Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age: A Critical Analysis

by Neil Selwyn

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

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

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

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

Genres: Education

194 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Neil Selwyn is a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has worked for the past 25 years researching the integration of digital technology into schools, universities and adult learning. He is recognised as a leading international researcher in the area of digital education - with particular expertise in the 'real-life' constraints and problems faced when technology-based education is implemented. He is currently working on nationally-funded projects examining the roll-out of educational data and learning analytics, AI technologies, and the changing nature of teachers' digital work.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is getting a little bit old now, I guess, but I still felt it gave a really useful overview of many of the issues around the promises (and over-promises) of technology in the classroom. There has been a kind of revolution spoken about in the application of digital technologies within classrooms, but this hasn’t involved as much of a change in how teachers teach as has been the case in a range of other industries. In part, the author here says that this might be due to the fact that in education people speak of ‘integrating’ digital technologies—but that in other industries no one really talks about integration. He quotes someone along the way who said that no one ever suggested ‘integrating’ the internal combustion engine into a horse. And this is a central idea of technological revolutions—that they are revolutions in the sense that they don’t do what has always been done before, but rather fundamentally change what has always been done, even if in doing so you still end up with ‘the same’ outputs.

This certainly has not been the experience in education or schooling. The author says that many of the ways in which technology has been integrated into classrooms has been around two major aspects of education. One might be seen as peripheral, that is, in the management of administrative tasks both of students themselves (in keeping data about their work, learning and so on), but also in managing teachers and their work within the classroom too. This has become a much larger concern for school systems, particularly as society has increasingly degraded the work of teachers, both by mandating so much of what they are expected to perform in the classroom, but also in the plummeting levels of respect shown towards teachers and the teaching profession across society more generally.

The other role of technology in the classroom has also been mostly around presentation. So, digital white boards and digital data projectors. And while these provide a very useful service—if you have ever taught, the benefits of these technologies are immediately obvious—it would be hard to argue that they have brought about a fundamental change in the way teachers teach. That is, in education speak, a change in the pedagogies that teachers use in their classrooms. Because, if technology is going to make a fundamental change to how schooling works, then ultimately that will involve a change in pedagogy, rather than in how information is displayed.

Many people are opposed to schools and schooling—but this used to be limited to people on the left. The de-schooling movement of the 1970s was concerned that the ‘industrial’ model of schooling that had existed for the last couple of hundred years was mostly designed to ensure people were ready to work within factories. So, just enough reading and mathematics, but really, the main point of schooling was to instil in people the regimens necessary for them to mindlessly follow instructions within workplaces and to respond to the demands of punctual attendance. Schools teach us all to march in step—there has always been a counter-movement seeking to encourage learning outside of that. As I said, that used to be mostly on the left, but home schooling and the promise of de-schooling more generally seems to have become more closely associated with the right now. And digital technologies appear to offer exactly that. Students seem to be placed in a position where they can be taught by ‘the best’ in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) where you can learn at your own pace and watch video lectures presented by some of the best presenters of this course material available. If you need to hear something explained again, that explanation is just a reverse button away, as many times as you need it. The problem is that it isn’t clear that these courses work for all that many people in society. In fact, something I read a while ago said that the people likely to do well in these courses—courses which have appalling attrition rates—are those who would have done well in face-to-face courses. That is, people who already have the academic skills that will allow them to succeed anyway.

Since this book has been written there has been a movement towards platform applications in education—which is something that the book anticipates. Again, these platforms have their own pedagogical affordances, they encourages particular ways of learning, but also make other ways of learning almost impossible. This is one of the things that Edward Tufte makes all too clear in his fascinating pamphlet 'The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint'. That is, that PowerPoint as a platform application encourages hierarchical thinking—thinking in headings and multiple levels of dot points—and this can place a straitjacket on creativity and make it virtually impossible to ‘think outside the slide’. It also discourages the teacher from being side-tracked by student interest, something you might otherwise think would be central to teaching and learning.

Many of the books I’ve read about the use of technology in classrooms have been mostly concerned that this is essentially Bill Gates being evil and seeking to impose digitalisation so he can make money from (and commodify) schooling. Don’t get me wrong, this is certainly the case, but the author here feels how technology is used in schools is never going to be the primary focus of the Microsofts of the world, but rather that they are likely to continue to encourage the use of their already existing 'business' applications—Word, Excel, PowerPoint and so on—and so education will probably remain a bit of a side hustle for the tech-giants.

