What this article does is to summarize some of the main challenges which educational technology will bring up in the next decade. It is filled with interesting ideas, and as such, it constitutes a fitting conclusion for what is my final weekly reflection. Below, I will summarize what I consider to be the four most interesting challenges/issues and provide some of my own thoughts on these in addition to those which the authors present. These tend to take the form of questions which it is difficult to know exactly how to go about answering.

New forms of digital inclusion/exclusion

This involves asking the question of who benefits more from new technologies, and who benefits less. Traditionally, educational technology researchers have tended to view technology as inherently good, the inequalities generated by new technology simply having to do with the fact that some people (by virtue of socio-economic status and educational levels) are able to better absorb and integrate new technologies than others. However, as I have already stated in previous posts, this ignores the larger socio-economic framework which birthed the technology in the first place, and the imprint of this context which the technology carries with it. What if, Selwyn et al. ask, instead of being a function of differential ability to integrate new technologies, the latter tend to exacerbate pre-existing social inequalities and hierarchies? How does this work? Maybe the work world is getting increasingly polarized according to levels of technological fluency. As a result, if you have a pre-exiting advantage with technology due to higher educational levels or higher socio-economic status, technology only serves to increase the social distance between yourself and those people who do not have these advantages. If this is the case, that technology has an inherent tendency to exacerbate the socio-economic divide, is there a way to utilize technology in a way that would work against this inherent tendency, to reduce inequality?

Platform economics in an age of artificial intelligence

Here, the issue is that these tech corporations who are providing the platforms for educational institutions, are benefiting from the integration of these platforms by using them to mine student data, in order to target advertising to them and to ‘educate’ their artificial intelligence programs. This gets us into some of the same terrain as that concerning the use of Google in the classroom. As one person interviewed in that podcast said: “if you are getting a product for free, then you are the product” (my paraphrase). When integrating platforms such as Google into the classroom therefore, we need to do a cost/benefit analysis of what the company is gaining, what students and educators are getting and what the costs of this are. Is it worth selling student data in order to have access to this platform? What is the cost of putting up with targeted advertising, or the risk that one’s data will be used in attempts to commit fraud or scams against a person? What about the larger implications of helping companies perfect their AI? This is touched on in the following section. How is this AI used to shape subsequent human behavior, and what does it do to our political economy to have powerful AI, controlled by large companies, able to do the tasks that humans used to do?

‘Divisions of learning’ across humans and machines  

Artificial intelligence raises numerous questions for technology of education researchers, and for researchers across numerous other disciplines. Who controls and benefits from AI? How is it reshaping our political economy? And what is the implication for the future of education? Allow me unpack these questions a little. Large corporations control AI. One of the applications to which AI is put is to learn our thoughts, preferences, prejudices and behaviors. AI can then be used to sell us things, but it can also be used to influence our behaviors in others ways, that are not always socially advantageous. Maybe in an effort to garner our attention it is used to spit our worst tendencies and prejudices back to us in a way that intensifies them and social polarization with them, as can be seen with Facebook, for example. In addition, AI may be changing our political economy. Clearly the work world is in the process of being transformed as AI learns to do more and more tasks previously undertaken by humans. This may make many jobs, and the livelihoods that depend on them, obsolete in the near future. This raises larger questions about that nature of work and the way that the latter is linked to distribution of resources. If these two remain tightly connected, the way they are now, then AI is preparing the road to a future that is even more polarized, between those who control AI and the means of production and a growing army of unemployed, redundant, immiserated former workers. Finally, AI raises new questions about the future of education. Maybe educational researchers should also begin to look at the ‘education’ of AI. The former also need to theorize human learning in the context of rapidly evolving AI. What is the optimal type of skills that humans need to develop in the context of highly developed AI taking over many tasks previously fulfilled by humans? What types of professional niches can humans continue to occupy in a work world dominated by AI?

IT industry actors as a leading educational force

Selwyn et al. note that large tech corporations are the ones leading the charge to integrate new tech in the classroom. They say that while there is nothing inherently wrong with business taking such a leading role in education, sufficient oversight and regulation has to be developed to keep corporations from influencing educational policy in a way that benefits their own bottom line over and against the public interest in education. While I agree with the second half of this sentence, regarding the need for regulation and oversight of corporations involved in education, I could not disagree more with the sentence’s first clause, that there is nothing inherently wrong with corporations being involved in education. In fact, I would state the exact opposite: there is something inherently wrong and deleterious about having private business involved in education, in any way. As soon as private business becomes involved in education, the purpose of education and its ability to act in the public good get undermined. Business begins to subtly interfere with educational policy, putting its own profit motive above the objectives of forming democratic citizens. Business in the classroom can work to subtly shape the perceptions, attitudes, and narratives that are transmitted in the educational process, in a way that makes them more pro-business and which develops only the skills and attitudes needed to form the next generation of workers. When business becomes involved in education, the ability to of education to be an independent pillar of society, which stands apart from society and imparts the abilities to critique it, is eroded. The more business becomes involved in education, the more it (subtly and not so subtly) undertakes the reshaping of society in ways that benefit its own world view and consolidate its own domination over people, government, civil society. This is why, I believe, the entrance of corporations into public institution must be resisted, in principle, in all of its forms.

Article:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694945?needAccess=true