CDs and other digital learning tools on a massive scale that were also designed as needing to be constantly updated and re-licensed. An entire new edu-industry has been created, but the initial venture wasn’t started by capitalist corporations. It is simply a further example of how the dominant economic class can rob the culture of subordinated groups and sell it back to them at a profit.
2. The investigation aims and methods
As indicated already, the present paper is based on the results from two years of ethnographic research in four upper secondary schools in Sweden that have invested in one-to-one lap-top initiatives in recent years. Its aim is to test whether the claims that are made about laptop initiatives are actually realised and in what way based on data that has been produced through surveys, semi-structured focus group interviews with school principals and teachers, and video observations from everyday work in classrooms. We wanted to make visible, describe and analyse everyday educational/ pedagogical work in these technology rich schools to see exactly how (or perhaps if) education really is made more innovative and productive by the use of one-to-one lap top technology. Previous investigations have suggested that it might not be and that instead, one-to-one laptops are just useful educational tools. In this way the investigation tries to look beyond the often taken for granted views that describe technology and computers only in terms of their potential to improve and innovate education.
The four upper secondary schools that been investigated were all situated in relatively rich suburbs and had a predominantly middle class intake which together with an ICT-profile could be assumed to be positive in terms of increasing the possibilities for successful one-to-one projects and effective learning outcomes. That was out assumption at least and the choices therefore represent what we feel are positive case selections in this sense. The schools all have an expressed policy for the use and integration of digital technologies and their educational performance levels are above national averages.
Bernstein’s concept of pedagogical discourse analysis has been employed in the research project. The following questions were given special attention:
What teaching and learning patterns can be found in technology rich educational practices?
What discourses appear to structure educational practices in conjunction with the infusion of one-to-one initiative?
What transformational potential is suggested by this?
We have conducted the research using ethnography, which to us means basically trying to learn about people and their everyday lives based on long-term engagement with them through participant observation. This involves not only watching what is going on but also listening and feeling as well and produces a particular kind of knowledge because of this. This knowledge is not simply propositional, instead it consists of sensuous practical knowledge gained from skills of perception and capacities of judgement that develop in the course of direct practical engagements with our surroundings and people in them. Ethnography is particularly strong because of these characteristics in producing unique studies that provide detailed, in-depth descriptions of practices and meaning at particular places and times. It contributes in this way to new, finely grained knowledge about the conditions of specific educational systems and their demands based on documentations of and interviews about their most minute and intimate details. Ethnography places a human face on research.
3. Results
The results indicate that most of the teachers used ICT regularly in their teaching and 40% used it on a daily basis. They described search features, educational materials and the computer screen as a new tool for communication, where the projected screen image became in effect a new whiteboard as the main reasons for using the computer. Observation protocol supports these points. The use of the computer and the teachers’ use of space created a focal point in the classroom around the whiteboard and projector screen, which were used for displaying the computer screen content. In this way classroom regionalisation seems thus to have remained structured and front focused. This applied even though, not despite, new digital technology being fully integrated in the teachers’ everyday work.
Teaching from the front of the classroom was still the most common way of organising the lessons even according to questionnaires and interviews. 23 % of teachers responded in the questionnaire that teaching from the front was used in more than 50 % of their teaching time and 61 % responded that this way of organising classroom work occurred in at least 30 % of their teaching time. This was also evident in dialogue during focus group interviews: Teaching is no different ... I stand at the board…
Before I had an overhead projector whereas now I use PowerPoint. … Yes ... now it is natural... The
computer is second-nature... whereas it wasn’t before... you had to book, a computer lab and all that…. I don’t think that education has changed pedagogically ... but it is a tremendous gain in communication ...
students can retrieve articles from the Internet or go to any Twitter account and tweet directly with politicians for example... it’s a big change ... but not pedagogically... but the ICT certainly provides more tools for communication… the world has become closer ... it’s very easy for students to listen to things and find interesting texts... (focus group interview 2012-06-14)
Individual task based activities using ICT were common. 46 % of the teachers responded that this kind of classroom work occurred during at least 30 % of their classroom time. This pattern has also been noted by us in earlier ethnographic work. However, what teachers do within these forms of front-on work may have been changed through the use of ICT. Citations from focus group interviews serve to illustrate this. For instance: A change is that I can stream the movie ... I do not have to order it as I used to have to do… I no longer have the usual (printed) textbooks ... it's really convenient to have computers instead ... only to search on specific topics ... I think that saves time and that students get a different picture than just reading a book. (focus group interview 2012-06-12).
