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Is this a rhizomatic learning environment?

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Is this a rhizomatic learning environment?

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--Originally published at Just Another Blog
I wanted to make a ringtone that I actually wanted to use. Looking though creative commons music I found one track that was interesting and also pleasant to have in everyday life. We don't really call much in Japan, but it still needed be to pleasant. ...

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Originally published at Just Another Blog I wanted to make a ringtone that I actually wanted to use. Looking though creative commons music I found one track that was interesting and also pleasant to have in everyday life. We don't really call much in Japan, but it still needed be to pleasant.

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The trials and tribulations of PhD research

October 27, 2016 by comcultgirl

Well I'm at a crisis point - probably the same one every PhD student gets to - is there any point in what I am doing? I'm interested in why so many secondary school students in England are disengaged from learning in their classrooms yet are not disengaged from learning. How do I know that? Because I've watched children learning out of the classroom in a myriad of ways - from their peers, their parents, on their own - and using different means to do this.

As a Digital Education researcher I am particularly interested in the part that digital means such as games, social media and the internet can play in the so-called 'informal' learning context. I have placed quotation marks around 'informal' because I don't actually see a distinction between formal and informal 'learning' but certainly it is the context which tends to change the nature of the learning. Institutional learning, such as that which is supposed to be happening in schools, is a very different experience for the learner, than that which takes place outside of institutions. More than anything I think, I am interested in the learning experience rather than the structures or mechanisms which surround it. However, structures and mechanisms have a profound influence on learning experience.

Why is the learning experience in schools so disengaging for so many students? Conversely, what is so engaging about the learning experiences available whilst playing games and sharing that experience with others who share your interest? Perhaps the key lies in that phrase 'sharing the experience with others who share your interest'. I haven't met many school children who are eager to share their school learning experiences with others on YouTube or via social media! Yet vast numbers of children share what they have learnt and can do in Minecraft on Youtube. Many children watch other players play their favourite game in order to learn to progress further. They discuss their strategies when engaged in multiplayer games and allocate roles, defer to expertise in their team or group and spend hours thinking about how to implement ideas.

I spent several days playing Minecraft with my two nephews - not only was it a social experience - we constantly chatted as we built together - but I was accepted as an equal once I had established some credentials. Information was exchanged - my nephews told me about new blocks that were available and what you could use them for, demonstrated complex machines they had built and what their purpose was and I talked about using Minecraft with the adults on the Masters course I tutor on. What was noticeable was that these children were still willing to accept my greater knowledge in some areas, particularly if it was still in the context of the game but mainly because it was part of the 'flow' of narrative we were creating around our activity in Minecraft. Learning had a context which fitted into their world view or culture.

So what is so different in a classroom environment? Children are automatically assumed to have nothing to offer in the situation until the teacher has 'shared' their knowledge with them. Children are at an immediate disadvantage in their learning, reliant on the teacher for information and restricted to activity prescribed by the teacher. They are rewarded if they can memorise this information and produce it during the activity prescribed for this purpose. They don't get to see the teacher learning alongside them, modelling the approach they would like students to emulate. Students frequently have no opportunity to offer their perspective, wisdom or prior knowledge, either to the teacher or to each other.

This is not the teachers' fault. Education in classrooms has become about 'teaching to the test'. Curriculum is led by assessment. Structures and mechanisms in schools are regressing to Victorian times - Gradgrind would have been proud.
"...little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim."
The focus of my research then, was to be a narrative ethnography of disengaged learners who also happened to be game-players. I hoped to interview learners about their learning experiences when in game-playing environments and compare this to their experiences in the classroom. From their narratives, I hoped to learn, from their perspective, where we might be going wrong in schools. So why the crisis with my research?

