Symposium Title: Bucks, Bytes and Benefits: Accounting for New Technology Investment in Social Contexts of Learning Disadvantage

Discussion of papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 2003, Chicago, Illinois

These are all excellent talks, which raise important issues for research, technology development, teaching, and policy. I've noted my keyword for each paper, and a few phrases from my notes.

Reading Gender in the Technobiographies of Adolescents

by Kevin Leander, Dana Cammack, Beth Aplin-Rollins

Keyword: Multimediated

The paper explores the construction of identity in practice, as it develops through both time and space. It examines the differences between meatspace and cyberspace. Highlights the importance of family, discipline, shopping, and other daily activities in relation to ICT use.

Examples include Alexis who becomes more herself online, a nicer person, more talkative and Mia, who learned by "spying." (cf. "over the shoulder learning", Twidale, 2003)

ICT activities are multimediated in film, music, TV

Accounting for Latino Students' Learning: Literacies, New Technologies and Education Achievement in Five Southern Californian Schools

by Michele Knobel

Keyword: Cridition/Conteria

Michele's paper explores the issue of access. She builds on the work of Burbules and Callister (2000) who argue that effective access requires both a range of conditions that enable a person's participation and criteria shaped by personal characteristics such as the inclination or ability to participate.

The condition/criteria model provides a useful starting point, but Michele's examples push that model in interesting ways. Her studies show that more than conditions, which are mostly physical, or criteria, which are individual, there are social factors that shape ICT use. She identifies several paradoxes, such as the ways that accountability or online research practices in these schools can limit or mystify ICT's. Issues of literacy content, opportunities to learn, teacher expectations, curricula, constraints produced by the effects of accountability, etc. do not fit neatly into either conditions or criteria. I was tempted to say that we need an overlap category, such as "cridition" or "conteria".

This work parallels nicely the work of Cece Merkel (2002) on the use ICT's in homes in low-income communities, where again neither the physical setup nor the individual skills and inclinations account for the patterns of use.

Building Equitable Literate Futures: Home and School Computer-Mediated Literacy Practices and Disadvantage

by Ilana Snyder, Lawrence Angus, and Wendy Sutherland-Smith

Keyword: Consonance

Paper shows clearly that access alone is not enough, either as a policy or as a theoretical construct. Examines relations among disadvantage, literacy, and ICT's. Reports on case studies of four families in their varied use of ICT's.

Good discussion of the socialisation' of the technology ("its appropriation into existing family norms, values and lifestyles") and the relations between home and school socialisations. -

The Rhetoric and Reality of Aid: A Critical Look at Shared Responsibility

by Mark Warschauer

Keyword: Whose problem?

Mark's paper examines a project in which foreign aid is applied to promote educational technology in Egypt. He reports on three-year study examining how political, economic, and social goals led to a struggle between the donor agencies, recipient agencies, and grassroots educators in the Integrated English Language Program. The guiding question was why was the rhetoric so different from the reality.

He shows how most of the training money went to the US, the training labs were used to showcase the West, and the videoconference training replaced options that would have been more locally-grounded and less expensive. Thus, "there is little evidence that the large amounts of money that IELP-II spent on educational technology efforts made any serious dent on improving education in Egypt."

One could describe the project as a failure of the technology, or, as a very successful application of it to a problem other than the one stated. That is, if the goal is to showcase Western technology and divert funds to US enterprises, it could be considered reasonably successful. Highlights the need to clarify "whose problem" is being addressed.

The UK National Grid for Learning: Bucks, Bytes and Baloney

by Colin Lankshear

Keyword: Dissonance

Colin's paper highlights the dissonance between the lived experience of students and decontextualized instruction.

Britain's National Grid for Learning is intended to create a "connected learning society," which is accessible and adapted to individual needs.

Colin describes elaborate measures to maintain propriety in the use of the Internet, an emphasis on superhighway safety. Most of the content is teacher- or administrator-directed, with a small proportion dedicated to the learners. Literacy-related activities generally require only low-level responses.

In contrast, video games are engaging students and challenging them in new ways.

I thought of John Dewey's goal of connecting learning to life:

Points to highlight about the symposium as a whole

• Each of the papers could be seen as making a case for new literacies , yet there seemed to be a deliberate avoidance of that term.
• Each paper also made an argument for ICT's as having the potential to promote equity. On the whole the studies showed they exacerbated inequities.
• They each identify new possibilities, but their failure to be realized because of familiar constrictions (cf. Foucault's "well-trodden battle lines of social conflict", 1972, p. 226)
• They all pioint to the richness of the embedding ICT in social processes, versus a linear school framework. Reminiscent of Gay and Cole (1967) on the new math coming into the old culture.
• Again, the separation of learning and life.

Additional lenses

• Pragmatic technology: see technology, not only as a tool to solve problems but as the outcome of problem solving (Hickman, 1990); a more constructivist view of technology itself. This is helpful for understanding divergent or unintended uses. Also, in looking at whose problem is being addressed.
• Situated evaluation: emphasizes contrastive analysis and seeks to explore differences in use. It assumes that the object of study is neither the innovation alone (the idealization) nor its effects, but rather, the realization of the innovation--the innovation-in-use.
• Levels of use / Concerns-Based Adoption Model: emphasizes the change process versus a snapshot of use
• Adaptive structuration: looks at process in terms of substitution, enlargement, reconfiguration; where in the process are we? Example: email (ftp &arr; mail &arr; forbidden in school &arr; allowed/supplemental &arr; required through webboards, but blogs, IM forbidden)
• Technology studies: issues such as
  • path dependence
  • affordances and constraints
  • information ecologies: what else in the local and extended environments shapes the ICT use?

References

Bruce, Bertram C., Peyton, Joy Kreeft, & Trent W. Batson (Eds.). (1993). Network-based classrooms: Promises and realities. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bruce, Bertram C., & Rubin, Andee (1993). Electronic Quills: A situated evaluation of using computers for writing in classrooms. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Burbules, N. & Callister, T. (2000). Watch IT: The Risks and Promises of Information Technologies for Education. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Dewey, John (1907). The school and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon.

Gay, J. & Cole, M. (1967). The new mathematics and an old culture. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Hickman, L. A. (1990). John Dewey's pragmatic technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Merkel, Cecelia (2002). Uncovering the Hidden Literacies of "Have-nots": A Study of Computer and Internet Use in a Low-income Community. Ph. D. Dissertation, Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Twidale, Michael (2003). Over-The-Shoulder Learning [website with articles].