“We need to ask, ‘who benefits?’ in any of the visions of the future we are offered or that we are working towards” (Facer, p. 9)
Sometimes I find myself being A Little Bit Concerned.
And the more time I spend in the e-learning / digital tech space, the more these niggling worries draw me towards ethical issues related to the use of technologies for learning.
This post is not an either/or debate about whether or not we should use technologies for learning – that horse has bolted and the advantages almost definitely outweigh the disadvantages. But I find myself musing more often on how we choose, discuss, advocate and share ideas related to the ethical use of digital technologies.
Recently, I have been reading and watching a whole bunch of aligned ideas which are influencing my thoughts…
- Audrey Watters’ polemic on Twitter on the future of edtech
- Terms and conditions may apply (2013): “A documentary that exposes what corporations and governments learn about people through Internet and cell phone usage…”
- Free is a lie: Aral Balkan’s articulate unpacking of the notion that many of the technologies we use are ’free’…
- Lawsuit against Google highlights mining of student data
- Quinn Norton’s ‘Everything is Broken’ essay
- Only openness frees innovation (Wired)
These pieces, in some ways, are quite different, but all are highlighting the way we engage as people, citizens, educators with technology in the context for both our personal use, learning and formalised education. There’s the allure of the apps, the next gen device, the possibly misplaced desire to be a ‘Google Gl***hole’. What is queried here is the cost in terms of data ownership, the increasing corporatisation of edu-tech, the veneer of security and safety and ‘free’ that the proliferation of devices appears to promise.
It is common for schools to plunge wholesale into single device selection (“We are a Chromebook school”). The use of dashboards for the management of students’ work (and, by implication, the management of students?) is gaining in popularity and yet the debate around open data, open source, power sharing with students/families and democracy is only heard in pockets amongst a few schools and educators.
Learning is a hectic business, on the whole. Time-poor schools, often looking to keep up, catch up, get connected, get networked, are sometimes making decisions based as much on expediency as on implications for involvement in global corporations, networks, device loyalty for young learners and so on…
I’m not wanting to get busy with my Makerspace soldering kit crafting a wee tinfoil hat just yet. But I do think, despite all the hustle and bustle of education technological provision, we need to ‘look up’ to consider what the ethical implications might be for ourselves, our learners. We need to make time to reflect on our vision for education in the future, to “[see] our developing socio-technical knowledge as the product of choices and intentions rather than as a disembodied inevitable and unstoppable force” (Facer, p 71)
In her book exploring learning futures, Keri Facer focuses on the way in which modern education could be preparing young people to not only engage with technology but question it and evaluate it because:
“We are being encouraged not to pay attention to the way we are interacting with computers and to get on with our lives instead, while the systems we are using to connect us to each other gather data and filter our information landscape on our behalf.” (Facer, p. 66)
Are we those boiling frogs? Sheep? Lemmings? Does it matter? At the end of the day, we may still choose to buy into the global corporations, driven by affluent middle class males in Silicon Valley, but we should do so as knowingly as we can.
And there are other ways. Consider open source schooling. Consider open systems. Consider designing learning that fosters inquiry into the nature of the tools we use. Debate. Question. We have choices. Don’t we?
Some questions to ponder:
- How well do we understand the long-term discourse around the use of technologies in education? (Think Cuban, Oppenheimer, Turkle, Carr…)
- To what extent do our schools’ line up their vision for learning with their choice of technological solutions?
- What are the ‘terms and conditions’ in relation to the access and use of student data, by corporations but also by teachers themselves?
- How can we scaffold deep discussion in our school communities around the opportunities and constraints of our use of digital technologies?
- ‘Free your mind’ by Michael [CC BY-NC 2.0]
- ‘They walked this way’ by Ricardo Mendonca Ferreira [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]