Beyond Technology E-Book

David Buckingham

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 430

Beschreibung

Beyond Technology offers a challenging new analysis of learning, young people and digital media. Disputing both utopian fantasies about the transformation of education and exaggerated fears about the corruption of childhood innocence, it offers a level-headed analysis of the impact of these new media on learning, drawing on a wide range of critical research. Buckingham argues that there is now a growing divide between the media-rich world of childrens lives outside school and their experiences of technology in the classroom. Bridging this divide, he suggests, will require more than superficial attempts to import technology into schools, or to combine education with digital entertainment. While debunking such fantasies of technological change, Buckingham also provides a constructive alternative, arguing that young people need to be equipped with a new form of digital literacy that is both critical and creative. Beyond Technology will be essential reading for all students of the media or education, as well as for teachers and other education professionals.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Acknowledgements

1 Selling Technology Solutions

Sales pitches

The political economy of educational technology

Conclusion

2 Making Technology Policy

New Labour, new technology

Changing times

Getting personal

New styles of learning

Learning platforms: online community or educational panopticon?

Conclusion

3 Techno-Topias

Just another day in Edutopia

The emancipated child

Slaves to the machine

The children’s crusade

Conclusion

4 Waiting for the Revolution

A fickle romance?

Brave new media

Using computers in the classroom

The obstacle race

Going down slow

Whose revolution?

How change can happen

Where’s the difference?

Conclusion

5 Digital Childhoods?

Living the digital life?

Convergence

Commerce

The child at risk

Constructing the digital generation

A different story

The new digital divide

Conclusion

6 Playing to Learn?

Games and learning: making the case

Constructing digital learners

The limits of celebration

The game of learning

Games in the classroom

Conclusion

7 That’s Edutainment

Selling learning: educational software

Learning online

The limits of interactivity

Learning (and playing) online

Learning coming home

Conclusion

8 Digital Media Literacies

Why media education?

The literacy metaphor

Defining literacy: the limits of competence

Internet literacy: from access to critical understanding

Media literacy goes online

Towards game literacy

The limits of critique

Creating digital media

Processes and products

The meanings of ‘access’

Technology and pedagogy: the role of school

A cautious conclusion

9 School’s Out?

The new digital divide

Towards digital literacies

The end of school?

Rethinking the school

References

Index

Created in 1899, Jean Marc Cote’s vision of a classroom in the year 2000 illustrates the long history of technological fantasies about education. The students are connected to a network by transmitters placed on their heads, although they sit at desks in disciplined rows, all faced towards the front, while the teacher feeds them books via a kind of mechanical mincing machine.

Copyright © David Buckingham 2007

The right of David Buckingham to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3880-5

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3881-2 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-07456-5530-7 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-07456-5531-4 (Single-user ebook)

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Preface

It is now more than a quarter of a century since the first microcomputers began arriving in British schools. I can personally recall the appearance of one such large black metal box – a Research Machines 380Z – in the North London comprehensive school where I was working in the late 1970s; and I can also remember very well the computer program that was demonstrated to the English Department – a simple but genuinely thought-provoking package called ‘Developing Tray’, a kind of ‘hangman’ game in which a poem gradually emerged like a photographic image in a developing tray.1 I also recall, a couple of years later, being involved in a research project called ‘Telesoftware’, run from Brighton Polytechnic, where educational software was (amazingly to us at the time) sent over the telephone line and recorded onto little cassette tapes. Actually, very few of the other teachers were interested in the software that was being delivered, but the students in my media studies class were quick to commandeer the equipment to make animated title and credit sequences for their scratch-edited video productions.

Around the same time, the American technology guru Seymour Papert was telling us that computers would fundamentally transform education – and ultimately make the school itself redundant. ‘Computers’, he wrote in a book published in 1980, ‘will gradually return to the individual the power to determine the patterns of education. Education will become more of a private act’ (Papert, 1980: 37). Four years later, he told readers even more bluntly, ‘There won’t be schools in the future. The computer will blow up the school’ (Papert, 1984: 38). He was not alone. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers, then pitching relentlessly to capture the education market in the US, was another passionate advocate of the revolutionary potential of educational computing; and he was later joined by an enthusiastic cohort of visionary marketers, such as Bill Gates of Microsoft, who were keen to use schools as a springboard into the much more valuable home market. Indeed, ten years earlier, the radical theorist Ivan Illich was creating a vision of a ‘deschooled society’, in which computers would permit the creation of informal, ‘convivial’ networks of learners, and schools and teachers would simply wither away (Illich, 1971).

Such predictions about the transformative potential of technology have a very long history, not just in education, and in retrospect it is easy to show that they have largely failed to come true. The wholesale revolution Papert and others were predicting patently has not taken place: for better or worse, the school as an institution is still very much with us, and most of the teaching and learning that happens there has remained completely untouched by the influence of technology. And yet, over the same period, electronic technology has become an increasingly significant dimension of most young people’s lives. Digital media – the internet, mobile phones, computer games, interactive television – are now an indispensable aspect of children’s and young people’s leisure-time experiences. Young people’s relationship with digital technology is no longer formed primarily in the context of the school – as it was during the 1980s, and even into the 1990s – but in the domain of popular culture. This raises the fundamental question that I want to address in this book. How should schools be responding to the role of digital media in young people’s lives? Should they simply ignore them – as they largely appear to do at the present time? Should they enlist these media for the purpose of delivering the established curriculum? Or can they find ways of engaging with them more critically and creatively?

