings?

As these deceptively simple questions imply, education and technology is best seen as a site of ongoing
negotiation, struggle and conflict. Addressing these questions requires a deliberate focus on what this
book has described as the ‘messy realities’ of educational technology use. This involves exploring
instances where technologies are not being used, or where technologies are being used in ways that
suppress and disadvantage. This requires asking questions about emotional and affective aspects of
education and technology – what Schirmer and Apple (2014) describe as matters of ‘love, care and
solidarity’ that define education as more than just a process of knowledge transfer. In all these senses,
we need to pose questions that are perhaps more ambiguous and awkward than those usually found
in discussions of educational technology. We need to develop lines of enquiry that are less forward-
looking and less ‘high-tech’, but certainly no less important.
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All these suggestions imply the development of a critical outlook on education and technology. Of
course, being critical of technology is not a comfortable perspective for many people to adopt. As Jill
Lepore (2014) notes, few people want to be seen as an ‘old fogey’ speaking against ‘innovation’ or
‘change’. Yet – as we stressed in Chapter 2 – to think critically of technology is not the same as being
‘anti-technology’. One cannot be ‘anti- technology’ any more than one can be ‘anti-food’ or deny the
need for any other essential element for living in modern society. Being critical does not involve
stubbornly opposing the existence of digital technology or engaging in relentless critique with no sense
of hope. Neither does being critical involve giving up altogether on the potential of digital technology
to support better forms of education. Instead, being critical involves offering pushback against the
current ways of doing things and offering alternatives. This involves being realistic, objective and
sceptical (rather than cynical). This also involves asking awkward questions along the lines of Neil
Postman’s seven critical questions listed in Chapter 2. As such, our key concerns about education and
technology are not the usual ones of ‘What works?’ but concerns of ‘What is education for?’ and ‘What
should education be like?’

All of these contentions point to the need to stimulate and sustain in-depth debates about education
and technology – debates that are not confined to academic circles but are driven by all interest groups
involved in education. Indeed, many of the dominant academic understandings of education and
technology are notable for their lack of consideration for the ‘voices’ of the student, the teacher or
the educational institution. At best, academics and educational technologists tend to speak on behalf
of these interests, rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. It is very rare for the educational
technology literature to feature the ‘voices’ of the 1.3 billion people in the developing world who exist
on less than a dollar a day, and for whom any kind of schooling is a privilege rather than a problem. It
is very rare for discussions of technology to consider the fact that over half the world’s population (3.5
billion people) continues to have no access to the internet at all. Educational technology is often
something that is ‘done to’ students, educators, the less privileged and less affluent, rather than ‘done
by’ them.

One of the key issues that underpins any use of technology in education is the simple question of ‘Who
decides?’ At present, it is clear that technology is usually something that is presented to those involved
in education as a fait accompli rather than something that is negotiable and malleable. As we discussed
in Chapter 2, technology is often ‘handed down’ to educators under a number of wider imperatives of
economic efficiency, future employment needs or vague notions of modernisation and effectiveness.
In all these instances, technology is presented to those in education as a ‘black box’ that must be
responded to as best as they can.

Yet, technology and education is too important and significant an issue to be organised in a reactive
manner (Facer 2011). Instead, one of the most important steps towards realising the potential of
digital technology is stimulating debates that involve all of the ‘publics’ of education and technology –
not least, teachers, students, parents and other people forming the ‘silent majority’ of end users. At
the moment, it appears that few people are overly concerned or involved with the topic of education
and technology beyond a vague notion that digital tools and applications are ‘desirable’ and probably
‘a good thing’. Despite the increased tendency of parents, employers and other ‘end users’ of
education to exert their ‘consumer rights’ on all kinds of other matters, there is often a distinct
ambivalence and apathy when it comes to improving digital technology use in educational settings.
Education and technology seems not to be a topic that many people talk openly about, let alone get
impassioned or angry about. In this sense, it is high time for increased public and professional
engagement with the politics of educational technology.