But that’s basically the problem. While it is a side-hustle, it is unlikely that applications will be developed that will meet the demands of a pedagogical revolution. These applications will always be ‘someone else’s tools’ that are shoehorned into the classroom. That is, integrated, like fitting a combustion engine into a horse. I’m not going to pretend I can see how best to bring about a real digital revolution in education, but it will require a focus on pedagogy, rather than on technology, per se.

The digital learning revolution is likely to be a bit like all capitalist revolutions—that is, involve a standardisation, simplification and massification of production. And that will involve moving away from the ‘craft’ of teaching towards the conveyor belt of standardised inputs and precision outputs. None of which sounds particularly appealing if you are a teacher. To date, too much of the digital technology that has been brought into the classroom has been to increase the surveillance of teachers and their students. As he says at one point in this, such surveillance encourages ‘defensive pedagogies’—where the teacher and their students do just enough to stay just above the surface, but not so high above the surface as to be noticed and have their head removed.

In a world where teaching and learning has become reduced to the demands of high stakes tests, where teachers are provided overcrowded curricula to teach, where their pedagogical practices are monitored, sometimes even filmed, where they are sometimes assessed according to the scores of their students, the use of technology in the classroom is likely to reinforce these practices. And we will all be worse off as a consequence. Until technology is understood as a ‘tool’ rather than ‘the means to provide a real turn around in student attainment’ there are strong grounds for becoming an educational Luddite.

[Agie Soegiono · Rating 4 out of 5]

The same author Selwyn puts the educational technology (edtech) debates into micro cases, at the level of school! In general, this book examines what best schools should do to respond edtech hegemony.

The promises of edtech, mostly run by private corporations, seem successful in assuring the government to put more concerns on technology installation and implementation in education policy agenda. For techno-determinists, edtech is promoted as the quick-fix solution for education problems. The taken-for-granted gimmicks then occur. Computers are now regarded to be ‘must-be-available furniture’ in class, the installation of interactive whiteboards is seen as a symbol of transformation, if not exaggerated, current ideal teaching and learning. Today, something is lacking whenever teaching does not involve any digital technology usage.

This is the most interesting point made in the book: edtech features and schooling principles are contradictory! On the one hand, edtech promotes liberalisation of learning in the form of personalisation. Learners are free to learn whatever they want, whenever they want, from whomever they might suit them. These are possible because of edtech features, especially for today’s digital learning platforms – MOOC, EOR, LMS, you name it.

On the other hand, the curricula of schooling are formed to run in ‘pre-information age’ of thinking, resulting rigid and structured learning. School itself is a fixed organization (if I may call, education bureaucracy) that runs with standardised and inflexible nature. Knowing these two paradigms – according to the author – is nearly impossible to optimise features of technology if operated in school.

So what has driven the call for massive edtech installation? As you guess, it is the political economy of edtech players who aim to seek enormous possibilities in school market. Edtech is today’s access for private sector involvement in school.

[Michael Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very excited to see this book, as it asks a lot of very important questions, looking at the implementation of technology in schools through concepts of power, politics, equality, social justice, etc. Selwyn challenges the tacit view that somehow digital technology lies in some rarified space outside of society, culture and politics and, with this neutrality, can be transformative of education.

This is an important challenge, as digital technology is a cultural artefact, designed, developed, sold and implemented in particular sociocultural contexts, which reflect and recreate certain power dynamics. It is only in teasing those out into the open that the failure of the promise of digital technology in schools can start to be dealt with. Selwyn wants to tease out those dynamics in the "messy reality" of compulsory education within various contexts such as the lived experiences of teachers and pupils, policy making, school organizational concerns, public v private trends etc.

He attempts to make the case that whatever the intentions of the those implementing digital technology in schools, in practice, the variety of power/political and social agendas stymie the potential.

My only personal frustrations with the book is that he seems to think that these are the only reasons for the failure of technology implementations. Sometimes it can be (at least partly and not particularly sociologically interesting), bad implementation, bad project management, bad purchasing. I get the impression the schools and teachers can do no wrong. Even stranger for me (I've not read Selwyn before), is that he starts the book saying, "I'm not anti Tech. Honest Guv!" (not a direct quote!)He seems to have been criticised for being a Luddite. However, it is hard to see a positive view of technology in his book. It feels like his fundamental position is that most tech comes from private capital, which is only there for itself, embedding and recreating its own position. His only major positive view is around the use of open source, which in my opinion in weakly argued. (Will be interesting to hear other views).