The present study introduces the ways in which parents mediate young children's digital media practices in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet country. This study reveals a new parental mediation strategy - subterfuge, which refers to parents' indirect communication about digital media restrictions with their children. With this approach, parents blame digital devices or internet connectivity for limiting children's access. Using the strategy, parents prefer indirect interference with their children's digital practices to avoid upsetting or confronting them. The strategy is explained through parental ethnotheories - parents' cultural beliefs and values about childrearing. The study calls for adding parental ethnotheories to research on parental mediation in digital environments. Findings presented here originated in a study involving five families with a five-year-old child through family visits and the living journals method developed specifically for this study.
This article contributes to the study of radio pedagogy in Africa by exploring the Cameroonian case. It shows how Cameroon, after it gained independence in 1960 but faced a shortage of primary school teachers, set up a continuous training scheme based on distance learning via radio broadcasts. Drawing on archival sources of Yaounde, documentaries and field interviews, and taking a historical approach and a deductive logic, the article analyzes the implementation of this training initiative. It highlights the didactic devices, the teaching methods and the distance learning programs. The analysis shows that many teachers benefited from a professional qualification. The distance learning contributed to their skills development and career advancement. However, the article also reveals that the economic crisis of the 1980s put an end to this continuous training of teachers. It concludes with shedding light on the current challenges of technology use in Cameroon's education.
The educational technology industry includes numerous learning providers and platforms offering cohort-based courses. In this paper, we examine, analyze, and critique one such platform called Maven. We focus our analysis on Maven because this specific platform describes itself as building ‘the university of the future’ and has recently received significant attention and funding, making it a compelling case study to better understand the potential roles and risks associated with education platforms operating outside of and alongside more traditional higher education institutions today and into the future. We highlight specific concerns about cohort-based platforms like Maven, including lack of transparency, risk of surveillance, lack of adequate financial support for learners, and over-reliance on social media networks as signifiers of educator/instructor qualification. Suggested benefits include adaptability, suitability to changing skills needs, and responsiveness to changing environmental scenarios.
This paper develops a critical perspective on the use of conversational agents (CAs) with children at home. Drawing on interviews with eleven parents of pre-school children living in Norway, we illustrate the ways in which parents resisted the values epitomised by CAs. We problematise CAs' attributes in light of parents' ontological perceptions of what it means to be human and outline how their attitudes correspond to Bourdieu's [1998a. Acts of Resistance. New York: New Press] concept of acts of resistance. For example, parents saw artificial conversation designed for profit as a potential threat to users' autonomy and the instant gratification of CAs as a threat to children's development. Parents' antecedent beliefs map onto the ontological tensions between human and non-human attributes and challenge the neoliberal discourse by demanding freedom and equality for users rather than productivity and economic gain. Parents' comments reflect the belief that artificial conversation with a machine inappropriately and ineffectively mimics a nuanced and intimate human-to-human experience in service of profit motives.
The paper proposes a framework for thinking about digital technologies, including AI, in education. The framework combines Don Ihde's postphenomenology and Seymour Papert's constructionism. The former is rooted in the philosophy of technology, the latter - in education and technology. The intersections between the two theories have been mentioned but not explored. There are biographical affinities between the two thinkers, and their ground-breaking works were published in adjacent years - Ihde's Technics and Praxis in 1979 and Papert's Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas in 1980. The intersection between the two theories is examined through a review of constructionism through the prism of the Ihde's four postphenomenological relations showing how each relation matches a major constructionist thread: for embodiment relations, personalization fits; for hermeneutic relations - computational thinking; for alterity relations - microworld; and for background relations - democratization. The paper shows how the two theories contribute to each other and enrich the analysis.
Allowing learners to move across learning contexts in novel ways, digital tools play an increasingly central role for the formation of learning trajectories and identities. They thus presumably also affect dynamics of social sorting in education. Against this background, this article introduces a conceptual framework for unravelling dynamics of social sorting in digital learning environments. Inspired by French pragmatic sociology, we propose classification as analytical anchor point for disentangling the intricate interplays between educational technologies, learning situations, and wider moral and social orders. We present a 'speculative inquiry' into current AIED to demonstrate the added value this analytical perspective. We identify a hiatus between 'inspired' and 'industrial' logics of classification in current digital learning tools and environments that are likely to yield unwanted social sorting effects. A classification lens helps foreground social dynamics underlying such patterns, thus furthering our understanding of persistent patterns of disadvantaging in (digital) education.