Having spent several weeks in June observing lessons, talking to teachers and beginning to talk to students I began to realise how the 'testing culture' in schools was going to provide not just a barrier to learning but a barrier to me talking to people about learning. Teachers were constrained by the system they were caught up in - their time was not their own, and in some schools, neither was their thinking. In the rushed moments I was able to get with them they talked with despair about the demands of the assessment system, the monitoring systems in their schools and over and over, the sheer lack of time to do anything meaningful, either for themselves or for students. They talked about being deprived of their 'creativity' and their professional judgement. Students were similarly constrained - in initial discussions they found it very difficult to verbalise or even think about what was meant by 'learning', either in the classroom or in games.

So what is the point of my research? Whatever I discover, can the formal education system ever learn from such research? Numerous experts have called on the government to implement a more research-led approach to education policy - most of it has fallen on deaf ears.

Secondly, how original is this research? There are scores of studies into engagement and disengagement in school environments and a myriad of suggested solutions. There are also a rising number of studies into the value of game-playing social learning techniques and calls for bringing together what children do out-of-school into school. Where is the gap I will fill with my research?

Thirdly, how can I create the environment or circumstances in which to discuss and immerse myself in young people's learning experiences outside of school? I am a 56 year old, white middle class woman - as many educational researchers are. I play games but not many of the popular, multiplayer games which my surveyed group of children play - 'FIFA', 'Grand Theft Auto' and 'Call of Duty'. I don't have the time to visit individual children in their homes, get to know them and have a level of ease with them and their gameplay to initiate the sort of discussions and narrative I hoped to collect. Focus group interviews have elicited little of value as children still see these as part of the school experience and myself as the 'teacher' despite reassurances to the contrary.

I did have the brilliant idea of setting up (in conjunction with teachers) game clubs in my target schools where children could discuss, share ideas and videos and write reviews and guides to videogames. Both schools I approached gave me a positive initial response to this idea. The first school contact is now not in the school and no-one else will respond to my emails. The second school already had a game club and the teacher who runs it doesn't want to work with me.

So here we are full circle - I'm having a crisis with my research!

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The trials and tribulations of PhD research

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Well I'm at a crisis point - probably the same one every PhD student gets to - is there any point in what I am doing? I'm interested in why so many secondary school students in England are disengaged from learning in their classrooms yet are not disengaged from learning.

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What lurks within your favourite technology?

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What lurks within your favourite technology?

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A sociotechnical survey of a public sphere platform

Ben Williamson

The world's most successful educational technology is ClassDojo. Originally developed as a smartphone app for teachers to reward 'positive behaviour' in classrooms, it has recently extended significantly to become a communication channel between teachers and parents, a school-wide reporting and communication platform, an educational video channel, and a platform for schoolchildren to collect and present digital portfolios of their class work.

In a previous post I began sketching out a critical approach to the ClassDojo app. In this follow-up (note that it's a long read, more a working paper than a post) I want to explore ClassDojo as a more extensive platform, and to consider it as a sociotechnical 'assemblage' of many moving parts. It is, I argue, simultaneously composed of technical components, people, policies, funding arrangements, expert knowledge and discourse, all of which combine and work together as a hybrid product of human and nonhuman actors to enable the functioning of the platform. Each of these components has been assembled together over time to make ClassDojo what it is today. The purpose of the post is twofold: to help generate greater public understanding and awareness of ClassDojo among teachers and parents, and also to scope out the contours of the platform for further detailed research.

Education in the 'platform society'
When it was first launched as a beta product in 2011, ClassDojo was a simple app designed for use on mobile devices. It has subsequently become a much more extensive platform, spreading rapidly across the US and around the world. As new features have been added over its 5 year lifespan to date, ClassDojo has become much more like a social media platform for schools. It allows teachers to award points for behaviour, somewhat akin to pressing the 'like' button on Facebook; permits text and video communication between teachers and parents, as many social media platforms do; acts as a channel for video content; and also has capacity for schoolchildren to create digital portfolios of their work. It has also extended to become a 'schoolwide' platform, whereby all teachers, school leaders and pupils are signed up to the platform and school leaders can take an overview of everything occurring on it.

