Chapter 2 Thinking about Ed Tech

The Problem with the Internet Trinity

Some of the early metaphors of the internet illustrate how the initial optimism about positive social change has turned to a more dystopian perspective. Because the internet, and particularly the web and social media, are so pervasive now and form such an integral part of our everyday lives, there is a tendency to overlook how recent all of this change has been and how rapid the associated social adjustments have been. If the founding of the pre-web can be seen as the gestation of the internet’s role in society, then since the 1990s we have been going through its childhood. This has been a time filled with optimism, charm, naïveté, and rapid development. We are now in the teenage years, which can be dark and moody but also positive, engaging, and realistic. It is a stage in which we and the technology seek meaning and our roles in the world.

One way to demonstrate this shift is to think of some of those early beliefs and sayings about the internet. They were couched in metaphors, and when we re-examine them now there are often aspects that are apparent that were not appreciated or intended when they were first proposed.

For example, it was commonly said in one form or another that “we’re all broadcasters now” (e.g., Shirky, 2008), by which people meant that publishing content was no longer the privilege of those who worked in the media or owned a newspaper. This removal of the filter to publish remains the most powerful aspect of the internet. But thinking about the metaphor of broadcasters now, what we did not appreciate then was that it should also have meant “we all have the responsibility of broadcasters now.” In a world where misinformation and fake news are disorientating to any notion of truth, to the extent that post-truth was the word of the year in 2016 (BBC News, 2016), how each one of us contributes to this problem becomes significant. Like broadcasters are supposed to, we have a responsibility to check the veracity of stories that we share, retweet, and amplify. Sadly, many broadcasters have also abandoned that principle. But the point remains: the liberation that we initially perceived masked the responsibility that came with it.

Caulfield (2019) proposes four moves toward building habits that protect against this kind of misinformation and therefore its redistribution. The four moves have the acronym SIFT.

• Stop: ask whether the website or source of information is known and what the reputations of both the claim and the website are.
• Investigate the source: take 60 seconds to consider where it is from before reading it; doing so will help you to determine if it is worth your attention and, if it is, provide a better understanding of its significance and trustworthiness.
• Find trusted coverage: sometimes it is not the particular article that is of interest but the claim that the article is making. You want to know if it is true or false. In these cases, it is useful to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs—more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied.
• Trace claims, quotations, and posts back to the original contexts: much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. In these cases, it is useful to go back to the original sources so that their contexts can be ascertained and thus whether the version shared was accurately presented.

SIFT is an example of the journalistic habits that we need to develop for ourselves in a world where everyone is a broadcaster.

James Boyle (1997) proposed an “internet trinity” or three fundamental beliefs that people held about the internet, at least in its early days. They can be seen as laws focused on the internet’s seeming immunity from state regulation. Boyle argued that “this tripartite immunity came to be a kind of Internet Holy Trinity, [and] faith in it was a condition of acceptance into the community.” If we examine each in turn, then a similar reinterpretation of the broadcaster’s cliché in the current context can be revealed.

The first law of the internet trinity is that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This is a quotation attributed to John Gilmore (Boyle, 1997). This was and remains a powerful metaphor. It attributes agency to the internet; however, as long as one remains wary of attributing intention to a technology, it does seem to capture the internet’s (or the community of internet users’) ability to avoid forms of censorship and find alternatives. This is a result of how the internet itself is structured. As Boyle puts it, the internet’s “distributed architecture and its technique of packet switching were built around the problem of getting messages delivered despite blockages, holes and malfunctions. Imagine the poor censor faced with such a system. There is no central exchange to seize and hold; messages actively ‘seek out’ alternative routes so that even if one path is blocked another may open up.”

A plus for overcoming state censorship, then, but the flip side of this metaphor could be that “trolls will route around censorship.” Caulfield (2017) refers to the controversy of Gamergate, when women in the gaming industry suffered coordinated harassment as a “dry run for the apocalypse.” He suggests that such activities, which might seem to be confined to a small community, are part of a broader movement in which “the rise of coordinated mal-information and harassment for political ends has much of its roots in the harassment of women online and misogyny in general.” Similarly, Lees (2016) identifies Gamergate as a warning about the radicalization of the alt-right: “This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.” Many of the systematic trolling and organized harassment techniques developed through the Gamergate community then spread further to the alt-right. Effectively, techniques were finessed there, and participants learned how to route around censorship in order to make previously extremist views part of the mainstream.