Taken together and in relation to the research question concerning the teaching and learning patterns that are evident in technology rich educational practices the results suggest that the one-to-one initiative has resulted in a high frequency of use of ICT as an integrated tool for teaching and that ICT is a component of a digital infrastructure that is also used for the organisation of the education. The learning platform is a key component of this. But in many senses these changes don’t represent changes in pedagogical principles. Conventional examination forms are still in place. ICT is the medium for their production. It is used for text production, communication, and information retrieval, thus replacing traditional media rather than changing principles of organisation and communication or transforming educational outcomes. It has replaced textbooks, pen and paper and seems thus to have primarily taken over their respective roles. ICT has had an effect. But not in a deeper sense! It has affected some working methods but teaching is organized primarily according to traditional patterns and power relations. The power centric relations of space in the classroom have not been reconfigured and the modality of education does not seem to have been affected significantly in terms of classification, framing, or pedagogic discourse. This is also in line with our initial starting point and previous studies that have repeatedly shown a considerable lack of evidence regarding transformation or enhancements of educational standards.
Sometimes the explanation for the failure or absence of IT impact is made by pointing at the teacher as the major hindrance to the successful implementation of technology in schools. However, this cannot be said to apply in the present case, as in this research most of the teachers had a positive attitude toward technology and found it useful for managing their professional work, even if their view of teaching was somewhat traditionally organised. Thus an important point for us in this respect is to stress that it is not the teachers who should be regarded as failures. Instead, the use of technology should be analysed and understood in the context where it appears, and in relation to the complex web of policy demands and the different expectations and requirements which teachers are obliged to take into consideration.
Taken together the results provide an example of issues that were brought forward by the teachers concerning how educational policy is related to the formation of the pedagogic discourse and how the field for policy production seems to have prevented teachers from making innovative transformations of their teaching, not only through the implementation of ICT in their pedagogical practice. They concern how performative demands from national testing tend to structure the formation of the pedagogic discourse and the way teaching is focused on preparing students for the national tests. It is national testing rather than the presence of technology that steers teachers’ pedagogical decisions the most.
The main findings thus suggest there is a frequent use of technology in classrooms but that this use is a form conservative modernisation in a context of educational reforms that are structured by neo-liberal and neo-conservative movements in terms of high stakes performativity, all of which are clearly issues that press down on teachers in their teaching and learning in ways that could be considered as mainly traditional, and that seem to have highly traditionalising effects. These effects have been such that although in principle all the teachers in the investigation schools had been described and identified by their principal as ICT-innovators with a positive attitude towards the use of technology, and despite them finding it to be a useful tool for managing their professional work, they have remained highly traditional in their basic pedagogical perspective and activities and have given no sign that the use of technologies has played a significant part in education innovation. This does not mean that teaching has not changed.
The point is instead that the introduction of ICT in educational settings seems to lack the potential that is often referred to, namely that of transforming teaching and learning. Indeed instead it seems to be used within established power structures and relations, which are in practice reinforced not challenged.
4. Discussion
In Sweden as in many other countries, an increasing number of education districts are investing in one-to-one laptop initiatives. This integration has been accompanied by a national debate in which information and communication technology (ICT) is often singled out as a key enabler for bringing about a needy modernisation of education and training to enable our nation to remain competitive in the globalised economy. This debate is also a global one. It involves ideas about the development of educational processes with measurable outcomes both for stakeholder satisfaction and educational performance assessment. There is a techno positivist assumption that social, economic and cultural advancement and the solution to any eventual social crises can be found through and in technological innovations, which seem to be automatically marketed and accepted as able to solve important problems and transform social settings to the better for all. The diffusion of innovations is held and promoted to be the main factor determining changes in organisations or practices and ICT is presented as an enabler for social innovation and cultural developments that will revolutionise teaching and make education systems more effective.