Given its expansion beyond its original design as an app, ClassDojo needs to be understood in relation to emerging critical research on digital platforms, where 'platform' refers to internet-based applications such as social media sites that process information and communication. Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell have argued that 'over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines.' More recently, van Dijck has suggested that we are entering a new kind of ' platform society ' in which 'social, economic and interpersonal traffic is largely channeled by an (overwhelmingly corporate) global online infrastructure that is driven by algorithms and fueled by data.' This emerging platform society is gradually interfering with more and more aspects of everyday life, including key public institutions of society such as health and education. Van Dijck has called these 'public sphere platforms' that promise to contribute to the public good in areas which are under funded by governments, but are owned and structured by private actors and networks.

ClassDojo is prototypical of a public sphere platform for education, one that is designed to contribute to the public good by supporting teachers to manage children's classroom behaviour and allow parents to communicate with schools at a time when schools are increasingly under pressure. Before detailing its various dimensions as a platform, however, it is important to note that any platform ultimate consists of multiple moving parts, both human and nonhuman, that have to be assembled together. Putting it simply, social researchers have recently begun to attend to the messy 'assemblages' of digital technologies such as online platforms, while education researchers have begun to acknowledge that their objects of study-classrooms, tests, policies, or educational technologies-are in fact assemblies of myriad things. In recent work on 'critical data studies,' Rob Kitchin and Tracey Lauriault have described a 'data assemblage' as:

a complex socio-technical system, composed of many apparatuses and elements that are thoroughly entwined, whose central concern is the production of data. A data assemblage consists of more than the data system/infrastructure itself, such as a big data system, an open data repository, or a data archive, to include all of the technological, political, social and economic apparatuses that frames their nature, operation and work.

An assemblage such as a digital platform, then, needs to be understood in terms of the ways that all its moving parts-whether human and social or nonhuman, material or technical-come together to form a relatively coherent and stable whole. For Kitchin and Lauriault, researching such an assemblage would therefore involve an investigation of its technical and material components; the people that inhabit it and the practices they undertake; the organizations and institutions that are part of it; the marketplaces and financial techniques that enable it; the policies and frameworks that govern it; and the knowledges and discourses that promote and support it.

Importantly, they-like others working with the assemblage concept-acknowledge that assemblages are contingent and mutable rather than fixed entities:

Data assemblages evolve and mutate as new ideas and knowledges emerge, technologies are invented, organisations change, business models are created, the political economy alters, regulations and laws introduced and repealed, skill sets develop, debates take place, and markets grow or shrink.

Utilizing the concept of a sociotechnical assemblage, in what follows I aim to detail how ClassDojo has been assembled over time as a mutating and evolving public sphere platform for education that consists of many human and nonhuman moving parts. I have arranged this as a kind of sociotechnical survey of the elements that constitute the ClassDojo assemblage.

Technicalities & materialities
As a technical platform ClassDojo consists of a mobile app and an online platform. Teachers can access and use the app on a smartphone or tablet in the classroom, and open up the online platform on any other computing device or display hardware for pupils to view. The platform allows class teachers to set their own behavioural categories, though it comes pre-loaded with a series of behaviours that teachers can use to award or deduct feedback points. Each child in the system is represented by a cute avatar, a dojo monster, which can be customized by the user. Behavioural targets can be set for both individuals and groups to achieve positive goals, and teachers can also deduct points. Children's points are represented as a 'doughnut' of green positive points and red 'needs work' deductions. Teachers are able, if they choose, to display each child's aggregate points to their entire class as a kind of league table of behaviour, and school leaders can access each child's profile to monitor their behavioural progress.

Launched in 2016, its ' school-wide' features to allow whole schools, not just individual teachers, to sign up for accounts, which enables 'teachers and school leaders to safely share photos, videos, and messages with all parents connected to the school at once, replacing cumbersome school websites, group email threads, newsletters, and paper flyers.' At the same time that ClassDojo is expanding in scope to encompass new technical innovations and serve other practical and social functions, it is therefore obsolescing existing school technologies and materials. The new school-wide application of ClassDojo also makes it easier for the platform to be used by administrators, and means that a child's individual profile remains persistent over time as that child moves between classes. Teachers can also create ' Student Stories ' for each child in a class, where digital portfolios of their class work can be uploaded and maintained.