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Conclusions

Of course, the whole point of stimulating serious and sustained public debate about education and
technology is to provoke action and change. Many of the chapters in this book have concluded that
education and technology is a contested area – a struggle over ideas, values and beliefs regarding what
education should (and could) be like. At present, these struggles involve a variety of ‘high-level’
interests from politicians to industrialists, learning scientists to academics. It now seems essential that
students, teachers and others involved in the day-to-day realities of education play a greater part in
these negotiations and struggles – getting their voices heard, arguing for their demands for change,
and then being involved in initiating these changes. Students, teachers and other ‘grass-roots’ actors
have a key role to play in developing plausible suggestions as to how current inequalities, inefficiencies
and inconsistencies might be overcome. They also have a key role to play in deciding how digital
technology use in educational settings may be reshaped along ‘better’, fairer and more equitable lines.

A number of potential ways in which this democratising of education and technology could take place
has been highlighted throughout this book. One obvious area is the increased involvement of students
and teachers in producing digital technologies for education. This could entail teachers becoming
more involved in the commercial production and development of technologies, tools and applications
– letting software developers and hardware manufacturers know how technologies might ‘fit’ with the
day-to-day demands of educational settings. There are also opportunities for increased ‘bottom-up’
involvement in the shaping of technology production. It could be that ‘open source’- style communities
of teachers and students can take increased responsibility for developing, sharing and refining their
own digital resources for learning and teaching. Models of ‘open education resources’ might offer a
potential way for educators-as-producers to be involved in taking responsibility for and control of
shaping the technologies that they use (Andrade et al. 2013).

There are also opportunities for educators to reiterate the role of ‘pre-digital’ elements of education
that are presumed to be usurped by ‘digital’ education. For example, present debates over the future
of educational institutions and the relevance of the teacher appear to be led by the views and opinions
of those seeking the radical reform of public services (often to their own advantage and/or profit).
Very rarely are the alternative opinions of disinterested teachers, schools or even students heard in
these discussions of education reform. Even the language that is used to discuss education and
technology is often overly technicist and far removed from the language used by teachers and students
to discuss their education. We, therefore, need a change of emphasis and a change in vocabulary in
the ways that education and technology are discussed. Policymakers and those responsible for the
future shaping of education tend to take debates over such nebulous concepts such as ‘disruptive
innovation’ and ‘agile’ education very seriously. It is crucial that those people who are involved directly
in the consequences of these changes have a greater say in the nature and form of these debates.

This is not to naïvely imagine the restorative power of a unified ‘learner voice’ or ‘teacher lobby’ as a
neatly packaged counterweight to the opinions and actions of the powerful. Instead, it is simply a call
for individual teachers, students, administrators, parents and everyone else with a stake in education
to become engaged actively in the shaping of ‘their’ educational technology. Of course, any ‘bottom-
up’ suggestions and interventions will be as value-driven and ideologically led as the current ‘top-down’
debates and development. It is likely that students, teachers and other interest groups will be no more
coherent than anyone else at agreeing on what constitutes making education ‘better’, more ‘effective’
or ‘fairer’. It is likely that any such interventions and actions would be very local in nature and very
specific in influence. As such, there is no easy way to completely transform or overhaul education and
technology.

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Yet, the lack of easy solutions is no reason to give up on working towards the improvement of
education and technology. It is important that alternative perspectives, beliefs and values of those
involved at the grass-roots levels of education are included more prominently in the development and
implementation of educational technologies. As we have stated throughout this book, technology
does not have – and never has had – an inevitable impact on education. It is crucial that all the people
working in and around education realise that they are as much capable of shaping technology as
technology is capable of shaping them. Hopefully, the ideas and debates raised in this book will provide
a useful foundation for better things to come.

Further questions to consider

• Why should the future of education and technology be any different from how it is now? What
changes in technology- based activities and practices have taken place over the last twenty years?
What equivalent changes may be reasonably expected over the next twenty years? How might the
contexts

of educational technology use have changed in twenty years’

time?
• How might students and educators have more of an influence

on the nature of the technologies that they use? In terms of the production of technology, for example,
how might a student-designed ‘learning management system’ differ from the ones currently in use?

• Is the idea of stimulating and supporting widespread public awareness and debate about educational
technology simply too idealistic? Think of the educational issues that tend to attract news media
attention. Are the issues surrounding education and technology as important as these ‘controversies’?
How can education and technology become a topic that is widely discussed and debated?

