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What impact, if any, is the use of computers and other digital technologies having on the
learning process of today’s student? To what extent or degree are we as teachers responsible, or
should be responsible, for the ‘proper’ integration of technology into our classrooms? Research
and inquiry into this realm have proposed both positive and negative aspects to computer versus
traditional learning. There are, without question, cultural and educational benefits and dangers of
technology and computer usage for students. As educators, we have a significant role to play in
ensuring equal access to technology, and in realizing its full educational and creative potential.
Public debate about the impact of new digital technologies have been marked by a kind of
schizophrenia which often accompanies the advent of new cultural forms. On the one hand, these
new forms are seen to have enormous positive potential, particularly for learning; on the other,
they are frequently seen to be harmful to those who are regarded as particularly vulnerable. In
both cases, it is children - or perhaps more accurately, the idea of childhood - which is the vehicle
for many of these aspirations and concerns.
This was certainly apparent in the early years of television. Amid current fears about the
impact of television violence, it is interesting to recall that television was initially promoted to
parents as an educational medium. Likewise, in the 1950s and 1960s, television and other new
electronic technologies were widely seen to embody the future of education: they were described
as ‘teaching machines’. Even here, however, hopes of a utopian future were often balanced
against fears of loss and cultural decline. Television was seen both as a new way of bringing the
family together, and as something which would undermine natural family interaction. The
medium was extolled as a means of nurturing children’s emotional and educational development,
and simultaneously condemned for taking them away from more wholesome or worthwhile
activities.
This kind of schizophrenia is also apparent in contemporary responses to digital
technology. On the one hand, there is a form of visionary utopianism, particularly among
educationists. Seymour Papert, the inventor of ‘logo’ programming language, for example,
argues that computers bring about new forms of learning, which transcend the limitations of
older methods, particularly linear methods such as print and television (Papert, 1993). It is
children who are seen to be most responsive to these new approaches: the computer somehow
releases their natural creativity and desire to learn, which are blocked and frustrated by old-
fashioned methods. According to Papert, the computer is ‘the children’s machine’.
Such utopianism is also increasingly popular in the area of literacy. Some writers, for
example argue that digital technology will bring about a new form of democratic literacy. It will
bring the means of expression and communication within everyone’s reach, and thereby
‘enfranchise the public imagination in genuinely new ways’. This leads in turn to what might be
called a form of political utopianism. Jon Katz (1996), for instance, regards the Internet as a
means of children’s liberation: it provides children with opportunities to escape from adult
control, and to create their own cultures and communities. “For the first time’, he argues,
‘children can reach past the suffocating boundaries of social conventions, past their elders’ rigid
notions of what is good for them’. It is children, according to Katz, who will ‘lead the
revolution’.
This utopian view forges a connection between a particular mythological construction of
childhood and a parallel mythology about technology, which is powerfully reflected in
advertising for computers. Ads for Apple Macs or Microsoft work hard to counter popular views
of technology as somehow unnatural or inhuman, and therefore threatening. They often focus not
on the scientific specifications, but on the magical promise of the technology: the computer is
represented here as a window onto new worlds, a way of developing children’s intuitive sense of
wonder and their thirst for knowledge.
In this respect, there are striking parallels between the new age utopianism of some
academic writing about computers and the rhetoric of the sales pitch. What is perhaps more
disturbing is how these arguments have been taken up by politicians and policy-makers.
Representatives of all the main political parties now frequently suggest that the ‘information
superhighway’ will offer a solution to all the problems of contemporary schooling - as though
this technology would bring about learning in and of itself. (The Clinton administration has been
advocating the National Information Infrastructure arguing that computer-based instruction is
cost-effective, enabling 30% more learning in 40% less time at 30% less cost (Tapscott, 1996).)
On the other hand, however, there is a much more negative account of the impact of
digital technologies on children’s lives. This account focuses not on their educational potential,
but on their role as a medium of entertainment - and it depends upon making an absolute
distinction between the two. Some of the anxieties that are regularly rehearsed in relation to
television now appear to have been carried over to this new medium.
As with television, the range of concerns evoked here is very broad. Thus, digital media
are frequently seen to be a bad influence on children’s behavior - and particularly to cause
imitative violence. Thus, it is argued, the more ‘realistic’ graphic effects become, the more likely
they are to encourage ‘copycat’ behavior. These technologies are also seen to be bad for your
brain - and indeed for your body. There have been numerous clinical studies of phenomena such
as ‘Nintendo elbow’ and epileptic fits allegedly caused by computer games, through to research
on computer ‘addiction’, and its negative effects on imagination and academic achievement. The
technologies are also seen to be bad for your social life: they apparently cause people to become
anti-social, destroying normal human interaction and family life. Young people come to prefer
the distance and anonymity of virtual communication to the reality of face-to-face interaction.
Finally, digital media are also seen to be bad for your politics and for your morality. Games
playing is seen to be a highly gendered activity, which reinforces traditional stereotypes and
negative role models; while concern about the accessibility of pornography on the Internet is
currently growing apace.
These arguments, like those about the effects of television, often involve a form of
scapegoating. Like television, the computer becomes a convenient bad object onto which we can
dump our worries and frustrations - whether they are about violence or immorality or
commercialism or sexism or the demise of traditional notions of childhood and family life. As
with other screen-based media, at least some of this concern is expressed in the call for stricter
legislation, although it also leads to the view that parents and teachers should be exercising
greater control in order to protect children from such apparently corrupting influences.