The public ClassDojo website acts as a glossy front door and public face to the platform and the company behind it. It presents the brand through highly attractive visual graphics, high-production promotional video content and carefully crafted text copy. The website also features an ' Idea Board' where ideas about the use of the platform in the classroom can be submitted by teachers to be shared publicly, plus a blogging area for teachers and an engineering blog where the technical details of the platform are discussed and shared by its engineers. For parents assigned a login, it is possible to access the ' Class Story ' area where teachers can share messages and video with all parents of children in a specific class, and individual teachers and parents can also exchange short text messages.

Less visibly, ClassDojo consists of technical standards relating to network security, data storage, interoperability, and communication protocols. All of the technical aspects of ClassDojo also need to be written in the code and algorithms that make the platform function. The ClassDojo engineering blog details some of the complexity of the code and algorithms that have been used or designed to make all the different elements of the platform function. Much of its source code is available to view on the ClassDojo area of the GitHub code repository. GitHub is therefore part of the assemblage of ClassDojo, a resource that both contains the code and algorithms used in the platform and a resource used by its engineers to locate existing re-useable code.

As a cloud-based service, all of ClassDojo's data servers and analytics are hosted externally. For this it employs Amazon Web Services. The safety and security page of the ClassDojo website notes that the web servers of Amazon Web Services 'are physically located in high-security data centers - the same data centers used to hold secure financial information. ... Our database provider uses the same https security connections used by banks and government departments to store and transfer the most sensitive data.' (Unfortunately, at the time of writing the link provided on the ClassDojo website to the 'security measures' provided by AWS does not work.) Any interaction with the ClassDojo platform, therefore, takes place via Amazon's vast global infrastructure of cloud technologies, including being physically stored in one of Amazon's data centres. ClassDojo is, in other words, physically, financially and technically located within one of the key global organisations that orchestrate the emerging 'platform society.'

As well as being a technical platform, ClassDojo consists of a variety of material artefacts under the ' Resources ' section of the website . These include teacher resources to support the use of ClassDojo in the classroom and lesson planning, training resources such as powerpoint presentations to enable school leaders to train staff, and a variety of glossy printable posts and other display materials that can be used to decorate the classroom. In addition to this, the website provides resources for parents such as introductory letters that can be distributed by schools to explain the platform, detailed parent guides as downloadable PDF files, and simple video content that can be used in the classroom to help young children understand it too.

ClassDojo also extends into other platforms. It has its own Facebook page and a popular @ClassDojo account on Twitter with 61,000 followers. Much of its initial word-of-mouth marketing worked through these platforms, allowing ClassDojo to rapidly extend to new users as enthusiastic early adopters recommended it to friends and colleagues via social media. Facebook and Twitter are part of the ClassDojo community, enabling its vast user base to engage with the organization and other community members. User-generated materials such as lesson plans and classroom resources to support the use of ClassDojo are made available for sharing by teacher advocates of the platform on teaching websites and other public sharing sites such as Pinterest, thus extending it beyond the enclosures of its own technical infrastructure to other platforms and material resources. Via other platforms, teachers have created and shared, for example, 'Dojo dollars,' 'reward coupons' and 'vouchers,' created their own incentives and rewards systems and displays, posted 'points tracker' posters and sets of 'Dojo goals for data folders, and suggested the use of 'prize centres' where physical prizes are displayed for pupils that top the ClassDojo league tables.

As this survey of the technical aspects of ClassDojo demonstrates, it consists of myriad technologies, materials, standards and so on; but these technical elements all need to be orchestrated by human hands.