The second law of the internet trinity is that, “in Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” attributed to John Perry Barlow. This took the metaphor of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, whereby the government cannot pass laws restricting practice of religion, freedom of speech, and right to assembly and suggested that these were fundamental freedoms regardless of physical location. Boyle states that, “to the technological obstacles the Net raises against externally imposed content filtration, one must add the geographic obstacles raised by its global extent; since a document can as easily be retrieved from a server 5,000 miles away as one five miles away, geographical proximity and content availability are independent of each other.” This meant that the significance of physical location and the ability to control someone’s access to resources based upon that location are diminished. This failure to create a constitution of the internet, the romantic wild west notion, where anything goes, has fuelled the sense that free speech means freedom from consequences. It has also meant that we have state regulation of the internet in many places, increasing data surveillance, and the lack of a real regulatory (compared with a technical) framework to defend it. The First Amendment needed to be a global ordinance, but so did the accompanying restrictions on what is permissible.

The third and perhaps most fundamental law of the internet trinity that Boyle proposes is Stewart Brand’s phrase “Information Wants to be Free.” Again, this is metaphorical in nature, applying intent to information. Such anthropomorphic thinking is problematic, but as with the first law it does provide a useful way of thinking about how the removal of the filter, the anonymous nature of the internet, and the immediate global distribution meant that it was difficult, if not impossible, to contain information. The famous Streisand effect (Masnick, 2005), whereby a clumsy attempt to censor or control information has the opposite effect of publicizing it more widely, particularly through social media, is an instance of this. Named after Barbra Streisand’s attempt to remove pictures of her Malibu residence, it had the effect of greatly increasing views of it. Similar effects have been seen by companies or individuals that attempt to suppress information. More significantly, the notion that information wants to be free can be seen in the release of confidential documents, such as the extent of government surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden or Aaron Swartz’s release of JSTOR academic articles.

So, in many respects, information seemingly does want to be free. But maybe misinformation wants to be free more. And that poses real problems for a society. Aggressive recommendation algorithms in platforms such as YouTube and Pinterest mean that extremist views, conspiracy theories, and misinformation spread quickly. In addition, social media function by promoting views that provoke strong reactions, operating an “outrage economy” (Harvey, 2018), with bloggers, columnists, and media outlets all seeking traffic through clickbait articles. In this environment, factual information often struggles to compete against a system that favours misinformation. As a result, political entities have become adept at manipulating this tendency of information. For example, the site Wikileaks might be seen as an embodiment of the principle, but it has also been accused of being a vehicle for conspiracy theories and supporting an anti–Hillary Clinton stance during the American election in 2016. The initial metaphor of information wanting to be free was largely seen in a positive light, but when this tendency became manipulated and weaponized the very lack of control that made it appealing meant that the damage was difficult to limit.

To return to the initial point, from a long-view perspective, it is not surprising that we’re now going through these struggles with our relationship with the internet. It is all still relatively new, and society really has not had anything like this before. This makes it more important that we seek to address the issues now and reflect on where the internet is heading rather than see it as neutral or something beyond our control. Analyzing what these initial metaphors promised and how they have altered over the past 20 or so years provides a means to reflect on our changing relationship with the internet. This relationship is at the core of how we view, develop, and implement ed tech.

The Lure of Ed Tech

In this section, I want to explore why venture capitalists and technology start-ups are seemingly so obsessed with developing solutions for education. We will look at the “education is broken” metaphor later, but it seems that barely a week goes past without some new solution being announced that will “fix” some part of education. The obvious answer to the question of why ed tech is attractive is that it is seen as a lucrative investment—the global market for education was estimated at $6 trillion in 2019 (Nead, 2019), and the global shift to online education in 2020 has increased the appeal of this market. There is also the perception that the education sector is slow and ripe for change, which appeals to both investors and developers. These are undoubtedly significant factors, but I suspect that there is something else in the psychological mix that makes it so appealing, which can be thought of as a desire for a form of legitimacy and permanence. To illustrate this, I will use the metaphor of the industrial revolution and how architectural symbols of permanence appealed to the newly rich barons, in particular the construction of a fairy-tale castle in Wales.

Rewilding Ed Tech

Rewilding is the restoration of an ecosystem to a less managed one, where plants and animals that cannot flourish in intensively farmed or cultivated land can once again grow sustainable populations. Monbiot (2013) states that even nature reserves are extremely overmanaged: “The ecological disasters we call nature reserves are often kept in this depleted state through intense intervention: cutting and burning any trees that return; grazing by domestic animals at greater densities and for longer periods than would ever be found in nature.” He goes on to argue that the solution to this depleted state is rewilding, which involves “reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.”

