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UK
Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water
During the pandemic, there were many exciting developments in the world of educational technology. Many of those developments were positive and welcome; in fact, it could well be argued that the pandemic advanced the cause of educational technology in the UK by at least 10 years. Some of the things that happened were an enhanced sense of online community, the development of various apps and software for technology enhanced learning, and the fast roll out of the MS Teams workspace.
However, in education we are very aware that although the technology was charging off at 100 miles an hour down the motorway, pedagogy, and sometimes staff and students, were left behind. The switch to online education for many schools, colleges and higher education institutions was done almost overnight. What that meant was that there was little time to engage in critical thinking about online pedagogies. It became very quickly apparent that teaching online is just not the same as teaching face-to-face but with a camera on. It was also apparent that different institutions were using, and still often are using multiple platforms and technologies for various aspects of the educational and student experience agenda, and that the use of these multiple platforms and technologies does not provide a good experience either for colleagues in education or for students.
Over the pandemic, while we were working from home, many of us experienced the phenomenon zoom fatigue, and the rather befuddling feeling are spending all day online working and then all evening online, relaxing, as we contacted family and played online games. This was set against the context of generalised anxiety about family and friends about the state of the world. All this made for an unsettling existence within which students and teachers were attempting to enact some form of education. We missed out on corridor conversations and underground working that contribute so much to the experiences of staff and students in education. Those “watercooler chats” are very difficult to recreate digitally.
One of the other things that became very clear and that was starkly illustrated by the lockdowns was the fact that we are not correct to presume that digital education is an immaterial process. It’s very far from it. Digital education is situated; it always takes place somewhere. When those ‘somewhere’ places are households, as they often were over lockdown, it is also important to factor in family relationship variables into our discussions about digital learning.
I’d like to set this within the context of something I’m going to describe as post digital. We as people, as humanity, are encountering a period of change in our relationships with digital technologies, and, as we have seen, the changes are proceeding at pace. Digital technologies are of course embedded within social systems and institutions. So we need to develop and start thinking about our broader understandings of the human technology relationships which exist as we interact.
In the post Covid era there is a significant move towards paying more attention to the understanding of human technology links. On the other hand, the Covid lockdowns foregrounded the significant inequalities in people’s capacities to engage with current forms of digital education; it’s certainly not true that we are all online now. That’s a mantra that many people have used, as Neil Selwyn from Monash University has pointed out; however, digital inequalities are as entrenched and significant as ever before; there are issues of digital inequality along the well-rehearsed lines of class, race, geography, disability and gender. Just as an example, in the UK, in the first week of January 2021 lockdown just 10% of teachers overall reported that all the students had adequate access to their device a device for remote learning and 17% of teachers reported that over 20% of the students didn’t have such access. So we should probably conclude that post digital live in it’s just as an unfair and compromises any other form of living. It is a good thing that the pandemic has foregrounded this issue in the minds of education leaders, policy makers, and academics as we think about online/digital learning. .
One of the questions it’s important for us to ask is ‘what do online and face-to-face teaching and learning bring us?’. They are different; how are they different? We need to be asking what do or should students get face-to-face so they don’t get online, and what do or should they get online they don’t get face-to-face? .So we need to recognise that online learning and face-to-face learning are separate but must be entangled; as a result of developing this understanding I now use the phrase ‘digitally enhanced learning and teaching’.
So as we are thinking about the effects of the pandemic, and we are moving back to face-to-face learning, which is clearly important and essential to many students’ experiences, we do also need to think about not throwing away the baby with the bathwater, that engaging in digital enhanced learning teaching and assessment are important- but they must be entangled and intertwined with face-to-face learning and teaching.
Of course, we must set this entanglement against the context of the digital divide and start to think about relevant material aspects of digitally enhance teaching and learning, as well as about and also the skills that educators and their students need in order to engage in this post-Covid world.
