Last week, I was massively flattered when my former classmate, Dr. Nikki Usher, asked me to advise one of her students. Nora Fleming is wrapping up her Master’s degree in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. She has done somewhat of a concentration in education policy, her area of interest, as she also works as a reporter for Education Week. Here are two of her recent stories:
Schools Are Using Social Networking to Involve Parents
Out-of-School Settings Create Climate for New Skills
[for my review of the first article, see Digital Equity)]
Nora asked me to pass along “any particularly noteworthy items (a few) on digital equity” and any “particularly interesting [pieces] on long term implications and challenges of tech integration and digital learning in schools.” While I did append some resources, I primarily interrogated the difficulty of defining digital equity and prophesying long-term implications. I found the exercise so stimulating, I’ve decided to share my response.
1. Noteworthy items on digital equity
Well this is somewhat difficult because we need to define digital equity. As you probably know, Henry Jenkins points to a participation gap complementing a digital divide, which implies that there are at least two dimensions to digital equity. The participation gap talks about access to skills and experiences — it might be partially understood in terms of cultural capital. It’s about knowledge that allows folks with technology to leverage it — create, critically analyze and comment, organize, conduct responsible research, network, etc. Some research reports suggest that even digital have’s are have-not’s in terms of savvy; they’re putting powerful tools towards relatively banal ends (e.g., Word processing, email, posting Facebook status updates, watching videos on Youtube) — which is not to say useless ends, just unremarkable. Old wine in new bottles. Very little game-changing.
Schools and libraries at present don’t go very far in terms of bridging this literacy gap. They often have old equipment and little time for individuals to really immerse, experience, and locate mentors and online communities who can scaffold their growth towards digital expertise. This item — New Grants Help 12 Museums and Libraries Plan and Design New Learning Labs — indicates the MacArthur Foundation’s acknowledgement of this shortfall. At the household level, ownership of computers and access to internet is less prevalent among the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Even when low-income families do have computers at home, they’re less likely to have high-speed internet, new equipment, and/or accessible mentors/guides.
In low-income communities (and internationally in developing contexts), online experiences increasingly occur on mobile phones. Some people characterize this phenomenon as “leap frogging” because users are jumping over the personal computer stage, going from nothing to smartphone (see my 2012 book chapter with Alexandre Rideau, Our Voice: Public Health and Youths’ Communication for Social Change in Senegal). What are the implications of this? If folks have data packages that are not unlimited — that is to say, that cost various prices according to megabytes used — then intense online engagement will probably have a positive relationship with income (as income rises, so does online engagement). Therefore, as in schools and libraries, income disparities expressed in time limitations constrain democratic growth opportunities.
The extent to which individuals engage in content creation, dialogic exchange, exhaustive research, etc, might also be limited by the robustness (or lack thereof) of apps. And again, always, there’s the question of access to mentors. I participated this summer on a digital literacy panel at the annual convention for the American Library Association. There I realized that supporting librarians’ own digital/new media literacies must be addressed in order for them to assume the role of digital/new media guides to library users. Recognizing this relationship between learners’ development and educators’ proficiency, my PLAY! (Participatory Learning And You!) colleagues and I supported teachers of grades 6-12 with their digital/new media literacies comfort (for an overview of this project, see my write-up with Vanessa Vartabedian in the edited volume Designing with Teachers: Participatory Approaches to Professional Development in Education and/or our webinar on connectedlearning.tv).
I’ll mention a few other things, and forgive me for being gloomy, I’m just on a roll. ;-) I think there’s also an entitlement question. Do folks with less access to expensive things treat these digital tools more fearfully, negotiate the interfaces less freely, out of fear that they’ll break something and/or get punished severely? Are they less used to creative experimentation because their experiences in school and at home have been more authoritarian and didactic — has pedagogy been “old school” and discipline consisted of “These are the rules” instead of “Let’s figure out together how to solve this problem”? This is a question I’m airing right now — it’s untested in any way. But it makes me wonder…
Finally, let’s say that schools and libraries had stellar equipment and users could spend as much time as they wanted in the computer lab. They still couldn’t go on most social network sites, any game sites, Youtube and most video-sharing sites, perhaps they couldn’t even do research on breast cancer because the word breast would be flagged as inappropriate. I’m pointing to the issue of firewalls. Without access to these digital destinations, I believe that folks will be at a strategic disadvantage academically, professionally, culturally; thus, they will not enjoy digital equity (whatever that is — see Digital Equity for a definition and problematization of this goal).
So! There’s work to be done. :)
Education Superhighway wants to get American classrooms hooked up to high-speed internet, which is nice but will be toothless if we continue to lock up/deny potentially problematic content and behaviors instead of empowering users with ways to manage them.
You know that sites like TeacherTube and Curriki are potentially useful digital ways to address equity in terms of unequal access to up-to-date textbooks. Open educational resources (OER) are being rolled out by some textbook publishers now too; here’s a story about Pearson specifically. I know this isn’t the same as digital equity, but it’s related.
Jaron Lanier and others might argue that, without the ability to code and/or an understanding of how websites work, then we’re all at a disadvantage, perhaps being played. How many people understand what data is scraped from various sites, how trackable is our digital footprint? Who understands how cultural and social biases — deliberate choices — inform the design of digital products? Then, even if we’re whizzes with all sorts of doo-dads, how free are we really? Food for thought.
Let me know how well I’m answering your question, if at all. I’m here to help.
2. Long-term implications and challenges of tech integration and digital learning in schools
Well that’s a doozy. It’s hard to say — we’re not in the long-term yet. ;-) We’re also unable to hold all variables constant; as technology and teaching changes, so does civic, family, and professional life. Hopefully, we’ll be sensitive to context and prepare students to meet the challenges of a changing world. So it’s not like we’re introducing something novel (tech integration, digital learning) into a context that’s static (2012 norms). Everything’s changing — how do we isolate the impact of just one thing? I trust you get where I’m going.
But okay, another way to answer the question. A bunch of possible futures:
1. Consistent or even worsening digital stratification contributes to widening social inequality.
2. Unproductive technology is mistaken for pedagogically meaningful technology and…
2a. …significant gains/innovations are not made; we have old wine in new bottles; we have the same kind of learning only now you swipe instead of pincer grip to turn the page
2b. …important capacities atrophy, such as the ability to read facial and social cues, amuse oneself sans digital device, focus on a single task for extended periods of time, etc, which delivers a net social loss
2c. …dissatisfied pushback paints all technology/media with a negative brush and dismisses the utility of even pedagogically meaningful tools
2d. …anytime, anywhere access creates a new sort of accountability to extended work hours and deterioration of boundaries
2e. …ignorance in terms of digital ethics facilitates harm in multiple ways
3. Affordances of technology allow new kinds of participation to shape the ways in which we teach, learn, and create and…
3a. …previously disenfranchised folks (e.g., specially abled, geographically remote, etc) can find and enrich community
3b. …more collaborative and efficient ways to pool knowledge and distribute tasks will become normative
3c. …digital gathering spaces will resurrect a sort of “one-room schoolhouse” type of learning context
All of these possibilities and more are possible. Who knows, Nora? Who knows?
Renee Hobbs specializes in media literacy, has just opened a school for communication in Rhode Island, and is involved with the American Library Association. She’s also a dear friend. Let me know if you’d like to pick her brain.
The 2011 Horizon Report could be a good resource for you. John Seely Brown likes to think about the future; so does The Institute for the Future.
Again, let me know if/how this serves you. Good luck!!!