This essay is part of the preparatory phase for a scenario construction exercise regarding ICT and education. It looks at future developments of ICTs and how they will affect education. Sorry about the missing references. I will add the reference list sometime soon.
ICTs and educational institutions: A growing divide?
The transition from the manageable, stationary desktop computers of the 1990s to the highly personalized compact laptops, cell phones and smart phones of today, has dampened educators once favorable views of ICTs. Educators increasingly view ICTs as distractive technologies, both inside and outside of the classroom, and readily support any number of measures to limit their use, including blanket bans on the use of any personal ICTs in educational institutions (Kolb, 2008). This is in stark contrast to many educators’ more optimistic views in the late 1980s and 1990s, when ICTs were generally embraced as transformative technologies that would modernize education (Bigum & Kenway, 2005; Collis, Veen & De Vries, 1993). But, as the rate of development of ICTs quickly overtook educational institutions ability to transform themselves in the early 2000s, educators have found themselves competing with realities for which they are wholly unprepared and mostly unable to accommodate. Young people today live out a considerable portion of their social lives online, through computers and cell phones, which influences their values, norms, knowledge, and ways of knowing (Lenhart, Ling, Campbell & Purcell, 2010; Ito, Horst, Bittanti, Boyd, Herr-Stephenson, Lange, et al., 2008). Unsurprisingly, since educational institutions largely deal with these same attributes, young people’s interactions online affect the way that they perceive the role and purpose of educational institutions and there is an obvious conflict between the collaborative and open nature of young people’s online realities and the structured and disciplined realities of most current educational institutions. It can be reasonably assumed that educators’ current attitudes toward ICTs in education are, in part, a reflection of this growing divide between young people’s perceptions of educational institutions and their own perceptions. Since there is nothing to indicate that the development of ICTs is in any way subject to the will of educational policy makers and educators, how this growing divide develops in the long-term future depends on future ICT developments and how educational institutions react to those developments. In this chapter we will examine two foreseeable development trajectories for ICTs that are likely to produce unexpected consequences for educational institutions given their current approaches to ICTs. The first is the increasing miniaturization and personalization of ICT hardware. The second is the increasing difficulty of managing access to information resources.Since the late 1990s, ICTs have become more compact and portable as wireless technologies have been developed and, first, laptops, and more recently, smartphones, have become the dominant computing platforms. Within the next decade ICTs will become increasingly transparent to users and individuals around them.
Current ICTs are remarkably compact compared to the bulky desktop computers and requisite peripherals, such as CRT monitors, keyboards and mice, of the 1990s. Yet, although a current smart phone, that far surpasses the computing power of a late 1990s desktop computer, can easily fit in one’s pocket, they are still surprisingly tedious to use. Because both input and output interfaces on the devices require direct physical interaction with the device, using either hands or spoken voice, the devices have to be removed from the user’s pocket, or wherever it is stored when not in use, and commands considerable attention from the user. Moreover, because devices require physical interaction, their use is obvious to others in the near vicinity of the user, which can be problematic for both users and others. Thus, although currently available smartphones and other ICTs provide us with “always-on” technologies, i.e. they are always powered-up and networked, they are not always available for use due to various factors.
There is general agreement among technology researchers that input and output interfaces used with current ICTs are problematic (Gustafson, Bierwirth & Baudisch, 2010; Harrison, Tan & Morri, 2010; Costanza, Inverso, Allen & Maes, 2007). A number of technologies have been, or are being, developed to address the previously mentioned limitations of current ICTs. Most current ICTs already have limited support for voice commands (Heidemann, 2009). Other novel technologies for input and output already being developed include, using an individual’s skin for input, spatial gestures for input and interaction, motionless gestures for input and interaction, and wearable lenses for “field of vision” displays (Parviz, 2009; Gustafson, Bierwirth & Baudisch; Harrison, Tan & Morri; Costanza, et al.). Even for voice-based applications, researchers are developing “silent speech” technologies, that enable users to talk without making any audible sound (Denby, Schultz, Honda, Hueber, Gilbert & Brumberg, 2009). These technologies will have a dramatic impact on the way we interact with ICTs as they become viable for commercial use. ICTs will become even more compact than they are today, to the point where they will be effectively as invisible as users choose to have them. Furthermore, virtual realities, i.e. computer simulated realities, and augmented realities, i.e. data overlays over experienced realities, will seamlessly integrate with physical realities allowing users to function in multiple realities at the same time. Yet, even a person standing directly in front of another will have no way of knowing whether that person is paying attention to them, carrying on a conversation with someone halfway across the world, or even playing a video game, unless that person chooses to let them know.