• How can one be critical about technology in education without being seen as a dinosaur, Luddite or
‘CAVE dweller’ (colleague against virtually everything)?

Please go to http://www.bloomsbury.com/cw/education-and- technology-second-edition/ to

download and listen to discussion around these further questions.

Further reading

The book provides an interesting and provocative overview of the role of ‘futures thinking’ in
understanding educational change:
Facer, K. (2011). Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change.

London, Routledge.

Finally, here are three books that continue many of the discussions pursued throughout the eight
chapters of this book. Each of these books focuses on key ideas and debates about technology at
particular levels of education provision from pre-school to university:

Garvis, S. and Lemon, N. (eds) (2016). Understanding Digital Technologies and Young Children: An
International Perspective. New York, Routledge.

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Selwyn, N. (2011). Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age. New York, Routledge.

Hamilton, E. (2016). Technology and the Politics of University Reform: The Social Shaping of Online
Education. New York, Palgrave MacMillan.

Glossary

Artificial Intelligence (AI) A field within the computer sciences that focuses on creating machines that
are capable of thinking intelligently. Much AI work addresses the challenge of adding ‘thinking-like’
features to computerised technology. The idea that computers are ‘machines for thinking’ has strongly
influenced the use of technology in education. In particular, AI principles have underpinned the
development of software that can provide models of ‘ideal learning’ against which an individual’s
performance can be compared and areas for improvement diagnosed.

Behaviourist theory Behaviourist theories (such as those advanced by B. F. Skinner) describe how
people’s behaviour is ‘conditioned’ by reactions and responses to various stimuli in their environment.
Behaviourist approaches often focus on modifying how an individual responds (i.e. behaves) when
faced with a stimulus. It is reasoned that the consequences of responding to a stimulus are likely to
influence how an individual subsequently responds when next faced with the same stimulus. If the
consequence of the initial behaviour is reinforced by a reward, then it is likely to be repeated (i.e.
reinforced). If the consequence of this behaviour is suppressed through a punishment, then it is likely
to be curtailed (i.e. modified). Despite being nearly 100 years old, behaviourist principles (e.g.
programmed instruction, frequent testing, immediate feedback) continue to influence many aspects
of contemporary online education.

Blended learning Any situation where formal, face-to-face education provision is combined with an
element of technology-mediated learning. In a blended learning situation, digital technology is used
to provide students with self- directed and/or a-synchronous learning experiences. The ‘blend’
between face-to-face and technology-mediated education will vary according to the type of learning
and level of the students.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) The idea that everyone in a class can make free use of personal digital
devices rather than these devices being restricted or banned altogether. The pluralised version ‘Bring
Your Own Devices’ acknowledges the increased use of ‘second screens’ (e.g. using a smartphone at
the same time as a laptop), while ‘Bring Your Own

Technology’ extends the concept to personal internet connections, applications and other aspects of
digital technology beyond the actual devices.

Cognitivist theory Theories of learning that have emerged from the field of cognitive science, seeking
to describe learning in terms of the thought processes that lie behind any observable behaviour.
Cognitivist theories tend to describe learning as an internal process of mental action. Learning is seen
primarily as a matter of symbolic manipulation, with an individual’s mind processing goals, intentions,
plans, mental representations and logical computations.

Connected learning A model of learning developed largely in the United States, which seeks to describe
the increased influence of digital technologies on everyday learning. Connected learning highlights the
learning that occurs when using technologies to design, make, create and produce various forms of
digital content. It also considers the role of digital technologies in supporting online communication
and interaction between remote individuals. Connected learning recognises the links between formal
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and informal learning, especially interest-driven learning that is supported by peers and
knowledgeable mentors.

Connectivism The idea that learning now relates primarily to the ability to access and use distributed
information on a ‘just-in-time’ basis. Rather than knowing and retaining information on a long-term
basis, connectivism describes how individuals develop personal, meaningful networks of learning.
From this perspective, ‘learning’ can be seen as an individual’s ability to connect to specialised
information nodes and sources when required. Similarly, being ‘knowledgeable’ can be seen as the
ability to nurture and maintain these connections.