More than twenty-five years after my first encounters with computers in the classroom, my university research centre was relocated to a new facility, the London Knowledge Lab. Although it is situated in the heart of London’s historic Bloomsbury district, the Knowledge Lab looks to the future: its strapline is ‘exploring the future of learning with digital technologies’. In the process, a small team of us who are concerned with children, young people and media have come into closer contact with advocates of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in schools, and with advanced computer scientists. In some respects, it is this encounter – and the much broader changes in media, technology and education that it represents – that has prompted me to write this book.

My perspective is not that of a technology or computer specialist. Most of my research and teaching has been about media – and particularly about moving image media such as television and film. I have explored how these media are produced, the characteristics of media ‘texts’, and how children and young people use and interpret them. I have also considered how teachers in schools might teach about these media, and what happens when they do so. Inevitably, in recent years, this focus has expanded to encompass new media such as computer games and the internet. However, I continue to regard these things as media rather than as technologies. I see them as ways of representing the world, and of communicating – and I seek to understand these phenomena as social and cultural processes, rather than primarily as technical ones. Technologies – or machines – are obviously part of the story. But technologies should not be seen as simply a set of neutral devices. On the contrary, they are shaped in particular ways by the social interests and motivations of the people who produce and use them.

Likewise, I would challenge the notion of information technology – as though these devices were simply a means of storing and delivering an inert body of facts or data (Burbules and Callister, 2000). The term ‘information’ somehow implies that the content of communication is neutral – and that, like technology, it is independent of human interests. There is also an implication here – particularly in the discourse of policy-makers – that delivering ‘information’ will somehow automatically lead to knowledge and learning. In practice, this approach inevitably sanctions an instrumental use of technology in education – a view of technology as a kind of teaching aid. Adding ‘communication’ – and widening the term to ‘ICT’ – is a step in the right direction. But, ultimately, we need to acknowledge that computers and other digital media are technologies of representation: they are social and cultural technologies that cannot be considered merely as neutral tools for learning.

Like many media educators, I have been both excited and dismayed by the contemporary enthusiasm for digital technology in education. I am excited, because I feel there is considerable potential here for students to take control of the ‘means of production’ – to use this technology to communicate, to become creative producers of media, and to represent their perspectives and concerns. I also believe that it is vital for schools to address the cultural experiences that young people have outside the classroom – and many of these experiences are now intimately connected with digital media. Yet I am dismayed, because so many uses of technology in education seem to me to be unimaginative, functional and misguided. The critical questions that media educators have been concerned with for many years – questions about who controls communications media, and about how those media represent the world – have been marginalized in favour of a superficial infatuation with technology for its own sake. Ultimately, I believe that we need to be teaching about technologies, not just with or through them.

Yet, in questioning the use of technology in education, it is not my intention to support those who would seek to abandon it in favour of a return to ‘basics’ – whatever they may be. Many critics of technology in education are inclined to fall back on claims about the ‘authentic’ and ‘natural’ ways of learning which have supposedly been displaced by technology, and they also rely on assertions about the ‘dehumanizing’ effects of particular media that are, to say the least, highly contentious. A great deal of learning involves technology of one form or another (if we grant that the printing press or even the pen are forms of technology); and a great deal of learning is inevitably mediated (again, if we grant that the book – or indeed the curriculum itself – is a medium, a means of representing the world, just like television or the internet). We cannot simply abandon media and technology in education and return to a simpler, more natural time.

This book begins at the heart of the action, with a visit to London’s BETT Show, a major UK educational technology marketing event. It moves on, in chapter 2, to consider the changing assumptions that have informed British government policy-making in this field and, in chapter 3, to explore the broader arguments that have been mounted both for and against the use of technology in schools. Chapter 4 shifts from rhetoric to reality, reviewing how technology is actually being used in education, and the evidence for its effectiveness. In chapter 5, we leave the classroom, to look at the changing role of digital media in young people’s lives and the widening gap that exists between their use of technology outside school and what is happening in education. How, then, are schools to respond to this situation? Chapters 6 and 7 consider two approaches to using technology in education that I believe are fundamentally misguided: chapter 6 looks at the debate about computer games and learning, while chapter 7 explores the phenomenon of ‘edutainment’, focusing particularly on the home market. In chapter 8, I outline what I regard as a more rigorous, and more productive, approach to teaching with and about digital media, within a ‘media literacy’ framework. Finally, chapter 9 returns to some of the questions raised above about the future of the school: if schools are unlikely to disappear, how can we rethink their role in the age of digital culture?

Note

1 This package, originally designed by Bob Moy, is still available via www.devtray.co.uk.

Acknowledgements

Parts of this book draw on other writing and research I have undertaken over the past ten years or so, some of which has been published in books such as After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Polity, 2000), Education, Entertainment and Learning in the Home (co-authored with Margaret Scanlon, Open University Press, 2003) and Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture (Polity, 2003), as well as in a range of journal articles and papers. An early version of the overall argument was presented in a professorial lecture at the Institute of Education in London in November 2005, and published as Schooling the Digital Generation: New Media, Popular Culture and the Future of Education (Institute of Education, 2005). I would like to thank my colleague Michael Young for his thoughtful response to this lecture. All of this material has been very substantially reworked and updated for this context.

