Project Tomorrow: The case for technology foresight in education

On April 1, 2011, Project Tomorrow released its report based on a survey of students, parents, teachers and school administrators on technology use in learning and education. Project Tomorrow’s study shows that there is an increasing gap between US educators’ perspectives of technology for learning and how young people are using, or prefer to use, technology for learning. Among the key findings are that young people from 6th grade and up have access to, and the capability to use, a range of technologies for their learning that are not supported by their schools. Perhaps the most revealing finding in the report is demonstrated by the following (original emphasis),

“Is your school doing a good job using technology to enhance learning and/or student achievement?” The results are unsettling, especially at the high school level. While 74 percent of high school teachers, 72 percent of high school principals and 62 percent of parents of high school aged children said yes to that question, only 47 percent of high school students agreed.

Project Tomorrow’s study supports the results of several studies that have been conducted over the last decade showing that formal educational institutions are not keeping up with developing technology, while students are. In 2002, the Pew Internet & American Life (PI&AL) project released the report, The Digital Disconnect: The widening gap between Internet-savvy students and their schools, which showed that students are frustrated by the “roadblocks” set up by schools that hinder their use of the Internet and other ICTs for learning. More recently, the PI&AL project, Teens and Mobile Phones, found that mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous among high school-aged youth in the US and their preferred means of accessing ICT services. Yet, a mere 12% of US youth are allowed to have their mobile phones with them at all times in school. The project, Digital Youth Research: Kids’ Informal learning with Digital Media, showed that young people routinely use the technology available to them (increasingly mobile phones) to establish their own self-organizing learning communities in their areas of interest. A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that young people are more than twice as likely to go online at home than at school and that young people’s use of technology is growing at an astounding rate.
The studies listed so far have all been conducted in the US and on US youth. But, this is an international issue as well. Analyses of PISA data on computer use have shown the same trends in countries other than the US. The UK’s BECTA also conducted several studies that showed the same trends in the UK (the BECTA reports have become difficult to locate online since BECTA was shut down).
What these studies show us is that the way that young people interact with, and learn from, information and media is changing at a dramatic pace consistent with the rapid development of ICT. Educational institutions, however, are resisting change and, consequently, not adopting educational approaches consistent with young people’s changing social reality. Without an anticipatory framework to work with, educational institutions find themselves forced to react to unexpected technological developments. All too often, the “easy way” is chosen, and technologies are simply dismissed, banned from schools, which ignores the inevitable impact that their use has on learning and the social realities of educational communities. Take, for example, many educational institutions reaction to the rise in cyberbullying. Many schools simply ban from their premises the devices that they believe are used to facilitate cyberbullying, expecting that to, at least, free them from any liability, if not completely eradicate the problem (I have actually had school administrators say to me that cyberbullying is not a problem at their school because they ban the use of mobile phones in school). To think that this solves the problem is remarkably naïve and demonstrative of a complete lack of understanding of how technology affects social interactions. In such cases, in-depth foresight activities could highlight the need for broader thinking about how ICTs transcend the boundaries of physical and social spaces to affect social realities, even where ICTs themselves are not imminently present. In a similar vein, foresight can highlight how ICTs are expected to affect students’ learning in a general sense, i.e. in and out of the schools themselves, to suggest strategies to address their use, wherever that use may occur.