People & organizations
Who makes ClassDojo? Critical studies of software code and algorithms have demonstrated that their function cannot be separated from their designers. As Tarleton Gillespie has phrased it, 'algorithms are full of people.' Humans make decisions about what algorithms do, their goals and purposes and the tasks to which they are put. Likewise, any system of data collection or online communication platform has to be programmed to perform its tasks according to particular objectives, business plans and within financial and regulatory constraints.

ClassDojo depends on a vast network of people and organizations. It was founded in 2011 by two young British entrepreneurs, Liam Don and Sam Chaudhary. Don was educated as a computer scientist and Chaudhary as an economist-with experience of working for the consultancy McKinsey in its education division in London-before both moved to Silicon Valley after successfully applying to the education technology 'incubator' program Imagine K-12. Imagine K-12's founder Tim Brady was the very first investor in ClassDojo and continues to sit on its board; he has been described by ClassDojo's founders as a key mentor and influence in the early days of its development. Brady himself was one of the very first employees at Yahoo! in the 1990s, where he acted as Chief Product Officer for 8 years. Considerable Silicon Valley experience is therefore accommodated on the ClassDojo board.

In addition to its founders, ClassDojo is staffed by a variety of software engineers, designers, product managers, communications and marketing officers, privacy, encryption and security experts and human-computer interaction designers. Notably, none of ClassDojo's staff are listed as educational experts, but instead are all drawn from the culture of software development, many of them with experience in other Silicon Valley technology companies, social media organizations and consultancies. Founders Don and Chaudhary themselves have some limited educational experience of working with schools in the UK prior to moving to Silicon Valley.

Through external partnerships, ClassDojo employs three independent privacy experts to guide it in relation to data privacy regulation in north America and Europe, and works with a team of security researchers to continually test ClassDojo's security practices for vulnerabilities. Its board consists primarily of its major investors (detailed more below under funding and finance). ClassDojo also works with over 20 third-party essential service providers who primarily support the platform with specific technical services, including data storage, video encoding, photo uploading, server performance, data visualization, web analytics, performance metrics, conducting A/B testing on different versions of the website, and managing real-time communication data. The third party service providers include Amazon Web Services, which hosts ClassDojo's servers and data analytics, Google Analytics, for analytics on its website, and many others, without which the platform could not function.

Support for ClassDojo has been confirmed through the award of a number of prizes. The business magazine FastCompany listed ClassDojo as one of the 10 most innovative education companies in 2013, and in 2015 it won the Crunchie award for best education startup from the TechCrunch awards while its founders were featured in the '30 under 30' list of Inc magazine. These prizes and recognitions have helped ClassDojo and its founders to consolidate their reputations and brand, both as a successful classroom tool and an entrepreneurial business.

As a sociotechnical assemblage it is important to note that ClassDojo functions through the involvement of its users. Users are both configured by ClassDojo-in the sense that it makes new practices possible-but can also reshape ClassDojo to their own purposes. The basic reward mechanism at the heart of the ClassDojo behaviour management application can be customized by any signed up teacher. These reward categories then shape the ways in which points are awarded in classrooms, changing both the practices of the staff employing it and the experience of the pupils who are its subjects. With the announcement of school-wide features in 2016, entire schools can be signed up to ClassDojo, ultimately becoming institutional network nodes of the platform. By mid-2016 the ClassDojo website reported that the platform was in use in 180 countries, with other 3 million subscribing teachers serving over 35 million pupils. ClassDojo is, in other words, constituted partly through the practices of a vast global constellation of users.

Teachers using ClassDojo are repositioned by the platform by being conferred new responsibilities. Huw Davies suggests teachers are transformed into data entry clerical workers by the platform, becoming responsible for data collection in the classroom that will ultimately contribute to big datasets that could be analysed and then 'sold' back to school leaders as premium features. Although ClassDojo does not market itself as a big data company, its access to behavioural data on millions of children confers it with tremendous capacity to report detailed and comparative analyses that could be used to measure teachers' and schools' records on the management of pupil behaviour.