I would like to thank the researchers who have worked with me on various of the empirical projects that have informed this book, particularly Margaret Scanlon; and my other colleagues and collaborators with whom I have discussed some of these issues at length, notably Shakuntala Banaji, Liesbeth de Block, Andrew Burn, Diane Carr, Sue Cranmer, Caroline Pelletier, Julian Sefton-Green and Rebekah Willett. Thanks to Andrew and Diane for their comments on the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the scholars and researchers whose work has challenged me to think more deeply and critically about these issues, particularly Larry Cuban, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jane Kenway, Sonia Livingstone, Ellen Seiter and Neil Selwyn.

1

Selling Technology Solutions

The Marketing of Educational Technology

The BETT (British Education, Training and Technology) Show1 is reputed to be the largest educational trade fair in the world. Held annually in the cavernous Victorian arena of London’s Olympia exhibition centre, it provides a startling indication of the growing importance of technology companies within the education marketplace. The main exhibition area is populated with stands from many major national and international corporations – Microsoft, Apple, RM, Oracle, BT, Dell – as well as broadcasters and other media companies with an interest in this field, such as the BBC, Channel 4 and Granada. More specialized mid-range software and hardware companies – TAG, Immersive, Harcourt, Promethean – also compete for attention, while around the fringes of the hall a wide range of smaller exhibitors ply their trade.

First established in 1984, the BETT Show is organized by EMAP Education, part of EMAP Business Communications, a leading UK media company. In addition to organizing exhibitions – particularly ‘business-to-business’ events – EMAP runs radio stations, and publishes trade papers and consumer magazines ranging from Therapy Weekly and Steam Railway right through to market-leading titles such as FHM, More! and Heat. Its annual turnover in 2005 was over £1 billion.2 The BETT Show is sponsored by BESA (the British Educational Suppliers Association) and the magazine Educational Computing and Technology, and is run in association with the Times Educational Supplement, the government’s Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and Educational Events Limited.

BESA is the leading partner in this alliance. Founded in 1933, it is the trade association for the educational supply industry, claiming a membership of over 250 manufacturers and distributors. These companies produce a range of ICT hardware and software, as well as more traditional teaching aids, furniture and other materials designed for use in educational settings ranging from pre-school to university. Some of these older products – wallcharts, stationery, worksheets, even books – continue to feature on the fringes of BETT, well away from the main site of the action.

Almost 30,000 visitors attended over four days in 2006, most leaving the exhibition with large bags emblazoned with logos and stuffed with lavishly produced handouts, catalogues and free software samples.3 Attending BETT is a gruelling experience. The noise level in the hall makes it difficult to carry on a conversation, and it is almost impossible to find a place to sit down. The wide range of stands – reaching almost 650 in 2006 – can prove bewildering and disorientating. The 168-page official show guide contains advice on planning your visit; and it is now possible to subscribe to ‘BETT mobbing’, a service that sends alerts to your mobile phone about ‘cool things to see’.

BETT has grown significantly in recent years, registering steady annual increases in the number of attendees and the number of stands. Those who visit are mainly UK teachers: according to BESA, around one-third of UK schools send teachers to the show each year. The organizers also promote the show through information sent to schools and through more practical means, such as arranging transport: in the past they have even collaborated with local education authorities to charter a train (dubbed the ‘Education Express’), with the dual objective of providing transport to the show and ICT training on board. However, the attendance figures have also seen particular increases both in the proportion of business personnel and ‘consultants’, and in the number of international visitors. Each year, the British government sponsors more than sixty overseas education ministers to attend the show – and to enjoy the facilities of its ‘international lounge’ – suggesting that the UK is now playing a leading role in the global marketing of educational technology.

Sales Pitches

The sales pitches adopted at BETT vary from the minimalist to the hyperactive, although the latter are much in evidence. Some of the larger exhibits are the most understated, suggesting that the central aim is one of branding rather than direct selling of products. Others use glossy images taken from the companies’ CD-ROMs, web pages or books, often emphasizing primary colours in a style characteristic of children’s publishing. Most of the larger stands include several terminals at which participants can try out the products on offer, as well as a presentation area with seating and a large whiteboard screen. Several run timetabled demonstrations and ‘seminars’ at which new products are showcased, and uniformed representatives are on hand to provide additional persuasion. Many exhibits include endorsements from reviewers or key figures in education, while others have large television screens showing promotional videos, often featuring fast-moving excerpts from their productions set to music. For technology companies, this is highly labour-intensive work: RM, for example, claimed in 2006 to have 100 staff working on its two stands, with fifty separate presentations in its two ‘theatres’. The overall cost of the show to exhibitors is reputed to be more than £6 million.4

In some instances, the sales techniques are more assertive. Several exhibitors offer quizzes and competitions, or the chance to win a free lunch. Others provide gifts, in the form of pens, yoyos, badges and chocolate bars; the BBC launched its digital curriculum, with its new street-credible title ‘BBC Jam’, by offering free pots of jam. Several stands have salespeople in costume: in 2006, William Shakespeare was on hand, along with a large cuddly bear, a nineteenth-century aristocrat, a robot and various medieval peasants. In previous years, Lara Croft lookalikes have roamed the halls, while in 2006 ‘booth babes’ dressed in white mini-skirts with company names emblazoned on their backsides attempted to entice the visitor to purchase the latest educational software solution.

