Is Technology Good for Education? (Digital Futures)

This is a great book to think of the great debate around technology being a change agent and qualifier in education. I’m curious how the period of online/distance learning changes the debate.

This is a good place to find the questions on this area collected together. Fit those of us in colleges and universities the issues in k-12 are both revealing and a distraction. This is compounded by ignoring the history of the impact of similar changes in culture and its impact on education like the printing press....

“Is Technology Good for Education?”, from Polity’s “Digital Futures” series, is written by Neil Selwyn to provoke discussion and to play devil’s advocate about the oft-hyped role of digital technologies in education in the 21st century. Mr. Selwyn is Professor at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia and leans decidedly left. He is concerned with social equity in education and the how digital technologies may impact education for typically underachieving segments of the population. But Selwyn does not confine his discussion to that topic. After introducing the idea of “digital education”, both its literal and ideological implications, he lays out the claims of digital advocates and the reasons to be skeptical in four chapters. Selwyn offers three suggestions for the future of technology in education in his final chapter.Selwyn states that “technology is undoubtedly an integral aspect of contemporary education,” but he is skeptical in the face of claims that digital technologies will change education as we know it, make it more democratic, more personalized, more calculable, and more commercial. He asks the fundamental question: “To what extent is digital technology really changing education –and is this always in our best interests?” The last 40 years of educational technology has had very little impact. To answer the second question: probably not. The motives of commercial interests that promote technology in education are undisguised. But Selwyn fears that so many people dismiss the grandiose claims of digital advocates that they miss the fact that these ideas are taken seriously by policy-makers.So he breaks it down: The claim that digital technologies make education more accessible to everyone –Selwyn argues that they increase participation but don’t widen it beyond those who are already engaged. The claim that digital technologies make education more personalized, enhancing its effectiveness in the estimation of humanist psychology –Selwyn argues that there are strict limits on how personalized it can be. The claim that the ability to aggregate huge quantities of data can improve education –Selwyn argues that it is difficult to measure what you actually intend and value, and you risk valuing only what you can measure. The claim that an expanding role for commercial interests in education is a good thing –Selwyn points out the influence of the “California capitalism” (Silicon Valley) ideology and wonders if it suits an educational environment.Selwyn’s arguments are more complex and varied than the above summary but not so detailed that you could use this book to debate the topic. His intent is to let us know what the debate is about. He’s underwhelmed by the impact of digital technologies on education. Their advocates have made big promises and delivered very little. He fears that digital technologies risk widening the gap in educational achievement between the affluent and the underprivileged. His discussion of students having more control over their own education and plotting their own course in a personalized digital environment was interesting to me. I attended an alternative high school in the 1980s that was founded on similar principles in the early 1970s. The school was very good for some students but not suitable for everyone. My point is that there may already be data on some of these “new” ideas for education.