Constructionist theory An extension of constructivist theories of learning, associated primarily with

the work of Seymour Papert. Constructionism describes how learning takes place through the
exploratory building of objects that are themselves capable of doing something. By building an object
and then manipulating it to do something, it is reasoned that individuals are able to learn from the
process of thinking about how to get something else to think. Constructionists talk of supporting
individuals’ conversations with artefacts, thereby framing technology as a tool to learn with rather
than learn from.

Constructivist theory Theories of learning associated primarily with the work of psychologists like Jean
Piaget and Jerome Bruner. Constructivist theories describe learning that is problem-based and builds
upon an individual’s previous experience and knowledge. In this sense, learning is rooted in

processes of exploration, inquiry, interpretation and meaning-making. Constructivist theories portray

learning as an active process where individuals construct their own perspective of the world through
personal experiences.

Context The social arrangements and organisational forms that surround the use of technology. This
can include institutions (such as the family or workplace), social structures (such as race, gender or
social class) and cultures (such as national cultures or youth subcultures). These broader social
contexts are seen to influence the specific activities and practices that people undertake with
technologies. Acknowledging the importance of social context highlights the need to not just see
digital technology in terms of artefacts and devices.

Deschooling The idea that education can be arranged and provided outside of the confines of
educational institutions such as schools and universities. Deschooling describes how learning can take
place through temporary, autonomous and non-hierarchical networks. Deschooling was popularised
through the work of the philosopher Ivan Illich. Illich reasoned that individuals in educational
institutions are discouraged from taking responsibility for their self-development, and also from
engaging with other potential opportunities for learning within their immediate communities.

Design (teaching as design) The view that a teacher’s job is primarily one of setting up the conditions
of learning and making sure that opportunities to learn arise over the course of any educational
episode. This involves an ongoing process of planning, interacting, evaluating and reflecting. It is
important to note that it is not possible for a teacher to ‘design’ learning – learning is not something
that can be controlled or forced to occur. Instead, the role of a teacher is to design for learning. This
can include establishing suitable learning tasks, supportive environments, and conducive forms of
social relations between students and teachers.

Deskilling The idea that technology contributes to a fragmentation of the teaching process, with
different elements of a teacher’s work shared between different people and/or automated through
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technology. While this breaking down of work might seem helpful, deskilling highlights the problem of
individuals losing sight of the whole process and, therefore, losing control over their own labour. In
this way, technology is seen to lead to a deprofessionalisation of teaching – fragmenting jobs into
disconnected work processes that require little conceptual ability. Ultimately, this can lead to a sense
of disengagement and alienation among teachers.

Digital In a basic sense, ‘digital’ refers to discontinuous data, based on the two distinct states of ‘off’
and ‘on’ (or 0 and 1) with no value in between. Digital

technologies are only capable of distinguishing between these two values of 0 and 1, but use binary
codes to combine these zeros and ones into large numbers and other practical forms of information.
Most people consider the processing of data in this way to be hugely advantageous in terms of the
scale, speed and control of what can be done. For example, digital information is far easier to store
and distribute electronically, easier to manipulate accurately than ‘real-world’ analog data, and
infinitely replicable.

Disruptive innovation A view of technology and social change deriving from the economist Clay
Christensen. ‘Disruptive innovation’ refers to relatively ordinary technologies that are combined to
address emerging values, needs and desires that are not being catered for elsewhere. Often, these
simple applications and ideas might seem counter-intuitive or inferior in comparison to current ways
of doing things. Nevertheless, these disruptive innovations successfully make a product or service
available to new populations who previously had not been able to access it. Over time, these new ways
of doing things then force existing providers to either change their ways or go out of business.
Wikipedia is an example of an innovation that disrupted the printed encyclopedia business.

Education In a basic sense, ‘education’ can be understood as the conditions and arrangements where
learning takes place. Yet, education is not simply a technical matter of facilitating people’s learning. In
addition, education also involves the broader functions of ‘qualification’, ‘socialisation’ and
‘subjectification’. Education is, therefore, concerned with helping people to gain a sense of who they
are, and to act autonomously and critically in the world. These broader concerns tend to be overlooked
in many discussions of technology and education.