While some of the presenters have a vaguely educational gravitas, most are more akin to market traders or ‘barkers’ at a funfair. They are fast-moving, amplified, ‘punchy’ and humorous, using repetition and rhetorical questions in the style of a department store salesman extolling the virtues of carpet shampoo. Prominent among them is Russell Prue, a self-styled ‘independent ICT Evangelist’, who presented at five different stands in 2006, in each case wearing different braces carrying the relevant company slogan along with his trademark glittering red bow tie. Formerly employed by the UK computer hardware company RM as ‘Chief Product Evangelist’, Prue is the author of The Science of Evangelism, and is frequently engaged by the Department for Education and Skills to promote its policies.5

The view of technology promoted at BETT is relentlessly upbeat. In the words of the show’s 2006 slogan, technology is ‘Engaging – Enriching – Empowering’. It will motivate, inspire and stimulate teachers and students, and transform the learning experience:

BETT … bringing together the global teaching and learning community for four days of innovations and inspirations. BETT is the place to see exciting ideas, the latest technology, practical solutions that can have an immediate impact, and new ways to put ICT at the heart of learning. (BESA website)

The straplines of individual exhibitors reinforce this almost mystical message: ‘lighting the flame of learning’ (Promethean); ‘inspiring creativity in the classroom’ (Smoothwall); ‘share knowledge, spark brilliance’ (Adobe); ‘transforming the future’ (RM). Even the DfES partakes of the same rhetoric, albeit in slightly more muted terms: technology is about ‘creating opportunities, realizing potential, achieving excellence’. Learning via technology, it is repeatedly asserted, is ‘fun’, exciting and motivating for young people in a way that more traditional methods are not.

While the BETT Show is almost exclusively targeted at schools, several key exhibitors also have significant interests in the domestic market. This interest in out-of-school learning is reflected in the straplines: ‘Extending the classroom into the home: Knowledge through your television’ (NTL); ‘Non Stop Learning – Non Stop Managed Services’ (Compaq); ‘Portable Learning’ (ACER). Likewise, the Microsoft presentations speak of ‘anytime, anywhere learning’ and ‘learners without limits’, and claim that their products are ‘bridging the gap between learning in and beyond the classroom’; part of the pitch of ‘BBC Jam’ is the ability of students to access it at home, ‘or as a continuation of their learning at school’, finding that ‘almost without knowing it, they are actually learning all the time’.

One of the recurrent themes that emerges here is the idea that technology represents a ‘solution’ – although it is never quite clear what problems it solves. There are no problems at BETT, only solutions – ‘solutions for schools’, ‘solutions that delight you’, ‘flexible solutions’, ‘solution providers’, ‘portable, hand-held solutions’, ‘integrated education ICT solutions’, ‘end-to-end solutions’, and many more. Some companies promoting managed learning environments claim that they can cater for all ICT requirements and thereby provide the ‘total solution’ for every need. In some cases, the term ‘solution’ appears to take the place of the material object – the hardware or software – that is actually on sale. In this formulation, the technology seems to move beyond being a mere consumer product, and to assume an almost metaphysical dimension; and, in the process, it is endowed with a magical ability to stimulate and transform teaching and learning.

Another broad theme here is the view of technology as empowering and emancipating: ‘What ever you want to do, YOU CAN!’ (Microsoft); ‘Release your time – release your potential’ (Capita). Teachers, it is implied, have been held back in some unspecified way, but can now be freed by technology. In this utopian vein, BT (British Telecom) even promises to take consumers to ‘educational ICT heaven’:

[Through technology] we are able to develop best-of-breed solutions that empower teachers, delight learners and enable everyone to realise their full potential.

According to this kind of futuristic rhetoric, ‘the digital age’ is a ‘new era’: it offers ‘new horizons in education’ and an opportunity to ‘build your future’. Such assertions are frequently accompanied by images of outer space, the earth, the sun and the solar system.

Yet while they are keen to reassure teachers that technology is about freedom, and that its use is natural and intuitive, these promotional texts also give them cause for concern about their own role in this technological age. They draw attention to the dangers of being ‘left behind’, and the responsibility that teachers have to keep up to date, to implement government policy, and to use their ICT funding wisely. In a context of increasing investment in ICT, teachers need guidance; and this is precisely what the industry, by means of BETT, purports to provide. ICT, it is argued, is no longer a matter of choice: all teachers, regardless of their curriculum area, will need to be familiar with it. As Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (1999) have noted, debates around information technology have often been characterized by a rhetoric of ‘inevitability’. In these formulations, this is allied with one of professionalism: just as the ‘good parent’ invests in technology in order that their child does not fall behind, so too does the professional teacher.