‘Digital Futures is an educational movement seeking to harness the expertise of the industry to train and employ the young innovators, makers and doers of tomorrow – today.’That is the opening proclamation of what I suppose I can call their Mission Statement. Neil Selwyn is an Australian academic with a prolific output of writings on the subject of education vs digital technology. What he has produced on this occasion is impressive in many ways, but not least in keeping his analysis of the intricate interactions of these topics clear to a reader without being patronising at the same time, and covering a wide gamut of arguments and reasoning within 160 pages of ‘main’ text.What Selwyn gives as his basic purpose is to ‘shift the nature of the conversation.’ He is ‘taking stock’ apparently, rather than trying to rock any boats or propose novelties, and I find that a fair description of what he has succeeded in doing, if only he had been less repetitious about the shortcomings of other discussions. These, after all, are explicitly ruled out of further discussion by himself, so just get on with that. One very important point is enunciated near the start, and it is that digital information and its capacity to broadcast teachings that were once jealously restricted within the four walls of this or that university or college is sounding the eventual death-knell of precisely these institutions.I could of course be mistaken, but I seemed to find very few if any occurrences of the word ‘information’, often inseparable from discussion of digital matters. In general Selwyn steers his way deftly through the standard vocabulary, but I felt that near the outset some delineation, even if rough-and-ready, of the terms information, knowledge, learning and education would have helped the reader or student on his or her way.Reading Selwyn I found my own impression reinforced where educational technology is concerned that technology is the engine and commerce is the driver, and I hope this not doing any injustice to Professor Selwyn’s own arguments. Some educational applications are indeed objectives in their own right, but more commonly they are spin-offs from the techno-commercial juggernaut. Selwyn also deals well with the very interesting question to what extent the education-related advances can be seen as something dramatic, say as ‘revolutions’. Selwyn seems to doubt this view, and for anything it may be worth so do I. What the discussion could have done with is a bit more stress on the conservative ‘undertow’ that always accompanies education, at least where human educators are involved. As a useful term capturing the ‘feel’ of this issue I rather like Selwyn’s ‘game-changer’.Digital advances in educational democracy, starting with providing the basic tools such as the computers themselves, obviously need discussion. I feel Selwyn handles this question in a sensible and level-headed manner, characteristically advising other philosophers of the topic not to get carried away. Very naturally, he progresses from this topic to the rather trickier issue of educational computing packages viewed as something that can be tailored to each student, to fit as closely as a lycra swimsuit. Here he comes near to getting off the fence, and that seems to me the right thing to do at this stage. I shall not quote Selwyn at length on this topic, but in general he seems to hit the right notes, considering that such a process implies close surveillance (he talks about ‘dataveillance’) of the student by the technology. The implication of Big Brother is only one unattractive and downright frightening kind of symbiosis that rears its head here. Ultra-individualist viewpoints cited, such as that of Mr Gingrich, are attracted to this kind of thing, but Selwyn seems not to be, a matter confirmed right at the end of the book, so I shall postpone my own comment on that until right at the end of my review. Meantime, this particular chapter has the overall heading ‘Making Education More Calculable'. Again Selwyn does not go overboard in citing some disadvantages, so I can’t quite foist on him my own view that what I used to think of as the Curse of Quantification, the craving for numbers when text would do better, is a false guide in many cases. To take a simple instance, how satisfactory is it to evaluate some book with only 5 stars as tools available to the reviewer? Myself, I more or less ignore star-ratings when I read a review and go straight to the reviewer’s own thoughts provided with all the flexibility that language can offer.I felt that a chapter on ‘Making Education More Commercial’ was hardly needed given the general tenour of the author’s arguments. There is also. as there has to be, a chapter on ‘Silicon Valley Magic’. This is liable to bamboozle all except the most adept techies, and surely in real life it must come up against what I called earlier ‘the conservative undertow’ of educators who can’t keep up with this sort of thing and so can’t communicate it to their pupils. However, to my outright astonishment, Professor Selwyn reveals his hand regarding the dispute over individual vs communal benefits of education, and here is what he says“Surely an overriding concern for the collective rather than the individual is the only way in which technology can be reckoned honestly to be ‘good’ for education? These are the values that I would prefer to see hardwired into the digital futures of education – how about you?”Me? Deal me in: deal me in.

Really easy read. Discusses up to date issues and gives a good overview of current thinking.

A very basic breakdown of Neil's core ideas. I read a lot of Neil's work for my course and I find treating this as a supplement to my weekly assignments an effective way to get ahead in our discussions.

Il testo affronta in modo equilibrato la questione dell'uso e diffusione delle tecnologie a scuola. offre spunti di riflessioni per insegnanti e docenti

An okay book for someone reading about the issue for the first time. Very repetitive.

This poses a question to which the answer may seem to be automatically in the affirmative, surely technology in education enables learning? An alternative, thought provoking view is published here.I was familiar with a little of Neil Selwyn's earlier work as Dr Selwyn has published academic articles in the early Noughties linked to my own studies a decade ago, of the value of ICT to older people and older peoples use of the Internet.Since then he has published a number of academic articles around education and technology examining the value of Facebook to students. In addition he has written an examination of whether or not young people in the Noughties were the digital natives one might expect, as well as other critical studies related to the subject of this book, the question of the value of technology to education.This book would appear to be the culmination of Selwyn's years of research on the topic; those familiar with his recent arguments on the question will find relatively few surprises.It is a relatively accessible read in which the argument is made that the use of educational technology leads to imbalances; as someone who has extensively used digital technology to personalise learning, his chapter on the topic was of particular interest to me.I'm not wholly convinced by the arguments against educational technology in personalisation personally, but that tended to be a theme that ran through the book for me.Like another reviewer, a point that has frustrated me personally in my work in education wasn't expanded on - the role of machine marking, which can be inaccurate.There were a few times when I did feel out of my depth with the arguments; some of the terminology was unfamiliar to me.However as someone who has worked in communities classed as deprived, the risks posed to such communities from the automatic embrace of technology in education outlined here really did make me stop and think, and this for me was essentially the key message of the book.