Those “V / / A G R A like questions” of value, enhancement, and betrayal

Doug Johnson in Blue Skunk Blog  posts an interesting Trick Question

The stumper, it seemed, during yesterday's interviews for our new high school library media specialist was: How will you demonstrate that the library media program is having a positive impact on student achievement in the school?

Challenging déjà vu, I realised that I have come up against this question before - but in New Zealand and in the context of the impact ICT_PD for teachers was having on student learning outcomes.

I believed then, and continue to believe that the question is unanswerable given the complexity of factors that influence student achievement.

The question/s we should be asking

• What are the conditions of value in teaching and learning that have a positive impact on student achievement in the school?
• How can the library media (or technology) program enhance or betray these conditions of value?

Insouci put me onto Tara Brabazon’s  Digital Hemlock, and I’ve just finished reading Brabazon’s reliability versus validity arguments in BA[Google]: Graduating to information literacy

Reading Brabazon makes me realise that my questions of value, enhancement and betrayal above are the equivalent of the  V / / A G R A from 3 , 33 $ spam emails that clog my inbox – they are distracting me from the questions that I need to be struggling with.   

I need to tear myself away from all these how to “learn through ICT” type questions and begin to look at the social and cultural impact of ICT in society - on democracy (smart mobbing), on what we consider authorship, on social relationships, on our environment.

Although it will take a decade to ramp up, mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell, govern, and create.  (Reingold. 2002)

Postman (1995) is a good place to start.  He asks a question I seldom hear asked in the context of ICT and teaching and learning in New Zealand, where 82% of Zealand primary schools in 2002 and 78% of secondary schools in 2001 had internet connections.

What we needed to know about cars-as we need to know about computers, television, and other important technologies-is not how to use them but how they use us (Postman, 1995, p324).

Perhaps as an educator the question/s I should be struggling with is,

How do they use us? 

How does ICT use teaching and learning? 

Comments

[botts]

gotta say i can't agree with postman and his anti technology stance. i really struggle with people who want to blame the tools we use for negative outcomes. if technology does bad things for you, then don't use it... oops, bit of a conundrum here, especially if we are prepared to accept that life in 2006 is pretty much a technology or bust kind of experience. can't live with it, can't live without it - to quote that great modern philosopher, meatloaf, "i know that i'm damned if i never get out and maybe i'm damned if i do"

however, even in a world where we have no real choice about our use of technology, the technology is still only a tool. a tool that we choose to use in one way or another and, if we need to question whether technology is using us, then perhaps we need to ask about our own addictions and issues.

beyond this then lies a more important question for me - and i guess this goes back to the blu(e) fairy - is, how are the powers that be using technology to control the things we do? if the boss tells me i must teach using technology x, and i can see that that technology is useless or inappropriate, then how do we respond?

have a great day

[Artichoke]

Dunno Botts, I don't think that Postman's questions undermine - but rather that they have the potential to make technology use in education more powerful

In pausing to ask How does ICT use teaching and learning? we may avoid designing learning experiences for students that are defined by the design constraints of the software rather than by learning intentions.

Postman's questions have led The Magnet and I to work on an "understanding by design" pedagogical framework that can be used by both teachers and students to design ICT integrated learning experiences. It is working well in our contract schools (both secondary and primary) and I hope to get it published this year so others can play with it. Will ping you a copy when it is.

[cj]

Yo Arti, good question... the use us line. It is now unfashionable (I think) but some of the pro ICT in Ed folk used to talk in terms of user-friendly. This is palpable bovine excretory byproduct. It's all about us being made friendly/compliant/compatible with them. We need to see job ads for MS Office compatible Science teachers or Photoshop compatible Art teachers or even typepad compatible Ed consultants!

[Insouciantfemme]

Whoever came up with that stupid word "user-friendly" should be taken out to a large park, stripped naked, strapped to a cow on the ground, and made to 'hoe' the grass till it's flat.