Policy, regulation & governance
The way that the technical platform of ClassDojo operates, and the work of the people who build and use it, is all governed by particular forms of regulation and policy. Data privacy is an area that the ClassDojo organization is especially keen to promote, not least following a critical article in theNew York Times in 2014, which the ClassDojo company vigorously countered in an open letter entitled ' What the NYTimes got wrong.' Its website features an extensive privacy policy, the product of its privacy advisers. This policy is extensive and regularly updated, organized on the website to detail exactly what information the platform collects, its student data protection policy, and available opt-outs. Notably, ClassDojo claims that it deletes all pupils' feedback points after 12 months, unless students or parents create accounts. Where schools or individual teachers have set up accounts that parents have then subscribed to, then a persistent record of the child's personal information will be retained.

ClassDojo claims it is completely compliant with north American data privacy regulatory frameworks such as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) and COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act). FERPA is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records, while the primary goal of COPPA is to place parents in control over what information is collected from their young children online. ClassDojo's ' privacy center' displays 'iKeepSafe' privacy seals from both FERPA and COPPA, alongside a badge proclaiming it as a signatory of the Student Privacy Pledge. iKeepSafe (Internet Keep Safe Coalition) is itself a nonprofit international alliance of more than 100 policy leaders, educators, law enforcement members, technology experts, public health experts and advocates, and acts to ensure that both FERPA and COPPA are enforced.

ClassDojo is additionally compliant with the US-EU Safe Harbor framework set forth by the US Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of personal data from European Union member countries. The European Court of Human Justice, however, declared this agreement invalid in 2015, meaning there is a grey area in terms of data protection for children logged on ClassDjo outside the US. Its commitment to data privacy would seem to depend on specific agreements made between the EU and the cloud service provider hosting its data, in this case Amazon Web Services. This seems to put pressure on schools to make sense of complex international data protection policies. Schools making use of ClassDojo in the UK, for example, might need to ensure they are familiar with the Information Commissioner's Office code of practice and checklists for data sharing. This code covers such activities as 'a school providing information about pupils to a research organisation' and would arguably extend to the providing of information of pupil behaviour to an organization like ClassDojo (and stored by Amazon Web Services), not least as the data may be used to construct behavioural profiles of individuals and classes.

ClassDojo also subscribes to the principles of 'privacy by design,' an approach which encourages the embedding of privacy frameworks into a company's products or services. ClassDojo's Sam Chaudhary has co-authored an article on p rivacy by design with the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington DC-based think tank dedicated to promoting responsible data practices through lobbying government leaders, and a sounding board for companies proposing new products and services. The founders of ClassDojo have therefore situated themselves among a network of data privacy expertise and lobbying groups in order to ensure their compliance with federal law and to be seen as a leading data privacy organization in relation to education and young children.

How ClassDojo operates in relation to data protection and privacy is therefore circumscribed by federal regulatory frameworks which govern how and why ClassDojo can collect, process and store users' data and what rights children and their parents have to withdraw their consent for its collection or request its deletion. Privacy regulation is 'designed-in' to its architecture, though inevitably some concerns persist, not least about ClassDojo's admission that if it experienced a 'change of control' that all users' personal information would be transferred to its new owner, with only 30 days for parents to request deletion of their children's data.

Besides privacy policy and regulation, ClassDojo is also shaped by education policy, although less directly. A distinctive policy discourse of 'character' education, 'positive behaviour support' and 'social-emotional learning' frames ClassDojo, shaping the way in which the organization presents the platform. For example, ClassDojo's founders present the platform through the language of character development and positive behaviour management. This is entirely compatible with US Department of Education policy documents and initiatives which, in the wake of a softening of the dominant test-based policy emphasis, has begun to emphasize concepts such as 'character,' 'grit,' 'perseverance,' 'personal qualities' and other 'non-cognitive' dimensions of 'social-emotional learning'-the most prominent example being the 2013 US Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology report Promoting grit, tenacity and perseverance. ClassDojo is directly promoted in the report as 'a classroom management tool that helps teachers maintain a supportive learning environment and keep students persisting on task in the classroom,' allowing 'teachers to track and reinforce good behaviors for individual students, and get instant reports to share with parents or administrators.'

