Is Educational Technology Killing or Liberating Our Souls?
Simon Buckland, US
Simon Buckland is the Director of Curriculum Development for Wall Street Institute International. He has been involved for many years in both technology-assisted language learning and personal development, and lives in Washington, DC.
E-mail: SBuckland@wallstreetinstitute.com
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Preamble: when analogue ruled the world
Language educators and their relationship with technology
The extended human
So what is an enabling technology?
Towards an ecology of e-learning
References
In my very first teaching job my duties included toughening up the students by exposing them to so-called “fluency drills” in a hugely expensive and (literally) clunky language lab. When all 20 open-reel tape players slammed to a halt at the same time, they sounded like a regiment of giants standing to attention in a cooking utensil factory. As for the drills, they contained
delights along the lines of Martin would have come to the séance if he hadn’t had to go and see his aunt in Harrogate (Susan, rodeo, father, Aberystwyth) Susan would have come to the rodeo if she hadn’t had to go and see her father in Aberystwyth.
Not that I ever had much chance to assess their educational value, as hitting the stop button on the console almost invariably caused one or more of the players to spew miles of tape all over the floor. This resulted in five or ten minutes of frantic re-spooling, while the students twiddled their thumbs or chatted to each other in Arabic.
What, I wonder, was their “take-away” from these sessions? I imagine that they were duly awed by our mighty technology, unfamiliar and in their faces as it was, but I doubt that its relevance to learning English as they understood it was all that obvious. Impersonal, authoritarian, and mechanistic without even possessing the reliability of a good mechanism, that language lab embodied everything which has often led educators to reject technology altogether, and to favor pedagogies which, they would argue, celebrate and enhance individual dignity and self-worth.
This rejection or at least deep mistrust of technology on the part of educators has, I think two separate origins, which are often conflated in a way which tends to muddy the waters of debate and discussion:
The first strand is a mistrust of technological civilization and its effect on our sensibilities and relationships which goes back to the early Industrial Revolution, and the fear of writers like Blake and Wordsworth that the emerging culture was separating men from their authentic selves, rooted in nature. Similar observations are found in many more recent writers: John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent, hero of the eponymous novel, imagines “… his escape into a world where machinery could not reach him, his escape into a deep, green, lovely world, where thoughts unfolded themselves like large, beautiful leaves, growing out of fathoms of blue-green water.” (Wolf’s struggle against the creeping mechanization of human life in the 1920s is one of the novel’s main themes.) Language teachers, educated largely in humanities faculties, are culturally and temperamentally inclined to sympathize with and share such views.
To this “neo-Romantic” strand we should add a second, more political, strand, emerging from the work of radical educators such is Ivan Illich and Paolo Freire, which tends to see educational technology, especially as imposed by corporations and ministries of education, as an instrument of social and class domination. Although, as Kahn and Kellner (Kahn and Kellner 2007) point out in their survey of the field, Freire and Illich’s ideas have been surprisingly absent from recent discussions of educational technology, critical pedagogy, which owes a good deal in its origins to Freire particularly, has played a crucial part in the growing socio-cultural “movement” within TESOL/TEFL.
It’s fair to say, though, that advocates of situated learning today are unlikely to condemn educational technology wholesale; they’re far more inclined to examine critically the ways in which it’s used and presented. (Warschauer 2004). And, to return for a moment to the pioneers, it’s interesting that Freire towards the end of his life was concerned “… that most people… have neither the ability to produce a computer, nor even to manufacture or manipulate the software… [and that this] was … antidemocratic and dangerously unparticipatory.” (quoted in Kahn and Kellner 2007)
So presumably Freire, who was far from a Luddite, would have endorsed recently developed tools such as wikis, blogs, etc., which democratize the creation of digital content in a way which was unthinkable in the days of Visual Basic and C++. As a result, the Internet itself has become considerably more varied and participatory than Denise Goodwin (Goodwin 2000) observed in her (relatively) recent critique of technological triumphalism.
Developing Illich’s and Freire’s analyses of power relations in education, then, and updating them for the world of 2009, might lead us to contrast “convivial” and “enabling” technologies which enhance people’s ability to take charge of their own lives with “dominating” and “alienating” technologies which enhance authority’s ability to control people. (What we would put into each bucket, of course, is another question.)
Buckets and their contents aside, what’s the bearing of all this on language learning? Why bring even a digital flavor into classrooms full of real, live and totally analogue people – unless it’s to add a spurious note of up-to-dateness to an activity which is often seen as fuddy-duddy and old-fashioned?
One very banal and basic reason is that we should presumably be teaching English in the contexts in which our students are going to use it; just as blackboard-and-chalk teaching made perfect sense in a pen-and-paper world, but doesn’t now. We only have to go back as little as 20 years (i.e. to the time when most textbook authors and many practicing teachers were trained) to find a world where many forms of interaction common today were unimaginable: no email, no websites, no mobile phones, no low-cost airlines, no cable or satellite TV, etc. etc. Note that I’m not primarily talking about technologies here, but about forms and contexts of communication – in the second as in the first language.
Evidently, the more remote the “learning world” we create for our students is from the world which they inhabit in the rest of their lives, the more likely they are to reject it – or at least, the more incumbent it becomes upon us to infuse our artificial learning worlds with deeper and different values: a challenge which is probably beyond many of us and in any case often infeasible in the contexts in which we actually work.