The underlying anxiety here – and it is one that (as we shall see) is borne out by research – is that teachers are not in fact integrating this technology in their teaching, and indeed that many remain uncertain about its value. Despite massive government funding for ICTs in schools, the fear of policy-makers and of companies is that technology is not becoming sufficiently ‘embedded’ in classroom practice. The director general of BESA, Dominic Savage, addresses this directly in his ‘Welcome’ to the 2006 official show guide. He recognizes that the ‘transformation of learning’ sought by government has yet to occur: harnessing the benefits of technology in schools, he argues, requires a new focus on ‘the learning experience’ and on developing teacher confidence. The need for more ‘embedding’ is also a theme strongly echoed in the government’s own publicity materials, and in the speeches of ministers who are typically enlisted to open the show. By implication, they draw attention to the contrary possibility, that technology may in fact be making only a very superficial impact on schools.

Furthermore, the uplifting rhetoric of inspiration and empowerment often sits rather awkwardly with the more bureaucratic claims that are also made here. As Neil Selwyn (2005) has noted, digital learning is often presented in such contexts both as ‘futuristic, exotic and endless’ and as ‘a set of benign tools which fit seamlessly into the daily drudgery of the classroom’. Software in particular needs to be sold, not only on the basis that it will transform learning or provide endless pleasure and fun, but also in terms of its ability to deliver specific assessment objectives, as defined by the government through the National Curriculum and measured through standardized examinations. ‘Unleashing creativity’ is all very well, but only if it improves test scores. Compared with the promise of technological utopia, these concerns about meeting the requirements of Key Stages and SAT tests appear strangely mundane; yet marketers know that they are bound to be the major preoccupation for teachers. The use of technology may be innovative and transformative, but we also need to be assured that it will deliver efficiency, ensure improved performance and raise standards. Technology may offer freedom, but it often seems to be merely the freedom to do what you are told.

The Political Economy of Educational Technology

Educational technology is self-evidently big business; yet it has also been significantly promoted by government intervention in the marketplace. According to a 2005 survey report commissioned by BESA, the number of computers in UK schools doubled between 2001 and 2005, to just over 2 million. The number of ‘client units’ for networks also doubled, while the provision of internet-connected computers increased by a factor of 2.5. According to the DfES, the ratio of computers to students in 2005 rose to 1 : 6.7 in primary schools and 1 : 4.1 in secondaries. Total ICT budgets in schools rose from £336 million in 2001 to £551 million in 2005, and these figures exclude the substantial amount of ring-fenced funding from government (such as ‘e-learning credits’, of which more below). BESA estimates that total direct government investment on technology in education rose from £102 million in 1998 to £640 million in 2005. (Interestingly, the same report suggests that, despite this significant growth in investment, teacher confidence and competence in using technology have actually declined over the past three years.)6

A key factor in the growth of the sector was the move towards a ‘free market’ in education, via the introduction of Local Management of Schools (LMS), which was part of the Education Reform Act of 1988. Before this, most purchasing decisions in education were taken by local education authorities (LEAs). By virtue of their large budgets, the LEAs wielded a significant degree of power in negotiating with potential providers of products and services, although from the point of view of many schools they were often unnecessarily bureaucratic. LMS passed much of the control over purchasing decisions to individual schools; in the process, teachers became a significant new consumer market – albeit one that was not necessarily very well informed or well supported in its purchasing decisions.

Much of the support for the development of educational technology has come directly from government in the form of ring-fenced funding. Initially, most of this was directed towards hardware, as in the case of the ICT in Schools grant provided from the government’s Standards Fund. Other key initiatives have included the National Grid for Learning, which acts as a portal for government-approved resources, and the New Opportunities Fund, which provided basic training for teachers. Both initiatives have been widely seen – even by advocates of ICT in education – as less than successful (see Conlon, 2004; Galanouli et al., 2004; and Ofsted, 2004).

More recently, the government has sought to ‘pump-prime’ the educational software industry through an initiative known as ‘e-learning credits’ (see Scanlon and Buckingham, 2003). The government’s decision to engage the BBC to produce a £150 million Digital Curriculum (the new initiative, renamed ‘BBC Jam’, was ultimately launched in early 2006) generated a considerable amount of protest from the commercial software industry. It was argued that the BBC had obtained unfair advantage, and that the choice available to schools would be significantly reduced. BESA, among other organizations, argued that the government should be seeking to establish ‘a competitive level playing field in education supply’.7 The government ultimately responded by introducing e-learning credits, which are given directly to schools to spend on educational software. While there has been concern that not all the money made available in this way is being spent, the initiative has undoubtedly provided significant support for the software industry – and perhaps particularly for small and medium-sized companies. Since its commencement in 2002, the government has provided more than £100 million per year for schools to spend, albeit only on DfES-approved products and services.

For technology companies, this funding has obviously represented a considerable commercial opportunity. While some of the major companies have seen education as somewhat of a marginal concern – albeit a lucrative one – many smaller companies have sought to create particular ‘niche markets’. As the number of teachers leaving the profession has grown, and as employment in the media industries has been increasingly casualized, educational technology has become an attractive opportunity for potential entrepreneurs; and the growth in the numbers of ‘consultants’ and other industry personnel attending the BETT Show might be taken as one indication of this.