While I would not wish to dismiss such concerns - nor indeed to deny the enormous
potential of these technologies - these apparently contrasting positions do share similar
weaknesses. As with debates around television, both positive and negative arguments draw upon
more general beliefs about childhood - indeed, a mythology about childhood. On the one hand,
children are seen to possess a natural, spontaneous creativity, which is somehow released by the
machine; while on the other, children are seen as vulnerable, innocent and in need of protection.
Ultimately, both positions are symptomatic of the chronic sentimentality with which our society
views children - of the very limited and limiting ways in which we construct the meaning of
childhood, and thereby constrain the lives of children.
At the same time, both positions are characterized by a kind of technological determinism
- that is, a belief that technology will bring about social changes in and of itself`. Whether we see
these changes as good or bad, they are seen to follow inexorably from the implementation or
availability of the technology. Thus, technology is frequently held to transform our social
relationships, to alter our mental functioning, to change our basic conceptions of knowledge and
culture - and, crucially in this context, to transform what it means to be a child, and what it
means to learn. This argument is determinist in the sense that technology is seen to emerge from
nowhere, or at least from a neutral process of scientific research and development, rather than
from the interplay of complex social, economic and political forces - forces which play a crucial
role in deciding which technologies are developed and marketed in the first place. From this
perspective, technology is seen to have effects irrespective of the ways in which it is used, and of
the social contexts and processes into which it enters.
Much of this debate about children’s uses of new communications technologies has been
conducted over the heads of children themselves. We still know very little about how children
perceive, interpret and use these new media. As in the case of television, most of the research has
been preoccupied with the search for evidence of negative effects, and much of it has been based
on implicitly behaviorist assumptions. There has been very little attention to the social contexts
in which the technology is used, or to the social relationships of which it forms a part. Children
are typically seen here as isolated individuals, who are powerless to resist the negative influences
of the media upon them.
Yet the meaning and use of technology are clearly mediated by social relationships. For
example, we need to analyze how technology enters into the peer group and the family, how
people get access to it, how they learn about it, and how its use is regulated and controlled (for
instance by parents). Certain combinations of technology and social relationships bring about
particular uses, but they also prevent others. In the process, technology comes to be defined as
(for example) ‘male’ or ‘female’, ‘educational’ or ‘entertaining’, in ways which systematically
favor access among particular social groups. As with television, people use the technology to
construct social relationships and to define their social identities - although the resources which
are available to them mean that they do not have infinite choice in how they do this.
It is immediately apparent that computer games are the focus of an elaborate peer group
culture. Contrary to much of the public concern which has surrounded it, games playing is very
much a social process. While the actual playing of games is sometimes an individual, isolated
activity, it is also often collaborative, a focus of a great deal of talk and interaction. Furthermore,
the culture surrounding the games is also a means of establishing and sustaining interpersonal
relationships - from the swapping of games, cheats and hints that took place in the playground or
in tutor periods, through to the more public culture of games shops, arcades, magazines and TV
shows. At the same time, this social process is one which is essentially mediated by
consumerism, by the operations of the market. Much of the discussion is about what you can buy,
what you have bought, or what you are going to buy - and this is a discussion in which we are not
all equal.
Middle-class children tend to have greater access to technology than working-class
children, as well as having newer and more powerful equipment. Also, boys are generally more
interested and involved in this area than girls.
Ultimately, I would want to resist any reduction of the phenomena I have been describing
to a label like ‘information technology’. This is not simply a matter of information. It is about
entertainment, art and culture; it is about literacy and communication. We urgently need to
extend our definitions of these things if we are to develop adequate responses to the challenges of
these new media.
Equally, these phenomena are not simply a matter of technology. We need to see digital
media in the context of the convergence of previously distinct media and cultural forms; and in
terms of wider economic, social and political forces. Despite their ‘newness’, these technologies
force us to go on asking some very traditional questions about access, about control, and about
public culture.
We need to move beyond the idea that technology has consequences in and of itself.
There may indeed be great creative, educational and democratic potential here; but whether that
potential is realized depends upon how the technology is used, and on the social relationships
that are constructed around it. We need to think creatively about new forms of educational
practice, and new forms of community, which can make this happen. Children clearly need help
in this respect. Technology in itself will not make them creative, nor will it motivate or enable
them to learn. Children need to develop specific skills both in using software and hardware, and
in more ‘traditional’ areas of literacy and artistic expression, if the potential is to be realized. We
need to abandon the idea that these ‘new’ and ‘old’ forms of literacy are mutually exclusive
alternatives; or that the ‘new’ literacies are simply routes towards the ‘old’.
Parents and teachers also need help here. We need to assist parents in supporting their
children’s use of computers, and to develop the fairly limited work that is currently being
undertaken in most schools. As in the case of print literacy, we need to develop forms of dialogue
and collaboration between home and school. The notion that we can simply wire children up to
the ‘information superhighway’ and expect them to learn is a drastic oversimplification of the
challenges that will be posed.
Perhaps most crucially, we need to ensure that the use of technology is a collaborative,
social process, rather than a privatized, individualized one. We need to construct new kinds of
public spheres in which children can work collaboratively, share what they produce, and
communicate with a wider audience. In my view, schools will be key institutions in this process.
The notion that these technologies will make schools and teachers effectively redundant - that the
Internet will be the school of the future - is little more than dangerous nonsense. Schools have the
potential to give equal access, not just to technology but to the skills and competencies that are
needed to use it creatively and effectively. If they cannot do so, it is likely that the creative,
educational and communicative benefits of these technologies will only be realized by a small
elite - and that elite, like other elites, will be primarily male and middle-class. If the potential of
these technologies is to be realized by all young people, schools may well have a significant role
to play.
Word Count: 2431
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