Tree (2018) recounts her experience of rewilding the Knepp estate in Sussex. She considers rewilding to be a process in which landowners have to let go to an extent and allow ecology to take its own course. There are different ways to approach rewilding. The most well-known is the reintroduction of large predators, such as wolves. The reintroduction of wolves from Canada into Yellowstone Park in 1995 has been deemed largely a success, both the wolves and the ecosystem as a whole flourishing. By controlling elk numbers, the height of willow saplings has increased, because fewer elk graze them. This is an example of what is termed “trophic cascade,” in which the introduction or removal of an apex predator can cause changes throughout the ecosystem. Similarly, the number of grizzly bears has increased because of increased carcasses to feed on (Smith & Bangs, 2009). This top-down approach (in terms of the food chain) can be contrasted with a bottom-up approach in which rewilding commences at the bottom of the food chain with the reintroduction of small-scale flora and the removal of some invasive species, which then allows for the process of succession to establish a habitat that attracts and supports wildlife. This can be realized through seed dispersal or the planting of tree seedlings, as in Scotland by the Trees for Life project. Often rewilding projects, such as that at the Knepp estate, combine both approaches, introducing new plants as well as larger species such as hogs and deer.

Before turning to the application of rewilding to ed tech, it is worth emphasizing that metaphors drawn from nature are probably the most prevalent but the most dangerous. Making appeals to what is deemed “natural” and applying them to any form of human endeavour have led to justifications for social Darwinism, misogyny, and repression, with the implication that certain states are naturally occurring and therefore inevitable. We should approach any metaphor that draws on nature with caution. The intention in this case is to investigate whether the two approaches to rewilding hold any value in considering the range of technology used in higher education. The collection of different technologies is often referred to as constituting an ecosystem, of course a metaphor that comes laden with many assumptions but also offers some useful reminders about how technologies interact with each other, can change over time, and fulfil specific functions (or environmental niches).

Much of the early enthusiasm for ed tech stemmed from the facts that it was fast, cheap, and out of control (Groom & Lamb, 2014). However, as elearning gained significance and occupied a more central role in the university system, the associated technology became more robust and controllable. This was inevitable and beneficial in many ways—students don’t want the system that they need to submit an assignment at midnight to be flaky or to spend their study time overcoming barriers in using a technology. But, as a result, there has been a loss of some of the innovation that was prevalent when there were greater freedoms as university processes and regulations have solidified around enterprise systems, such as the VLE or LMS. The deployment of such systems necessitates the development of administrative structures and processes that are then framed in terms of the specific technology. Thus, institutions have roadmaps, guidelines, training programs, and reporting structures, all of which help to embed the chosen tool. This in effect creates a tool-focused solution—if educators want to achieve something in their courses, and they ask their IT, or educational support, team for help, often the answer will be couched in terms of “what is the moodle (or institutional tool) way of implementing this?” or “that isn’t in our LMS road plan.” We will look at VLE/LMS metaphors in more detail in a later chapter, but in terms of the analogy here this establishes the kind of aggressive monoculture that intensive farming or land management has produced in many countries. As with the LMS, there are undoubtedly benefits to intensive farming, and it has increased productivity, allowing for affordable foods and robust supply chains. But it comes with an environmental cost (there are other costs too in terms of subsidies, globalization, and so on, but they are outside the scope of this discussion). Farmers grow a limited number of crops, and the use of fertilizers often means that the soil is not suitable for other plants. Both by intention and then through habitat formation, variety is reduced.

Having established the productive habitat of the LMS, though, many now seek more variety in the ed tech ecosystem. They might want to introduce tools into the ecosystem that would encourage some of the innovation that we saw previously. However, as with introducing apex predators, it has to be done carefully; just as Yellowstone National Park officials did not want tourists attacked by wolves, so too ed tech teams don’t want students caught in frustrations with unusable systems. The two approaches to rewilding offer pointers here. A bottom-up approach might be to introduce some small-scale, low-impact tools, such as SPLOT (2021), or smallest/simplest, possible/portable, learning/living, open/online, tool/technology, and the argument is that publishing in the open web is powerful, but too many open web tools (e.g., blogs) are seen as technical and specialist, thus creating a barrier for many to participate in this open web. The aim is to create simple tools, for instance a form, that reduce the barrier to such publication. The team behind SPLOT (notably Alan Levine and Brian Lamb) state two key principles: “Make it as easy as possible to post activity to the open web in an appealing and accessible way [and] allow users to do so without creating accounts or providing any required personal information.”

Such tools can encourage some of the pedagogical innovation required without becoming an institution-wide tool. Groom (2017) suggests that often educators and students “don’t want to be faced with a ‘Hello World!’ post. In fact, they don’t even want to hear the word ‘WordPress.’ They just want a tool that helps them accomplish a fairly simple task that, in turn, helps them create a focused community-driven, engaging assignment.”