Even so, educational credibility is a crucial selling point here. As the trade association, BESA has a code of practice designed ‘to give confidence to schools that they would be satisfied with any product or service bought from a BESA member’, and it is keen to promote its role in providing support and training to teachers through events like BETT. Crucially, BESA purports to mediate between public and private interests. ‘Partnership’ is the key term here, as its chief executive explains:

The interdependency which is occurring between schools, commercial suppliers and their local support structure is the way forward for ICT in education and the consortium approach is to be welcomed where individual contributions are on the basis of specialist knowledge in a particular area. Whether to provide training for teachers or curriculum content, opportunities for partnerships exist and BESA is here to help.8

This kind of relationship between business and public services, fostered by central government, is typical of New Labour policy more generally. The promotion of ICT in education represents a form of ‘public–private partnership’, although it is arguably one in which the private is significantly more powerful than the public. While the state acts as a facilitator of the market (not least, in this instance, through forms of financial ‘pump-priming’), it is ultimately assumed that the market will provide.

The marketing of educational technology is only one example of the growing incursion of market forces in education. While this phenomenon is particularly well advanced in the United States, it is now widespread in most developed countries (see Bridges and Mclaughlin, 1994; Kenway and Bullen, 2001; Molnar and Garcia, 2005). To some extent, this is simply a matter of schools being used as vehicles for marketing: direct advertising, sponsored classroom materials, branded vending machines, incentive programmes (such as voucher schemes), and the use of schools as venues for market research are all on the rise. However, in recent years we have also seen the privatization of several key aspects of schooling, ranging from the provision of school meals to school buildings themselves (via the Private Finance Initiative). Assessment is also a private concern: in the US, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which runs the national SAT tests, is a private company, while in the UK, examination boards are also profit-making enterprises (one of the largest, EdExcel, is owned by the multinational media corporation Pearson – who not coincidentally claim to sell one in four of the textbooks in use around the world (Seiter, 2005: 7)). Private companies are also increasingly involved in the sponsorship, and in some cases direct management and governance, of schools – a trend the government has sought to encourage through its promotion of ‘trust’ schools, ‘city academies’ and specialist schools, which are required to involve commercial partners. These kinds of activities are often presented as a form of philanthropy, or through a rhetoric of ‘partnership’; yet they are essentially a matter of generating profit and of building future markets. Indeed, education could be seen to provide a kind of alibi for companies seeking to create a positive brand identity within the broader marketplace – as in the case of the leading British supermarket chain Tesco, which has run a voucher scheme for computers in schools for many years.

Meanwhile, the provision of education itself has been progressively ‘marketized’. The emphasis on ‘parental choice’ has led to a situation in which schools compete for customers much like any other business; and, inevitably, some customers are in a much stronger position than others to manipulate the market to their own advantage (see Gewirtz et al., 1995; Gorard et al., 2003). One consequence of this is that there is a widening gap between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in the education market, and this has significant implications in terms of widening social segregation. The drive towards ‘customer choice’ is most apparent in proposals to introduce voucher schemes, which are steadily gaining political credibility in many countries (Cohn, 1997). In this competitive climate, schools have increasingly been obliged to market themselves, through the production of elaborate publicity materials and public relations activities of various kinds. As Kenway and Bullen (2001) point out, the existence of lavishly appointed computer suites is often regarded as a key selling point in this respect.

In this broader context, the provision of educational technology has played a key role in opening up schools to the influence of business. Amid a volatile and rapidly changing economy, education has provided a relatively stable market for technology corporations eager to sustain their profit margins, and it has also been widely seen as a springboard into the lucrative domestic market. Meanwhile, as Bettina Fabos (2004) has pointed out, the internet has become increasingly commercialized – albeit often in ways that are invisible to many of its users. In this respect, she suggests, schools’ reliance on commercial search engines represents another intrusion of business into the classroom, and public and non-profit sites are becoming more and more difficult to find amid the welter of advertising and commercially sponsored content. Furthermore, the internet is also being used as a means of gathering market research information on young people, as they are encouraged and required to provide personal information online (Burbules and Callister, 2000; Seiter, 2005). The internet is now essentially an unregulated commercial medium; while this does not in itself automatically undermine its educational value, it does mean that it can no longer be seen merely as a neutral conduit for ‘information’.

This is not necessarily to imply that the market has no place in education, or indeed that a non-commercial, Eden-like world of teaching and learning pre-existed the serpent of ICT. Nor is it to imply that students – or indeed teachers – are merely passive victims of the manipulations of evil marketeers. In a mixed economy, state and public institutions are perhaps bound to function as a kind of market. However, the traditional pattern of market regulation in education has changed, and there has been an alignment between the education market and the wider consumer market. In this new dispensation, teachers have become individual consumers, and can no longer rely on the bargaining power – and, to some extent, the expertise – of local education authorities. Meanwhile, schools have become an increasingly important means for commercial companies to target young people – a market that is traditionally seen as volatile and difficult to reach. This raises significant new questions about the role of education, and about the need for teachers and students to develop more critical approaches to using technology.