These kinds of ideas have driven most (if not all) one-to-one initiatives in Europe, but after three decades of research there is as yet little empirical evidence to support the claims that are being made (Selwyn, 2011). Instead, what hard evidence there is actually suggests that ICT has hardly brought about any transformative changes to pedagogy at all and that initiatives such as one-to-one teaching and learning could not yet be viewed as high impact. This doesn’t mean that ICT has not had any impact at all. Indeed it has. It has had a significant impact on management and administration, but the instructional use of ICT has not transformed teaching and learning or improved students’ academic achievements in any significant sense.
However, two points should be noted here. Firstly, there are no scientifically supported empirical studies that claim that ICT has been introduced to revolutionise classrooms and teaching, let alone that it has done so (Player-Koro, 2012a, b). Rather instead, from the initial Melbourne experiment onwards. ICT has been a tool for attaining traditional aims of knowledge development and improvement as a replacement for traditional pen-and-paper, which it has also arguably done more effectively than did the tools used in the past.
ICT has in other words been a tool for meeting the demands of education not changing them.
Secondly, performativity demands on postmodern professionals and examination requirements are what are emphasised the most by the teachers and these externally imposed demands (the terrors of performativity), rather than the presence of technology, are what contribute the most to the structuration of their working activities and its content. They work in this way, as the data suggests, through the regulative effects of examination-based performativity discourses on the instructional part of the pedagogic discourse and can be seen in the selection of subject content and in the interactional patterns during lessons. Thus, even when ICT was integrated in the teaching and learning activities observed, the examination demands worked through the teacher as an intermediary and were very much in control of what was selected as content and how this content was sequenced and paced. In the Durkheimian sense of education in the interests of social integration and control, there is little if anything that is really new about this. The pedagogic discourse can be seen to have been structured from performative demands and national policy documents together with traditional forms of evaluative criteria reinforced by an ever-increasing emphasis on assessment as a result of the recontextualising of official political discourses around performativity as opposed to creativity.
5. A tentative conclusion
The main results from our investigation thus paint a fairly clear picture and at two levels. The first level is that a quintessentially educational initiative at a girl’s Methodist school in Melbourne Australia has been economically exploited by capitalist corporations in the interests of profit, without any economic reimbursement to the agents whose intellectual activities became a source of unpaid labour power and that this exploitation was a forerunner to the current mass exploitation of schools and the actions and people in them by the ICT industries in the interests of further their private profits. The second is that technology optimism has allowed a marketization process that has also worked in these interests. One-to-one technology has not had strong effects on pedagogy and teaching and learning. The teacher is still in control of the selection, sequencing and pacing of the content that the state determines to be official knowledge, the exams are still the main structuring force behind what goes on during the lessons, and ICT seems therefore to have had no general context independent impact. The conclusions to be drawn from this are therefore very much in line with those of other extensive and critical studies. They are that one-to-one learning initiatives in Sweden and elsewhere seem to evidence only a weak link
between technology use and the transformation of educational practices. But there is one possible difference between our conclusions and those of others. This is that in other research the suggestion tends to be that the full potential of the use of ICT has not yet been reached, but that it can be: this line of reasoning springs from the conviction that ICT plays a prime role as a key enabler for innovation in education. Our claim is that a process of false marketing has taken place within which technology is claimed to solve problems and create educational change and effectiveness in ways in which it doesn’t, cannot, never has, and has furthermore never been seriously suggested to be capable of.
References
Player-Koro, C. (2012a). Hype, hope and ICT in teacher education: a Bernsteinian perspective. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-15. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2011.637503
Player-Koro, C. (2012b). Reproducing traditional discourses of teaching and learning mathematics [Elektronisk resurs] : studies of mathematics and ICT in teaching and teacher education.
Göteborg: Department of applied IT, University of Gothenburg ; Chalmers university of technology.
Selwyn, N. (2011). Technology, media and education: telling the whole story. Learning, Media and Technology, 36(3), 211-213. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2011.572977