What's this user-friendly business that those IT nuts are on about? Technology can never be user-friendly simply because no one knows how friendly the Radeon Motherboard really is. Ever tried asking one? I just did, and the damn son-of-a-b#*@h hanged-on me.

I must slightly disagree with Bott that technology should be looked at as a 'tool'. That is a dangerous proposition. For most of us in the Information Age, we are cyborgs. As Donna Haraway convolutedly reminds us, our selves are autoamputated. Our bodies are connected so intimately with the mobile, with the car, with our spectacles, with our shoes, that without technology, it becomes almost impossible to survive. Just take our spectacles for example. A revolutionary invention that would screw-up my life if I don't have it on when I engage with life in general. Take my mobile phone for example. I sleep with it, wake with it, shower with it, take a shit with it, and I of course work with it. Did I mention that my sex life is always a menage-a-trois? Trust your mobile phone. It never complains. But the examples are testimony of our naturalised, symbiotic state with technology. My ears are connected to the speakers, my mouth the microphone, and my voice always amplified through digital space. We are cyborgian.

But by being cyborgian and autoamputated, WE become user-friendly, not the prosthetic. We have to choose, or be, perhaps, forced to know the motherboard, the million-and-one softwares and those damn super-wireless-mouse that sucks-up battery like a famished calf. The technology has yet to be sentient. It cannot be user-friendly. However, the conscious symbiote - we - have to make technology applicable to us. We govern, and at the same time, governed by the conditions of technology's capabilities. As such the master/slave dialectic is annulled in the body of the cyborg. We, and the mechanics of the Information Age, are parasites of each other. Doesn't sound too healthy huh?

I can make Microsoft Windows user-friendly, simply because it was never friendly in the first place. I changed my mind. The copyright owner of 'user-friendly' is going to mow my lawn with his/her backside.

[Insouciantfemme]

Oops! Did I mention that I become user-friendly to Microsoft Windows too? Yes. Slight eclipse there. I am user-friendly. You can press my buttons anytime honey.

:)

I.F.

[cj]

Where do you get those Vista compatible buttons?

[botts]

omg - i've died and gone to heaven... bugger user friendly, i just want insouci to strip me naked and tie me to a cow... :-)

[botts]

however - slightly more serious now...

even if we have become symbiotic with the technology that surrounds us, surely the role of that technology is to serve our needs and improve our lives and so therefore to remain a tool.

i do agree tho' with the idea that micro$oft and many others seem to choose not to create tools that are easily integrated into our lives, meaning that we inevitably bend to shape ourselves to fit the technology rather than bending the seemingly unbendable (and positively fragile) technologies to fit us. but i still want to stress that despite the unfriendliness of the technology, i believe we should continue to view it as a tool that works for us rather than we for it.

on a very practical level, i choose to demonstrate this by consciously deciding to rid my computer of all things micro$oft as much as is possible. therefore, the only software i use that comes from the bowels of the evil empire is windows itself. (and even that is a european version that doesn't have media player included, and is further hacked to remove all unwanted bits of crap like notepad and word pad and paint - i feel sick just writing this stuff). everything else i use on my computer, in terms of software is free and / or open source and / or web based. programs i choose to use because they fit my needs and do the things i need them to.

the only reason i haven't gone the whole caboose to linux is because i'm chicken.

btw... next time the motherboard hangs on you, try a hammer - works for me every time.

have a great day

[Bill Kerr]

I agree with Botts that Postman is a pessimist whilst preferring IF's cyborg metaphor.

I think the trend is in the direction of the tools / cyborgs to be undermining institutional stability rather than the other way around.

Peer 2 peer technologies undermine traditional ways of doing school, news, government etc.

Don't blame the technology when those in power dumb it down in order to restrict or control us. That's not ICT controlling us but other people controlling us through their restricted vision of how ICT ought to be used. Actually, the main technical instrument of control is a piece of technology called the curriculum.