This article analyses the smartphone application TeacherTapp that is used to collect and disseminate information on teachers' views on education and their classroom practices. The research takes as its object of analysis the use of TeacherTapp in England and Flanders. We analyze what TeacherTapp is, how it relates to a given localized community in its form and function, as well as how it impacts education by re-shaping discourse on teaching. We find that this technology is a 'multiple enactment' that is articulated, used, and viewed differently between England and Flanders as well as in different contexts of use. We furthermore find that this multiple enactment centers on the complexities of the participatory data streams' flowing from, and generated by, the app. We conclude that TeacherTapp enables new forms of participatory datafication in education that constitutes new modes of enacting teachers' professional voice as a teacher professionalization app.
This paper examines the concept of open-source data interoperability in the United States' K-12 education domain, specifically addressing the implications of interoperability for data justice. The term 'data justice' is a relatively recent coinage; the framing and meaning of this term are still evolving, and it has not yet been applied in the educational domain. Building on the nascent research and theorizing in the fields of both data justice and interoperability in educational contexts, this paper provides an overview of the current state of this intersection. Additionally, the authors draw on their direct experiences implementing interoperability initiatives in several U.S. states in order to build a foundational understanding of the risks and opportunities for data justice in the realm of interoperability and data standards in education. The paper concludes with a call for more research to be completed on this complex sociotechnical topic.
This paper outlines how ideas of 'degrowth' might be used to reimagine sustainable forms of education technology. In essence, degrowth calls for a proactive renewal of technology use around goals of voluntary simplicity and slowing-down, community-based coproduction and sharing, alongside conscious minimalization of resource consumption. The paper considers how core degrowth principles of conviviality, commoning, autonomy and care have been used to develop various forms of 'radically sustainable computing'. The paper then suggests four ways in which degrowth principles might frame future thinking around education technology in terms of: (i) curtailing current manipulative forms of education technology, (ii) bolstering existing convivial forms of education technology; (iii) stimulating the development of new convivial education technologies; and (iv) developing digital technologies to achieve the eventual de-schooling of society. It is concluded that mobilisation of these ideas might support a much-needed reorientation of digital technology in education along low-impact, equitable lines.
This study raises a critical question: ‘what does it mean to be smart teachers in the era of technology?’. To provide a concrete and comprehensive answer, the authors analyse multiple discourses revolving around SMART education, an education technology reform initiative in South Korea. This article critically examines the significance of SMART education as dominant discourse to shed light on the formation of smart teachers. The results show that SMART education is conceptualised as ‘panacea’ that can practically solve all kinds of educational problems, which leaves no choice for teachers but to accept it. The authors also analyse teachers’ perceptions and practices by drawing on interviews conducted in a Korean smart city, where the SMART education was first enacted. It is argued that smart teachers are supposed to be ‘adaptive’ to survive by proving themselves as ‘compatible’. This article concludes that it is necessary to imagine more diverse versions of smart teachers.
The interplay of digital technologies and inequalities are increasingly discussed in contemporary research, mostly focusing on different forms of digital divides and often addressed as a 'problem' that societies should face. Hence, digital education and its governance becomes a major arena for addressing inequalities. In this paper, we offer a cross-country and multi-voiced perspective on how socio-digital inequalities are problematized in digital education policy in three world regions - Latin America, Africa and Europe - studying cases through policy documents in Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Botswana, Germany and Sweden. Our analysis shows how differences and similarities between digital education policy are rooted in various sociotechnical imaginaries that go beyond the national as they are highly situated in spatial-temporal contexts and rooted in historical trajectories. Our contribution aims at a further exploration of the entanglements of educational technology and in/equalities through global conditions and local (hi)stories.
Estonia has since the liberation from the Soviet Union in 1991 successfully branded itself as a digital society and an education nation. This transformation builds on a sociotechnical imaginary where the progression of learning and the advancement of future citizens is postulated by a restructuring of the classroom through digital solutions. In this case study, we look at a prototype of a future classroom that was set up at the Estonian pavilion at the world fair EXPO 2020 in Dubai, as part of a nation branding process, promoting the nation’s educational system and prosperous ed-tech sector. The future classroom was promoted using slogans and futuristic visuals that targeted foreign investors and policy makers, in a way that suggested that the anticipated digital future already exists in Estonia, and therefore, is available for foreign investment, while at the same time connecting to a national and historical narrative of Estonia as part of the European cultural sphere.
This introduction summarises the objectives and themes of a special issue that highlights global-local interdependencies in the history of educational technologies. It suggests that discussions of the development, diffusion, and use of technologies of teaching and learning around the world could benefit from a broadening of the definition of educational technologies, a diversification of research materials and practices, and a focus on underrepresented voices and asymmetrical power relations. Offering such perspectives, the ten articles included in the special issue present welcome approaches to tracing the historical and contemporary adoption of technologies in and beyond educational settings.