But there’s a inherently good reason for us to embrace at least those technologies which extend our possibilities as educators in the same way as they extend us as communicators. And, without necessarily waiting for the go-ahead from academics and theorists, that’s precisely what many pioneering teachers have been doing. Using social networking and other Web 2.0 tools, so many teachers that it would be invidious to name individuals have extended their classrooms into cyberspace, and used the Internet to set up and mediate virtual international “communities of practice” – and many students seem to be enthusiastic participants, even if evidence of learning success is thin on the ground so far.
However, these Web 2.0 materials and communities are very far from being the main exemplars of educational technology in ELT; on the contrary, the vast majority of technology-based content present more or less “canned language lessons” via the Internet or, just as likely, via CD-ROM – I’m thinking of products such as Rosetta Stone, Longman Interactive English, Englishtown, ELLIS and innumerable others. So how should we view such materials in the light of the foregoing discussion?
(At this point I should declare a personal interest, as a developer of blended learning systems I’m a strong believer in the value of these kinds of materials, in a context which also includes plenty of face-to-face – or at least webcam-to-webcam – interaction)
There is, to be fair, a potential pedagogic objection to these types of material: generally products of the CD-ROM era or at least pre-Web 2.0, they embody a top-down and arguably mechanistic view of learning (the instructional designer providing an expert’s optimal sequencing and blend of content), as opposed to the situated learning paradigm, where the learner negotiates and builds communicative capability through a range of meaning-rich interactions. A strong adherent of the social-cultural model of learning might well reject “canned learning” of this sort without even going into the political and aesthetic objections discussed at the start of this article.
However, there’s surprising little such criticism in the literature: generally the only writers dealing extensively with educational technology are enthusiasts for it in all its forms, even while acknowledging its limitations. Robert Godwin-Jones (Godwin-Jones 2007), for instance, writes “… self-correcting computer drills seem inconsistent with the current model of communicative language learning based on meaningful task-based interactions with the language. Yet such exercises continue to be created and used and can still play a useful role…”. Even more gung-ho, Christensen, Johnson and Horn (Christensen, Johnson and Horn 2008) argue that the possibilities of “student-centered” (i.e. customized) learning greatly outweigh any disadvantages resulting from a loss of socialization in the “electronically disrupted” schools of the future. Unsurprisingly, they give little or no space to radical critiques of top-down and profit-motivated technological innovation, preferring to believe that treating students as consumers will automatically liberate and empower them.
Part of the problem here is that terms like “personal” and “enabling” are meaningless except within a specific context: one person’s or group’s “enablement” may be at the expense of another person or group (the use of the automobile provides plenty of examples). To take an even more extreme example, the invasion of Iraq was very “enabling” for Halliburton, Bechtel and other large corporations, while it was clearly less so for the American taxpayer – not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their lives.
To come back to language learning: I’ve spoken to many people (in the USA) who have praised Rosetta Stone as a fun and painless way of preparing for a trip abroad. As an instructional designer, I’m somewhat critical of their pedagogical approach and their choice of syllabus, but no one can argue with the basic premise that they’ve come up with an enabling technology – literally – and their omnipresent marketing is an important facet of this. If RS didn’t exist, or they hadn’t heard of it, its customers wouldn’t be flocking to community colleges for French or Italian classes or creating learning wikis together; they simply wouldn’t be studying at all.
Just as there’s always been a place for professionally published materials alongside teachers’ own creations within the overall ecology of language learning, exactly the same goes for the electronic world of the 21st century: teachers can’t realistically create highly structured and sequenced rich-media content, any more than publishers can or should try to generate or even to seed online learning communities. And now, as always, the vast majority of practicing teachers don’t aspire to spend their leisure time creating new learning materials or online with their students: for them, pragmatists far more than cognitivists or constructivists, it’s enough if the pre-packaged materials they work with provide a space for them to make their own unique contribution to the learning process, however they might conceptualize it.
And in conclusion, what of the John Cowper Powys viewpoint? I’m sure that – as a teacher himself – he would have abhorred educational technology, and would have considered it ‘disruptive’ in the traditional pejorative sense rather than with the positive connotation that it’s acquired recently.
It’s realty not for me to say here whether adopting these new learning and teaching platforms makes us in a deep sense less human, or whether there’s a trade-off in which we acquire new sensibilities and capabilities as older ones fall away – or even, perhaps, that technology is remaking us into a new type of human being; this is a matter for the individual reader to decide for him or herself..
We should at least recognize and celebrate the possibility for individuals to access forms and types of learning which they previously couldn’t – and that, particularly in the post-formal education sector where I work, this is a more or less unconditioned choice. Where informed individuals are able to choose among a range of alternative modes of learning, we should have confidence in them to act in a way which will enhance rather than limit their own possibilities
Murray, D. (2000).
Changing technologies, changing literacy communities?
Language Learning & Technology Vol. 4, No. 2
Kahn, R. & Kellner, D. (2007)
Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich: technology, politics and the reconstruction of education
Policy Futures in Education, Volume 5, Number 4
Siemens, G. (2008)
Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers
Presented to ITFORUM; available at http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Paper105/Siemens.pdf
Powys, J.C.
Wolf Solent.
Originally published 1927; currently available from Vintage Books
Godwin-Jones, R. (2007)
Tools and trends in self-paced language instruction
Language Learning & Technology, Volume 11 Number 2
Warschauer, M. (2004)
Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide
MIT Press, October 2004
Christensen, C.; Johnson, C.W.; Horn, M.B.
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns
McGraw-Hill 2008
Please check the How to Use Technology in the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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