External imperatives The sense that the increased use of digital technology elsewhere in society
necessitates the increased use of technology in education. Commonly cited ‘external’ imperatives
include the workforce demands of business and industry, as well as the increasing requirement for
people to be able to use digital technology in order to participate in society and act as citizens.

Flipped classroom The use of digital technologies to allow students to engage with instructive
materials (such as lectures, set readings, tests) outside of the classroom. The most common is the use
of digital video and digital readings. Teachers are then free to use face-to-face lessons to focus on
student- centred activities such as problem-solving, group-work, discussion, discovery-led research
and personalised support and guidance.

Formal learning The institutionally sponsored provision of learning – that is, learning that is structured
and often assessed and credentialised. There is a

wide range of formal education, most obviously the compulsory forms of school-based learning for
children and young people. Similar types of formal post-compulsory learning also exist through
colleges, universities and various types of distance education. Formal education can also be found
outside of schools and universities, in adult education and work-based training settings.
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Informal learning Learning that occurs during the course of everyday life. Informal learning usually is
not classroom-based, and has no curriculum, assessment or formal ‘teacher’. Informal learning is
unstructured, and controlled by the individual learner. Common forms of informal learning include
work-based ‘learning on the job’ as well as learning that is stimulated by general interests, pursuits
and hobbies.

Internal imperatives The idea that digital technology has a clear capacity to improve many aspects of
education. Common forms of ‘internal’ imperatives for the increased use of digital technology within
schools and universities include supporting better forms of teaching and learning, supporting the
administrative and bureaucratic work of educators and making educational institutions more efficient
and productive.

Learning The acquisition of new skills and new forms of knowledge and understanding. Many theories
of learning developed during the first decades of the twentieth century conceptualised learning as an
end product or outcome – for example, a distinct change in behaviour or thinking. More recently,
learning is understood to also involve individuals making sense of who they are and developing an
understanding of the world in which they live. From this perspective, learning can be seen as a
continuing process of ‘participation’ rather than a discrete instance of ‘acquisition’.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) Online platforms for information and resource sharing, as well
as the organisation of curriculum and pedagogy. In essence, these systems replicate the main
functions of the classroom and school/university in digital form. These systems support the provision
of learning content and other resources; communication between students, teachers and
administrators; the submission and assessment of coursework; and the monitoring of learning
progress.

Life-long learning The idea that education encompasses not only the compulsory phases of schooling
but also education and training throughout the life-course. Life-long learning describes the different
forms and modes of learning that individuals engage in during distinct stages of their life (ranging from
workplace training requirements through to hobby-related learning in older age). A related concept is
‘life-wide learning’ – describing how an individual’s learning is likely to be situated across a number of
contexts at

any time, such as employment, formal education, community and family. Massive Open Online Course
(MOOC) MOOCs are courses provided to masses of online students for little or no cost. These often
involve the use of

video lectures accompanied by online quizzes and discussion spaces. Through the rise of providers
such as Udacity, edX, Coursera and Futurelearn, MOOCs offer university-affiliated courses to classes
of thousands of students at a time.

Matthew Effect A way of describing the tendency for technology to benefit most of those who are
already engaged and advantaged. In other words, while digital technologies might increase
opportunities for individuals who are well resourced, motivated and already educated, such benefits
tend to be experienced unevenly across the general population. The term ‘Matthew Effect’ refers to
a passage in the gospel of Matthew: ‘For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have
more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away.’

Open Educational Resources (OER) The open education resource movement supports free access to
information in the form of web-based digital resources for learning, teaching and research. These
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resources are usually placed in the public domain at no cost for free use or repurposing by others.
These resources can range from full courses to individual lessons or sessions. The idea of OERs relates
to the broader philosophies of ‘open source’ software development, as well as philosophies of ‘open
education’ and ‘open society’.

Personalised learning Using digital technology to arrange educators around the needs, interests and
circumstances of individuals. Efforts to support personalisation of education through technology tend
to focus on issues of either decision making or customisation of content. Whereas many technologies
support individuals in making decisions about their learning, other recent developments have explored
the possibility that these decisions might be best made by the technology itself. For example, analytics
and adaptive systems have been developed to adapt individuals’ engagement with learning content
according to their specific needs, capabilities and past performance.

