Week 5: Instrumentalist paradigm vs Value-based pedagogy Flashcards
Instrumentalist paradigm: assumptions (Kerssens & de Haan)
- Educational technology and digital learning resources are seen as key instruments for maximizing learning outcomes.
- Performance and effectiveness of learning is best achieved through digital tools.
- Data-driven teaching: Focus on student data as the basis for education policy and teaching decisions.
- Limited autonomy for teaching professionals in shaping the tools/platforms.
- Platforms are seen as objective and ‘neutral’, value-free tools for teaching
value-based perspective (Kerssens & de Haan)
- Focus on the ethics of digitization of education.
- Critical awareness of the impact of the platformization on education as a public good
- Attention to the effects of platforms on public, social values
- Asks for greater participation of teachers in the decision-making about the use of platforms
- Platforms & ed-tech: subjective and non-neutral force
Platformization of education:
The transformation of teaching & learning under the influence of online education platforms and digital learning tools. (e.g. Google Classroom, Teams, etc.)
Four key issues in digitalization & platformization of education (Williamson)
- Digital inequalities
3 common questions:
1. What is an adequate level of digital access? (is one laptop enough?)
2. How can young people and their families be supported to technology in the home? (digital skills?)
3. How can longevity of the scheme be assured? (quick fixes during pandemic)
Acces to the internet does not change economic and financial inequality.
- Datafication as transformative force
The education sector is one of the most noticeable domains affected by datafication, because it tranforms not only the way in which teaching and learning are organised, it also raises expectations about increased transparency, accountability, service orientation and civic participation, but also associated fears with respect to surveillance and control, privacy issues, power relations and new inequalities - Public education & ed-tech business interest
Certain actors in the edtech industry are treating the crisis as a business opportunity, with potentially long-term consequences for how public education is perceived and practised long after the coronavirus has been brought under control.
‘a situation with little state governance where the dominant technical platforms are amongst few centralising powers uniting schools as a national school system’ and ‘global commercial platforms incorporated into public education risk challenging education as a public good’
The current state of ‘pandemic pedagogy’, in other words, may not be seen by some businesses as simply an emergency response to a public health and political crisis, but as a rapid prototype of education as a private service and an opportunity to recentralize decentralized systems through platforms. - Digital pedagogies
routines are disrupted
colonization: spaces are invaded by devices and screens which melt to the foreground
roles are renegotiated and re-imagined under terms and conditions no on thought would ever apply
Move away from remote, unethical and unaccountable system into the hands of educators and communities. The direction flow should not be about ‘content’ being delivered downstream by algorithm but more trough open, attentive and productive spaces for both learners and educators.
Intraprobablity: (Kerssens & van Dijk)
Closed ed-tech design, difficult to integrate with other apps & digital programs, more prone to concentration of power in single ed-tech company
Think about Blackboard
Interoperability:
Open ed-tech design, easy to integrate with other apps & digital programs, more participation of stakeholders
Think about Citrix
mutual connectivity keeps the ecosystem decentralized, open and diverse
Digital pedagogies
Rethinking pedagogy:
exploring the potential of digital technology in achieving quality education. It has a call for educating teachers to use those and give feedback more on how technologies are being developed.
Digital parenting (de Haan)
Parents’ efforts to monitor and regulate the online media and digital tool use of their children
Different parental mediation strategies when it comes to children’s media use:
- Restrictive mediation (limiting use)
- Active mediation (discussing content and instructing)
- Co-use (sharing the experience)
- Supervision (keeping an eye during use)
- Monitoring (checking afterwards)
- Technical restrictions (‘’parental control’’- automatic lock screen)
Differences in mediation strategies (de Haan)
There are different strategies between mothers and fathers, and higher educated parents and lower educated parents. The mediation strategies are connected to their own use of digital media. Also, the parental beliefs are connected to the mediation strategies: if they belief that social media is bad, they will use more restrictive strategies.
Digital parenting
Parenting support:
Mediawijzer.net (network for media education with tips for parents & professionals, including daycare)
The Toolbox Mediaopvoeding (Toolbox on parental mediation)
The media coaches for parents in neighborhoods and schools (more than 800)
Conclusion Kerssens & van Dijk
Intraoperability challenges and may undermine interoperability as an organizing principle for platformization, which triggers the normative question of how the evolving edtech landscape can be restructured as a system that benefits the common good.
Proposition (Kerssens & van Dijk)
- critically assess the push by tech companies to fully integrate national edtech markets into global platform ecosystems governed by intraoperability principles
- this needs public governance that promotes interoperability
- national and suprational governance levels should be addressed in conjunction
- to fully benefit the public interest of Dutch education, platformisation requires a consequent application of interoperability principle across all levels of platform ecosystem
How to do this? (Kerssens & van Dijk)
- Sectorial efforts at securing interoperability in the Netherlands must be supported at a national level by the Ministery of Education, Culture and Science
- Interoperability under public control should aim for a more inclusive approach to governance where they do not become dependent on non-European (often American) companies that have different idealogical and socio-economic values
Instrumental rationale in the adoption of technology in education (Kerssens & de Haan)
- implies the absence of a values-based rationale
- imposes a model for professional action in which the professional is not in control of the desirable outcomes while being ‘on the job’
Biesta in Kerssens & de Haan
An instrumental rationale not only ‘restricts the scope of decision-making to questions about effectivity and effectiveness’ but also ‘restricts the opportunities for participation in educational decision-making’.