Conclusion

The BETT Show represents a prime example of what we might call the ‘educational–technological complex’ in action. While not quite as conspiratorial as the military–industrial one, this complex represents a powerful alliance between public and private interests – journalists, educationalists, researchers, marketeers, commercial corporations and (crucially) government departments. It is a complex that, in the UK, includes a number of high-profile research centres, weekly publications such as the Times Educational Supplement and Guardian Education, groups of teacher advisers and teacher trainers, as well as companies such as Microsoft, Apple, RM and BT. This work is largely sustained through government funding, and via successive initiatives deriving from the technology directorate and the so-called innovation unit of the DfES, and from BECTA (the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency), a government-funded body charged with advising on the implementation of its ICT strategy.

Thus, the sales pitches I have described, and the discourses they invoke, are routinely recycled in the advertising pages and ‘online supplements’ of the educational press, and in the publicity material that pours into schools on a daily basis. There is, to say the least, a blurring of the distinctions here between public and private interests. As Daniel Menchik (2004: 197) has observed, ‘the line that separates benevolent, authentic concern for student learning enrichment from self-interested entrepreneurship [is] difficult to ascertain’. Indeed, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, academic and political proponents of technology in education have often traded in precisely the kind of inflated claims that typify the sales pitches of the major corporations.

Of course, there are considerable grounds for questioning the claim that the products on sale at BETT are as genuinely ‘innovative’ as the marketeers claim. Digital encyclopaedias, multiple-choice online quizzes, copy art packages and even so-called interactive storybooks are, for the most part, only superficially different from their non-technological counterparts. The ‘interactive’ whiteboard often appears to be merely a means of reasserting traditional, teacher-centred whole-class teaching in the manner of its prehistoric predecessor, the blackboard – just as tablet PCs bear a striking resemblance to slate and chalk (albeit with added possibilities for teacher assessment and control). Certainly, much of the educational content made available via these new media is far from novel: much of it is little more than a repackaging of the traditional curriculum.

Nevertheless, for some commentators, it is the technology itself that makes all the difference. Technology is believed to motivate learners in and of itself – particularly ‘disaffected’ learners, who in contemporary debates are almost always implicitly identified as boys. Technology is seen to provide guaranteed pleasure and ‘fun’ in a way that older methods simply fail to do; and, it is argued, it can even make the most painful aspects of education (such as testing) engaging and exciting. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, such claims rest on assumptions about young people’s relationship with technology that are, to say the least, somewhat questionable.

For all the excesses of its marketing, the BETT Show is a telling indication of broader tendencies in the educational use of technology. It represents a coming together of public and private interests, and a concentration of discourses that are symptomatic of the field much more broadly. Technology is presented here as a source of innovation, of empowerment and liberation, and of authentic educational practice. Yet, in much less celebratory terms, it is also part of a broader move towards bureaucratization, regulation and surveillance. These discourses define the roles of the student and the teacher in diverse ways, and they also invoke much broader assumptions about the nature of learning. My aim in this book is to pick apart some of these contradictory discourses about technology in education, to puncture some of the inflated claims (both positive and negative) that are often made about it, and to provide some indications of a practice that I believe is genuinely new and challenging.

Ultimately, however, I do not believe that it is possible to stand outside these developments. I attended the BETT Show in 2006 not only to gather material for this chapter but also to participate in a seminar myself, presenting some of the research conducted at my university, in collaboration with a commercial software company. I also saw some products that I believe are genuinely innovative, useful and even creative. My criticism of the dominant use of technology in education is not motivated by a desire to reassert the supposedly more authentic methods of an earlier era. On the contrary, I believe we need to move the discussion forwards, beyond the superficial fascination with technology for its own sake, towards a more critical engagement with questions of learning, communication and culture.

Notes

1 My account of the BETT Show draws on material gathered in January 2006, and on an earlier account based on a visit in January 2000: see Buckingham, Scanlon and Sefton-Green (2001).

2 Information from EMAP website, www.emap.com, accessed January 2006.

3 Figures on attendance are drawn from ABC audit reports on the BESA website, www.besanet.org.uk. At a rough estimate, it costs the taxpayer around £1 million in teacher cover each day for staff to attend the show.

4 This figure was quoted in the opening speech by the education minister Charles Clarke at BETT in 2004.

5 Information from Prue’s website, www.andertontiger.com, accessed January 2006.

6 Figures in this paragraph come from the BESA report ‘Information and Communication Technology in UK State Schools’ (November 2005) and the BESA website and the DfES ‘TeacherNet’ (www.teachernet.gov.uk) site (both accessed January 2006).

7 This is still one of BESA’s organizational aims, as outlined in a 2005 press release on its website.

8 Press release, 18 November 1998: BESA web page.

2

Making Technology Policy

ICTs and the New Discourses of Learning

As we have seen, the drive to insert digital technology into education has been led not only by commercial companies, but also by government – and, indeed, by a range of alliances between them. The government has provided ring-fenced funding, set targets and standards for acceptable practice, and reinforced these through a punitive regime of school inspections. It has supported the broader privatization of schooling, removing obstacles to commercial involvement; yet in some instances it has also acted as a ‘developmental state’, directly supporting particular sectors of business and providing significant incentives for commercial activity.