Personalised Learning Environment (PLE) The idea of a ‘personalised learning environment’ relates to
the ways in which people use assortments of online tools and resources to obtain information, interact
with others, create their own content and publish their work. A personalised learning environment
(PLE) is an online space where these digital activities and materials can be aggregated. PLEs allow
individuals to develop and reflect on their learning and connect with other like-minded individuals. In
this sense, PLEs are conceived as a means of helping individuals to take responsibility for organising
educational activities in more connected and collaborative ways.

Remediation The idea that technological change tends to take place in incremental terms. In other
words, digital technologies are understood as reconfiguring educational processes and practices. This
is not to say that ‘new’ digital forms replace and usurp all practices and processes that have gone
before. Often, ‘new’ technologies in education retain many elements and traces of older technologies.
As such, ‘new’ digital activities often borrow from, and refashion, preceding technologies.

Reschooling The idea that digital technology necessitates the reconfiguration and reinvention of what
‘school’ is. Attempts at ‘reschooling’ often involve remodelling dominant institutional structures and
organisational processes within the existing physical and spatial environments of schools and
universities. In other words, while new schools and universities may look the same from the outside,
what goes on within them is substantially different from before.

SAMR SAMR describes teachers’ integration of technology in terms of four possible levels. The first
are the levels of ‘Substitution’ and ‘Augmentation’, where technology use enhances what a teacher
was already doing. More substantial, however, are the levels of ‘Modification’ and ‘Redefinition’,
where technology could be said to be transforming what the teacher was already doing. These uses of
technology allow different forms of learning tasks to take place (and by extension, can lead to different
forms of learning). Here, technology could be said to be supporting teachers to do things that they
would be unable to do without the technology.

Social media Online platforms and applications that depend on the collective efforts of their users.
These technologies are distinguished by their capacity to support forms of ‘mass socialisation’. Many
of the most popular social media platforms and applications rely on openly shared ‘user-generated’
content that is authored, curated, critiqued and reconfigured by a mass of users. In this way, social
media bring an interactive and participatory ethos to the way that digital technologies are used.

Social shaping of technology A way of understanding the relationship between social change and
technology. From this perspective, the nature and form of any technology is subjected to continual
interactions and ‘negotiations’ with the social, economic, political and cultural contexts that it emerges
131
into. Understanding technology as ‘socially shaped’ allows us to ask questions about the large number
of factors that influence the design, development, production, marketing, implementation and ‘end
use’ of

technology.
Socio-cultural theories of learning Theories of learning that are rooted in the

work of psychologists like Lev Vygotsky. Socio-cultural accounts tend to focus on the social and cultural
nature of learning. Vygotsky saw most human action as involving what he called ‘cultural tools’ and
resources (such as language or writing). Socio-cultural accounts describe learning with cultural tools
as being highly social and often informal in nature. The act of learning a particular skill or
understanding specific cultural and social practices is seen to be a largely tacit process, involving an
individual imitating what is observed from the actions of others.

Technical fix The tendency to see technology as a means of solving problems that are non-
technological in nature. While technology is often associated with positive changes, there is a danger
in assuming that digital technology has the ability to overcome deep-rooted problems (a viewpoint
that can be characterised as ‘solutionism’). Instead, technologies tend to produce uneven results,
rarely ending in similar outcomes for all of the population and often replacing one social problem with
another. At best, technology-based interventions tend to deal only with the surface manifestations of
a problem rather than its roots.

Technological determinism The commonplace assumption that technology is a primary force that
determines the nature of society. Technology is seen as an autonomous force that drives social
progress and changes in society. Whatever we do, we cannot stop technology having a certain and
inevitable effect on our lives. Despite its popularity, technological determinism is felt by some critical
commentators to be a reductive way of understanding technology and society.

Technology In a basic sense, technology is the process by which humans modify nature to meet their
needs and wants. Usually, technology is described in terms of humans’ ongoing use of tools to adapt
and control their environment, and also to improve existing forms of living. This emphasis on ‘doing
things better’ implies that the term ‘technology’ refers to more than just the material tools and
artefacts that are used to do something. In this sense, the term ‘technology’ has also encompassed
the processes and practices of doing things, understanding things and developing knowledge.