The issue of teachers using technology in a mechanical and limiting way in Schools is a real one - compounded and encouraged by systemic restrictions (computers in labs, censorware, obessions with security etc.). But overall the trend is the other way. eg. students will have restricted internet use during lesson time but unrestricted through their mobiles at recess and lunch.

Blogs, wikis and uTorrent are tools which facilitate a new dialogue about new futures for Schools, etc.

[Insouciantfemme]

Oh, I'll do that Botts, I'll definitely use the hammer next time. And while I'm at it, I'm going to pour gasoline over it just to make sure the bastard knows who it's dealing with. You never know... By pretending that the machine is sentient could sometimes give you the satisfaction of seeing it diarrhoea all its mechanical parts in fear.

By the way, agree with Bill there. It's the curriculum that really needs a bit of a beating. And it's the uber-conservative system that really needs to be strapped onto that cow I mentioned before. In my university, if the students 'accidentally' watch porn, they get their numbers and IDs taken automatically to the Head IT desk. Then they will get this massive warning flashing on their computers whenever they log on, saying something like you can't use the Internet until you call up the IT department to explain why you watched porn and that you're sorry and will never do it again. The censorship is supposed to make using technology 'safer' and more pedagogically 'efficient'.

First of all, they watched porn cause they were horny at 1am in the morning trying to figure out why Angelina Jolie should replace John Howard as Prime-Minister. It's not the lips honey. It's the eye-brows. Secondly, who the hell is going to call up and say, "I'm sorry. I watched porn cause I thought it'd be nice to relieve myself from the media assignment I was doing. Er... any chance of getting back the connection for research?" And lastly, who the hell in their right mind would say sorry for watching porn?! I say bring your DVDs along honey! But no, of course not. Some idiot might get offended from 'accidentally' seeing vaginal-anal action but it's cool to 'accidentally' see a burnt, naked kid running from Napalm.

No, I don't blame technology. A cyborg doesn't blame itself for using its prosthetics to relieve itself. I thank the thousand of Chinese gods for making lighters for my cigarettes and I thank the White, English God for making Peer-2-Peer sharing possible. I thank Rama and Krishna for inventing the White Rabbit, and I thank some obscure cultist god for just making Broadband 24,000Ks. Yes... I thank em' all for making technology the beau that it is. But I do blame the pieces of cow dung that censored all my porn online when I'm trying to type a 8,000 word journal about pornography. Bastards.

[cj]

At this fun little point i'd like to register my total and utter abhorence at the use of the word tool. Eons ago i scribbled some nonsense called 'beyond tools' it attempted to argue that the reassuring "just a tool" nonsense (worse in my view than user-friendly--add extra string of garlic around neck) was the silliest and most dangerous way to talk about the use of software about which we know very little and even if we think we do it still does not even come close to the notion of tool as extension of body -- as old (probably dead) Joe Weizenbaum argued, "no one knows an oar like a rower. These bits of software are NOT tools. They are bits of software. Potentially ways of doing things differently. Language matters. If they were tools like a hammer is a tool we'd have our mouths full of nails happily banging up a dunny in the backyard---feel free to do the educational mapping. And yes I work in a tertiary high school also.

[Artichoke]

I'm with Insouci and cj on the tool thing.

And I like the way Illich explains this

"This computer here on the table is not an instrument. It lacks a fundamental characteristic of that which was discovered as an instrument in the twelth century, the distality between the user and the tool. A hammer I can take or leave. It doesn't make me into part of the hammer. The hammer remains an instrument of the person, not the system. In a system the user, the manager, logically, by the logic of the sytem, becomes part of the system. As Heinz von Forster said to me when we first began to discuss this thirty years ago, a man walking a dog is a man-dog system - a cyborg, one would say today." The Rivers North of the Future p204

Must get out and walk the dog - become a cyborg before lunch