The more top-down approach could be to introduce a number of enterprise systems, or ones that can allow for adaptation, but an alternative would be to tackle the policy issues such as incentivizing the use of such tools, developing an IT infrastructure capable of supporting them, allocating resources for development, and removing different barriers. In this model, it is also necessary to create a cultural context in which students themselves see the value in such experimentation and are not penalized for it.

Rewilding offers another element to the metaphor in terms of ecotones. These are the areas of transition between two different biological communities, for example reed beds between river and forest. They might be seen as analogous to the transition between higher education and employment or society. Rewilding might have a role to play here, for example making the HEI technological ecosystem more like that of the wider internet. However, as Bump (2018) highlights, rewilding can also have a negative impact, with moose playing an important role in transporting nutrients across ecotones, and this can be affected by trophic rewilding with the introduction of wolves. Similarly, ed tech rewilding can negatively affect students’ performance or the robustness of such systems and thus limit the transition of skills and related evidence to the workplace. As mentioned previously, though rewilding is often beneficial for biological diversity, it is not the most effective or efficient means of food production to feed large populations. In a similar vein, a looser, more flexible ed tech system might not be efficient in terms of students’ use of time or in achieving grades.

These examples might be stretching the rewilding metaphor beyond a useful framing, but they demonstrate the type of further extension and possible negative connotations of any given metaphor raised in the chapter on metaphorical thinking. For my purposes, rewilding offers one means to think about the ed tech culture that we have developed in higher education and whether it is sufficiently diverse to meet the needs of students and educators. Davis (2015) has also proposed rewilding as a metaphor for education: “What if we removed the fences, where instead of focusing on managing experiences for students from the top on down, we co-create experiences with students from the bottom up?” As with rewilding, the aim is to allow a more sustainable, varied system to develop, which perhaps better reflects the broader environment outside a university.

Book Reading and Change in Higher Education

Among the articles that offer new models for education, there is often a claim that education has remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Many of these articles focus on schools as the largest sector of education, but their argument is often applied to higher education also. For example, Parr (2012) combines the broken and unchanged argument in an article entitled “We Know Our Education System Is Broken, So Why Can’t We Fix It?” As he asks, “how many industries that were around 100 years ago—and are still around today—are making their products almost the exact same way? . . . How about the American classroom? Our method of teaching hasn’t radically changed over the past century. It’s stuck, it’s dated, and it’s in need of radical transformation.”

The basic argument in such pieces is that we have an education system that was designed for an industrial age, that we are now in a post-industrial age, and ergo that the system is faulty. Watters (2015) examines in detail the flawed history in such accounts, arguing that “phrases like ‘the industrial model of education,’ ‘the factory model of education,’ and ‘the Prussian model of education’ are used as a ‘rhetorical foil’ in order to make a particular political point—not so much to explain the history of education, as to try to shape its future.” She also highlights that this argument dates back as far as 1932, with the urge to create a narrative that demands an upgrade. Here the “factory model of schooling” acts as a metaphor shaping our thinking about education in order to make a particular solution seem inevitable.

However, such accounts deliberately do not mention that a good deal of change has happened in the education sector, at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, that often is not immediately apparent. If you were to go to a university campus, then superficially it looks as though things are largely unchanged from 100 years ago. The sports centre is better, the cafeteria serves different food, but there are still lectures, laboratories, and students sitting around on the grass. But these similarities mask real technological and demographic changes that have taken place, particularly over the past 20 years.

First, the concept of the traditional student—someone who leaves home at 18 and studies full time at a university—is no longer dominant. Many students live at home, study part time, study at a distance, or belong to the “mature” group (i.e., over the age of 22) (Cruse et al., 2018).

Second, the role of technology has become much more central. Imagine turning off teaching and learning systems at a university. Many universities would simply be unable to function. Students submit assignments, access teaching material, use digital library resources, use software for research, engage in group work, and socialize via these systems. Although I have many reservations about the LMS path, this technology is central in most universities. Even relatively uninteresting technologies (from a pedagogical perspective) such as lecture capture can have profound impacts for many students. The online pivot demonstrated that the university could function without the campus but not without the technology.

These differences are in addition to changes to the support structures in place and the experiences of many students. In short, a university experience now would be very different from that of 50 or 100 years ago, although aspects of it would be recognizable.