TPACK A model explaining how teachers integrate technology into their teaching in terms of the
different kinds of knowledge that are involved. This distinguishes ‘content knowledge’ (i.e. specific
subject matter), ‘pedagogic knowledge’ of generic practices and methods of teaching (i.e.
independent of content knowledge), and also ‘technology’ as a distinct domain of knowledge that
requires to be combined with these aspects of teaching. The TPACK model attempts to make sense of
the different forms of knowledge that teachers draw on when they integrate technology into their
classrooms.

132
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Index

ahistoricism here, here

analogue, definition of here–here
Apple, Michael here, here, here
artifact, technology as here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here,

here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here artificial intelligence here, here, here, here, here,
here, here assessment here, here, here, here, here, here, here

barriers, to technology and education here, here, here, here–here behaviorist theories of learning
here, here, here–here, here, here, here

Biesta, Gert here, here, here

blended use of technology here, here
blogging here, here
Bloom’s taxonomy here
broadcast mode of information exchanges here, here, here–here

classroom here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here,
here, here–here, here

cognitivist theories of learning here–here, here, here

commercial interests here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here communities of practice
here–here
computer assisted instruction here–here, here, here, here, here
computer games here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here connected learning here–
here, here, here, here–here, here, here connectivism here–here, here, here, here
connectivity here, here, here, here, here, here
constructionist theories of education here–here, here, here, here, here, here constructivist theories
of education here–here, here, here, here, here contextualist account of history here–here, here

149
convergence here, here
Cuban, Larry here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,

here, here
curriculum here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,

here, here

deschooling here–here, here, here deskilling here, here, here

digital, definition of here–here, here

287

digital badges here–here, here

disruption, disruptive innovation here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here,

here, here, here–here drill-and-practice software here, here, here

Edison, Thomas here–here, here

education policy here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here email here
equality here–here

film here–here
flipped classroom here, here, here
formal learning here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Galloway, Alexander here, here, here, here gender here, here, here, here
Google here, here

hardware here, here, here, here, here

history, of technology use in education here, here–here, here, here, here, here,

here–here, here

Illich, Ivan here, here–here, here

individualisation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here,

here–here
industrial era’ education here, here, here, here, here
informal learning here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here interactive whiteboard
here, here, here, here
internet here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,

here, here, here, here–here, here, here iPad here, here, here
Ito, Mimi here–here

knowledge here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here– here, here, here–here,
here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Kozma, Robert here–here, here

150
learning management system here, here, here, here, here, here lifelong learning here, here, here,
here, here
Logo here, here

macro, level of analysis here, here, here, here Maker movement here, here
mastery learning here, here, here
Matthew effect here, here

meritocratic here, here, here, here

micro computing here–here
MOOCs here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here

neurology/brain here–here, here, here new, notion of here, here, here–here

288

open here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here

paperless office here–here

Papert, Seymour here–here, here–here, here, here, here
parents here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here pedagogy here, here, here–
here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here,

here–here, here, here, here, here, here

performativity here, here
Personalised here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here,

here–here, here
Postman, Neil here–here, here, here, here Prensky, Marc here, here, here, here
problem solving here, here, here, here, here, here

radio here, here–here

remediation here, here
resistance, to technology use here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here,

here
robots here, here, here, here–here, here

scaffolding here–here, here, here

school, as organisation here–here, here–here
School of the Air here–here
simulation here–here, here, here, here, here, here
skills here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here,

here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here Skinner, B. F. here–here,
here, here, here
social media here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,

here, here
social milieu, of technology use here, here, here

151
social shaping here, here, here, here, here, here, here
socio-cultural, theories of learning here–here, here, here–here, here, here socio-economic status
here, here, here

teachers here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here,
here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here– here

teaching machine here, here, here–here, here, here

technological determinism here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here technology, definition of
here–here, here
television here–here
textbook here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

university here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here

virtual here, here, here

virtual schooling here, here, here, here virtual worlds here, here

Vygotsky, Lev here, here

289

Wikipedia here

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Title: Education and technology: key issues and debates / Neil Selwyn. Description: Second edition. |
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