The FATIH project was the largest K-12 level ed-tech integration project in Turkey. Its aim was to enhance the quality of education by improving technology in classrooms. To determine the outcome of the project a systematic literature review was carried out and the perspectives of in-service teachers were considered. The literature was searched for information between the years 2014 and 2022. A total of 22 studies were thematically coded, which yielded 170 codes. The results indicate that the project revolved around hardware and that the e-content was unsatisfactory. They also showed that the teachers were not prepared, that there were sustainability problems, and that classroom practice was disrupted. The underlying reasons for these issues were the sudden top-down start of the project and the recalcitrance of teachers towards it. As a result, it is recommended that ed-tech integration literature is referred to before launching such an initiative.
The introduction of computers in Indian schools runs parallel with the development of a digital divide in the country. In addition to the formal ways in which government policies shape access to computers in schools, deeper informal cultures of the state and schools shape opinion about these technologies. In this paper, we examine three levels of these informal cultures: political cultures and their perceptions of technology; bureaucratic cultures, which are distanced from schooling realities; and classroom teaching-learning practices, where digital inequalities add to pre-existing educational inequalities. For examining the interplay of the informal cultures, we scale down from the national level to examine the case of West Bengal, a state in eastern India. The state has been one of the strongholds of Left politics in India. Drawing upon its experiences, we explore the linkage between political ideology and the social embedding of resistance to computers.
We draw upon Appadurai's 'scapes' and Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) to interrogate historical and spatial flows in relation to specific testing technologies. We reveal how testing systems, conceptualised as actor-networks, rearticulate colonial legacies of inequality which are intensified by new and emerging technologies. ANT helps trace social and relational interactions occurring in various national and global data spaces, and helps make sense of incessant transformations in education datascapes. Mapping actor-networks, and translations, help name and navigate neoliberal forces acting through colonial legacies via emerging educational datascapes. Our examination shows how educational technologies associated with standardised testing in northern and southern contexts - specifically, England, Singapore, Bangladesh and Australia - exacerbate structural inequalities. We consider how such technologies are actants and reflective of co-existing historical and temporal influences, and global cultural and spatial flows, allowing us to map the multiple ways in which educational technologies are manifested in an emerging education datascape.
This article analyzes the development, commercialization and demise of the Smaky school computer in French-speaking, Western Switzerland between 1973 and 1997. By examining archival material, I consider the connections between this locally assembled and used school computer, and the globally embedded economic developments during the period of investigation. I argue that, historically, the Smaky was both a product of and a response to the region's economic crisis in the 1970s and early 1980s. Analytically speaking, I critically reflect on the seemingly contradictory categories of 'global' and 'local'. Although these were politically effective among historical actors, they are of limited use in the historical analysis of digital educational technologies.
This article explores the history of digital testing technology. Using an organisation that pioneered the use of international large-scale assessments - the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) - I discuss the role of computers, punched cards, answer cards and scanning machines as an example of transnational collaboration in the social sciences. In doing so, I particularly look into temporal and spatial dimensions of collaboration. The temporal dimension had to do with ideals of speed and durability, whereas the spatial dimension had to do with questions of where data processing should occur and how data could travel across boundaries. The analysis goes beyond simplistic assumptions where digital technology is seen merely as a tool that facilitates data processing. Instead, I stress the complexity of using computers and emphasize the materiality of digital technology, essential for understanding how data moved around in an era before the World Wide Web.
The history of educational technology is replete with stories of mostly White men who have conducted some of the leading innovations in the field. The stories of educational technologists from minority backgrounds have largely gone untold, perhaps giving the false impression that such individuals were not involved in this field. This article recounts the stories of several leading African American innovators. These individuals did cutting-edge work and worked with well-known researchers from the 1960s to the present day, but their work has largely gone unnoticed by educational technology researchers and developers. These narratives provoke us to reconsider the meaning, scope, and purpose of educational technology as they collectively describe how the desire of a few individuals to use technology to educate and empower the underserved was intertwined with the African American struggle for civil rights.
After World War II, educational television became a significant tool for improving the quality of schooling worldwide. The use of educational television was starting to be considered a modernized way for developing the educational system in many countries including South Korea. Drawing on the archival sources of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Korean government, this article examines the USAID's educational aid programs in South Korea by focusing on the establishment of educational television. It first covers the rise of modernization theory as a framework for national development by focusing on educational television in less-industrialized countries. The second part explores how educational television in South Korea was shaped by the international interaction. Finally, this study argues that the case of educational television in South Korea reflects the dynamics of dualized modernization, in which South Korean adapt U.S. educational television to their own needs.