I want to explore further the claim that “education hasn’t changed in a century,” looking at the elements of that statement that are true (and why that is not necessarily a bad thing) and those that are false, by way of an analogy. Imagine that it is commonly stated as fact that “reading hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens.” To take the true aspect first, we could take a photo of someone reading a book printed on paper (maybe even a Dickens novel) while sitting in a chair in front of a fire. If you could go back in time, then you could show this image to Dickens, and he would declare that indeed reading has not changed. The first question to ask, then, is why would you want reading to change? Why is the absence of change deemed a bad thing? Reading a book is a good way to convey an idea or a story and an enjoyable and enriching thing to do. That this has not changed significantly in 150 years is a testament to its value, not a sign of its weakness.

Next, we can look at why this statement, though true in some respects, is also false. There are undoubtedly core similarities between reading now and reading in the time of Dickens, but there are also significant differences not revealed by that superficial analysis of the photo of an archetypal reader. For example, there have been significant changes in the following areas.

• The format: sales from online retail channels in 2018 showed that 45.1% were print, 24.5% ebooks, and 13.7% audiobooks (Rowe, 2019).
• The book retail industry: online retailers such as Amazon account for the majority of sales, with online retail accounting for $8.03 billion and physical retail $6.90 billion in 2018 (Rowe, 2019).
• The publishing process: digitization has made self-publishing easy, and selling self-published books via Amazon, which offers up to 70% royalties to authors, means that they are now bypassing traditional publishers.
• The novel genre: for example, compare a William S. Burroughs book, graphic novel, or fan fiction with a novel by Dickens.
• The context: reading now competes for leisure attention with gaming, on-demand television, cinema, and the internet.

So, any statement that nothing has changed does not recognize that reading now is a very different experience from what it was in 1840, and the book industry itself has changed considerably.

If we now return to the industrial education argument, then we see a similar pattern. First, there are significant similarities, so the statement is true in some respects. If you look at education now and in the 1900s, then there are some things that you would recognize: we send students to a central place, we have a physical library, we group learners in schools by age and ability, we have teachers. As with reading, these aspects might be unchanging because they work well. Whenever people propose that they want to revolutionize (or entirely do away with) the school or university system, their lack of a viable alternative that works for all learners—regardless of motivation, ability, or parental engagement—is often apparent. To realize this, a robust system is required. So, the absence of change so deplored by many might indicate that viable alternatives are not available. The start-up AltSchool failed to create a new school system, despite considerable investment from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, partly because the vision of personalized learning was very difficult to realize for all children (Greene, 2019).

Second, we need to consider what is wrong with the statement. As with the Dickens example, it actually ignores many significant changes.

• Use of technology: most schools and HEIs have their own LMS and use electronic whiteboards, computer suites, et cetera.
• Changes in curriculum: although there seems to be a cyclical call for “back to basics” in school education, the range of subjects available to children has expanded and adapted considerably. The tertiary-level curriculum is constantly in flux, responding to new developments and demands.
• Changes in pedagogy: groupwork and a greater focus on coursework have allowed for different modes of teaching.
• Increased professionalization of educators: the associated structures of lessons, roles, and legal and reporting mechanisms for educators mean that they are operating in a very different context compared with that of their historical counterparts.
• Access to resources: they are no longer limited to the physical resources in the school library.
• Increased access to education: although elitism and the differing quality of education remain issues both within any one country and globally, access to good-quality education is now much more of a reality for many children, with the number of out-of-school children declining from 377 million in 2000 to 263 million in 2016, although it has plateaued over the past few years (UNESCO, 2016). Access to higher education has increased significantly since the 1960s in many countries, with global higher education enrolment growing from 32 million in 1970 to 214 million in 2015 and predicted to reach 594 million by 2040 (Calderon, 2018).

When we take these developments into account, education in 2021 is quite different from that in 1921. This is not to suggest that there are not significant changes that could be made within the education system, and more work can be done to improve access to education for all. For example, the Finnish approach to schooling is often cited as having a better attitude to assessment, curriculum, grouping, mental health, and pedagogy (e.g., Weale, 2019), and deploying this approach more widely might have significant benefits.

How, then, can we reconcile these two elements of seeming resistance to change yet large-scale innovation within education? I suggest that both books and education have what might be termed a “core of immutability”: that is, some essential aspect that does not alter. Indeed, this essence is part of the reason that we give them high social value, they echo back through history, and they evoke generally positive emotions. For both, this core relates to the individual focus on a task conducted largely in the mind—indulgence in what is essentially a cognitive art form. Both are also fundamentally human—maybe AI can write decent books in the future, and maybe it can provide a reasonable level of support, but it can never quite capture that human element that is part of their appeal.

Recognizing, cherishing, and protecting this core of immutability allow us to engage in technological experimentation with it without threatening to destroy it. The analogy of books and reading to education highlights how this core is something to be valued but can be susceptible to change.