To some extent, however, the assumptions that have informed government policy on technology in education have shifted over time. In this chapter, I look at the changing character of policy discourse in this field in the UK, focusing particularly on the ten years since the election of the first New Labour administration in 1997. I explore the shift from broader economic arguments about the need to respond to the ‘information society’ to ones that focus more specifically on learning. The chapter uses examples from government publications, but it also considers material produced by other government-funded organizations, ranging from BECTA (the body responsible for advising on ICT policy) through to Futurelab (a technology research lab) and Demos (a centre-left ‘think tank’ that has been particularly influential in policy circles).

New Labour, New Technology

The drive to insert computers in UK schools dates back to the mid-1970s, although it began to appear more prominently on the political agenda during the 1980s. As Neil Selwyn (2002) has shown, the construction of the computer as an ‘educational’ device was by no means natural or inevitable: on the contrary, it arose through a complex combination of political, economic and social imperatives. For politicians, a focus on technology appeared to provide a means of addressing concerns about Britain’s international competitiveness and the need for a well-disciplined workforce. As Selwyn demonstrates, media representations of computing – not least in programmes such as the BBC’s popular science show Tomorrow’s World – played a significant part in this ‘educational mythologizing’ of information technology. Yet, for technology companies, this discursive construction of computing provided a useful means of fulfilling their longer-term aim of targeting the domestic market: if the educational credibility of computers could be established via schools, this would in turn place increasing pressure on parents to invest in technology in order to secure their children’s educational success.

The interest in educational technology among policy-makers has significantly gathered pace since the election of the first New Labour government in 1997. While education policy under the last years of the former Conservative administration had resorted to a kind of threadbare traditionalism, New Labour was keen to present itself as a modernizing party, oriented towards the future (see Jones, 2002). A key element of this approach was its response to the new challenges of the so-called knowledge economy. If Britain was to compete in global markets, it would need a workforce equipped with the appropriate ‘skills’. This to some extent accounts for the overall prominence of education in New Labour policy-making. The economic basis of this emphasis was clearly evident in the 1998 Green Paper The Learning Age: A Renaissance for a New Britain, where education and employment secretary David Blunkett proclaimed that ‘investment in human capital will be the foundation of success in the knowledge-based economy of the twenty-first century.’

The use of information and communication technology in education was seen as central to this process of ‘upskilling’ the future workforce and ensuring its employability – and in this respect the UK government was broadly in line with international trends (Selwyn and Brown, 2000). Announcing the establishment of the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) in the consultation document Connecting the Learning Society (DEE, 1997), Tony Blair asserted: ‘Technology has revolutionised the way we work and is now set to transform education. Children cannot be effective in tomorrow’s world if they are trained in yesterday’s skills.’ Meanwhile, in the symptomatically entitled document outlining the government’s plans, National Grid for Learning: Open for Learning, Open for Business (1998), he argued that ‘Britain’s international competitiveness’ would depend upon the adoption of technology, both in education and in industry.

From this perspective, then, the use of technology in education is a direct response to the demands of the modern economy. The ‘post-industrial’ or ‘post-Fordist’ economy is seen to require what Blunkett (1997) termed a ‘computer literate workforce’; although, as Facer et al. (2001) point out, technology is also being used here to create new markets – and technological skill is regarded as an essential prerequisite for a person’s effective functioning as a consumer of information and digital products. Those who fail to acquire such skills are seen to be at risk, not merely of unemployment, but also of a kind of disenfranchisement, as they will be unable to participate fully in the future ‘information society’. As Neil Selwyn (1999) has shown, these arguments were particularly prominent in the marketing of Britain’s version of the ‘information superhighway’, the NGfL during New Labour’s first term in office. The grid was a grandiose project that was seen to have the capacity ‘to consume and reproduce all the knowledge that had gone before it, rendering all previous incarnations of information obsolete’ (1999: 58). Funded both by government and by large private companies, it would move the education system into the twenty-first century, and help to create the ‘connected society’ of the future (Blunkett, 1997: 11).

This discourse of technological ‘skill’ thus proposes a particular articulation – a joining together – of education, the commercial market and the future worker/consumer. In their analysis of Connecting the Learning Society, Jo Moran-Ellis and Geoff Cooper (2000) identify several discursive moves that are symptomatic of New Labour policy more broadly. Technology, they argue, is presented as an unquestioned benefit, and the task of government is to remove any potential barriers to its adoption. Behind those barriers, it is assumed, is ‘a homogenous set of ready-made consumers who are eager to make use of the information on offer’, and the ability to access information is held to be a kind of ‘vaccine’ against future unemployment (which of course might itself be technologically induced). In this sense, technology is presented both as the primary driver of social and economic change and as the solution to any problems that it might cause. The issue then becomes not why or whether to adopt technology, but how: there is a ‘discourse of inevitability’ (Robins and Webster, 1999), from which it is impossible to dissent – unless, of course, one wishes to be labelled as a hopeless ‘dinosaur’.

Nevertheless, the place of the learner is somewhat paradoxical here. As Keri Facer et al. suggest, the discourse of the ‘information society’ (or the ‘knowledge economy’) constructs the child as a future worker, but also as a consumer of information – and indeed as ‘a testbed market for software manufacturers’ (2001: 96). To be sure, there is some rhetorical recognition here of the ‘techno-savvy child’ – the notion of children as a ‘digital generation’ that is somehow spontaneously competent in its relationships with technology. However, this image is generally played down in favour of a view of the child as essentially in