The development and proliferation of ICTs has affected our expectations regarding accessibility to digital informational resources. Because ICTs greatly increase the flow of information, there is an expectation that digital information that helps us to get through our daily lives ,or impacts our daily lives in some way, is easily accessible. In the most innocuous sense, this means that ICT users no longer expect to have to look for a telephone book to find someone’s phone number nor do we expect to have to make a trip to a bookstore or music store to acquire reading material or music to listen to. On a more controversial level, for a growing number of ICT users, especially of younger generations, the ease of access to digital informational resources is construed as meaning that such resources, whatever their nature or for what purpose they were produced, should be freely available, in the sense that they are easily accessed and not paid for, as long as it is accessed only for personal use (Morgan, Neal & Maris, 2008; Liang & Yan, 2005). Producers of digital information have devised a number of ways to protect their intellectual property rights from such use, which they perceive as theft, usually referred to as “piracy”. To date, none of the various methods that have been developed to curtail perceived violations of intellectual property rights of digital resources have proven entirely effective (Boone, 2008).
Like producers of digital information resources, educational institutions have also made various attempts to manage access to information to comply with institutional and district policies and state mandates. For educational institutions, the concerns prompting such measures are primarily (Zittrain & Palfrey, 2008):
- where the resources are deemed inappropriate for individuals in their students’ age groups (ex. pornography),
- where the resources or services concerned are considered distractive for the educational environment (ex. online games and social networking sites),
- and where access to the resource or services are considered to constitute potentially illegal activities (ex. sites for sharing copyrighted files).
Students in schools that attempt to limit access to digital information resources have proven no less adept at circumventing such measures of access control than ICT users in general, for example, using external networks, Internet “anonymizers” , and information syndication services (Zittrain & Palfrey). Although the majority of students make no attempt to circumvent access control measures, those that do, tend to make resources acquired by circumventing access controls accessible to others both inside and outside educational institutions (Zittrain & Palfrey). The end result is the same, that despite educational institutions’ extensive, and costly, measures to impose controls over students’ use of ICTs in schools, students’ access to information resources is mostly unhindered.
In the late 1980s, at the early dawn of the Internet-fueled information revolution, Stewart Brand famously declared, “information wants to be free.” (Brand, 1987). Although the accuracy of Brand’s declaration has already been demonstrated many times, few events have been as unanticipated and caused as much consternation for the producers of information as Wikileaks’ recent dissemination of thousands of secret documents produced by U.S. government officials (Wikileaks, 2010). Wikileaks’ action demonstrated the real extent to which information technologies pose a serious challenge to any attempts to control access to information. U.S. officials immediate attempts to have the website shutdown and made inaccessible proved futile (Warrick & Pegoraro, 2010). Even having the entry for the Wikileaks website removed from domain name servers (DNS), i.e. the computer servers that facilitate the translation between human readable Internet addresses and the fixed IP number addresses, has not affected the accessibility of the site. In fact, as of this writing, the Google Internet search website provides a direct link to the IP address of the Wikileaks site when “Wikileaks” is entered as a search term (Google, 2010). Even though the removal of Wikileaks’ entry in DNSs has not hindered access to the site, it has prompted interest in bypassing the central authority of the current DNS system. Following the removal of Wikileaks’ entry in central DNSs, the founders of the Pirate Bay, a web service that facilitates the exchange of files used to locate pirated files for free download, announced that they will launch their own alternative DNS system (Van Beijnum, 2010). Such an action is not insignificant in that it will facilitate the construction of alternative “Internets” that will challenge the authority of current Internet governance systems. Alternative networks, based on peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies along with the networking capabilities of future ICT devices, will make the control of access to information entirely pointless.
To what extent educational institutions will attempt to control access to information in the future depends on how they evolve organizationally, operationally, and how learning goals will be defined in rapidly changing societies. Continuation of the evolution of increasingly miniaturized and personalized ICTs creates significant levels of uncertainty, since future technologies will affect both perceived needs to control access and the ability of authorities to enforce such controls. Given the history of aversion to change in educational institutions, it is entirely likely that there will be some attempts to control access, whether they are based on federal or state mandates, institutional policies, or even community concerns. The fact that U.S. schools are affected by a number of different interests and stakeholders adds considerably to the uncertainty in this regard.
