Back in the Neanderthal days before Web 2.0, iPhones, tablets, the cloud, learning analytics and so on, Chris Bigum and Jane Kenway wrote a paper called ‘New Information Technologies and the Ambiguous Future of Schooling’. Although published in 1998, it remains relevant and can be accessed here.
They analysed the spectrum of discourse that was concerned with new technologies in education. At one end of this spectrum was a discourse community which they termed ‘boosters’. Then, as now, the boosters were far and away the dominant voices. Bigum and Kenway characterized the boosters as having an ‘unswerving faith in the technology’s capacity to improve education and most other things in society’. I discussed the boosterist discourse in my post on this blog, ‘Saving the World (adaptive marketing)’, focussing on the language of Knewton, as a representative example.
At the other end of Bigum and Kenway’s spectrum was what they termed ‘doomsters’ – ‘unqualified opponents of new technologies’ who see inevitable damage to society and education if we uncritically accept these new technologies.
Since starting this blog, I have been particularly struck by two things. The first of these is that I have had to try to restrain my aversion to the excesses of boosterist discourse – not always, it must be said, with complete success. The second is that I have found myself characterized by some people (perhaps those who have only superficially read a post of two) as an anti-technology doomsterist. At the same time, I have noticed that the debate about adaptive learning and educational technology, in general, tends to become polarized into booster and doomster camps.
To some extent, such polarization is inevitable. When a discourse is especially dominant, anyone who questions it risks finding themselves labelled as the extreme opposite. In some parts of the world, for example, any critique of neoliberal doxa is likely to be critiqued, in its turn, as ‘socialist, or worse’: ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’.
When it comes to adaptive learning, one can scoff at the adspeak of Knewton or the gapfills of Voxy, without having a problem with the technology per se. But, given the dominance of the booster discourse, one can’t really be neutral. Neil Selwyn (yes, him again!) suggests that the best way of making full sense of educational technology is to adopt a pessimistic perspective. ‘If nothing else,’ he writes, ‘a pessimistic view remains true to the realities of what has actually taken place with regards to higher education and digital technology over the past thirty years (to be blunt, things have clearly not been transformed or improved by digital technology so far, so why should we expect anything different in the near future?)’. This is not an ‘uncompromising pessimism’, but ‘a position akin to Gramsci’s notion of being ‘a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will’’.
Note: The quotes from Neil Selwyn here are taken from his new book Digital Technology and the Contemporary University (2014, Abingdon: Routledge). In the autumn of this year, there will be an online conference, jointly organised by the Learning Technologies and Global Issues Special Interest Groups of IATEFL, during which I will be interviewing Neil Selwyn. I’ll keep you posted.
Adaptive Learning in ELT 