As a consequence of the 'grit' report, controversial attempts have been made to make the measurement of 'personal qualities' of non-cognitive and social-emotional learning into school accountability mechanisms in the US. The prominent think tank the Brookings Institute has described these new school accountability systems as compatible with the Every Child Succeeds Act, the US law governing K-12 education signed in late 2015. The act requires states to include at least one non-academic measure when monitoring school performance. It therefore permits states to focus to a greater degree that previous acts on concepts such as competency-based and personalized learning, and promotes the role of the educational technology sector in supporting such changes. ClassDojo has been described in a commentary as an ideal educational technology to support the new law.

The ClassDojo website also suggests that its behaviour points system can be aligned with PBIS. PBIS stands for Positive Behavior Interventions and Support s and is an initiative of the US Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. Its aim is to support the adoption of the 'applied science' of Positive Behavior Support in schools and emphasizes social, emotional and academic outcomes for students. Through both its connections with the non-cognitive learning policy agenda and PBIS, ClassDojo has been positioned, and located itself, in relation to major political agendas about school priorities. It is in this sense an indirect technology of government that can help schools to support students' non-cognitive learning. In turn, those schools are increasingly been held accountable for the development and effective measurement of those qualities.

ClassDojo is, in other words, a bit-part player in emerging policy networks that are changing the priorities of education policy to focus on the management and measurement of children's personal qualities rather than academic attainment alone. Such changes are being brought about through processes of 'fast policy' as Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore describe it, where policy is a thoroughly distributed achievement of 'sprawling networks of human and nonhuman actors' that include web sites, practitioner communities, guru performances, evaluation scientists, think tanks, consultants, blogs, and media channels and sources, as well as the more hierarchical influence of centres of political authority. As both an organization and a platform, ClassDojo acts indirectly as a voice and a technology of networked fast policy in the educational domain, particularly as a catalyst and an accelerant that translates the priorities of government around non-cognitive learning and character development into classroom practice.

Markets, finances & investment
ClassDojo is part of a significant growing marketplace of educational technologies. The new Every Child Succeeds Act gives states in the US much more flexibility to spend on ed-tech, which has been growing as a sector at extraordinary rates in recent years. Some enthusiastic assessments suggest that global education technology sector spending was $67.8bn in 2015, part of a global e-learning market worth $165bn and estimated to reach $243.8bn by 2022.

This marketplace is being supported vigorously in Silicon Valley, where most investments are made, particularly through networks of venture capital firms and entrepreneurs and business 'incubator' and 'accelerator' programs dedicated to supporting startup ed-tech companies to go to scale. ClassDojo was developed as a working product through the Imagine K12 accelerator program for education technology startups in Silicon Valley. When ClassDojo emerged from its beta phase in 2013, it announced that it had further secured $1.6million in investment from venture capital sources from Silicon Valley. It raised another $21million in venture funding in spring 2016. Its investors include over 20 venture capital companies and entrepreneurial individuals, including Tim Brady from Imagine K12 (now merged with Y Combinator, a leading Silicon Valley Startup accelerator), General Catalyst Partners, GSV Capital and Learn Capital, 'a venture capital firm focused exclusively on funding entrepreneurs with a vision for better and smarter learning.' Learn Capital has invested in a large number of ed-tech products in recent years and is a key catalyst of the growth of the sector; its biggest limited partner is Pearson, the world's biggest edu-business, which links ClassDojo firmly into the global ed-tech market. Many of ClassDojo's investors also sit on the ClassDojo board.

Investment in ClassDojo has followed the standard model for startup funding in Silicon Valley. It first received seed funding from Imagine K12 and others, before securing Series A investment in 2013 and Series B in 2016. While seed funding refers to financial support for startup ideas, Series A funding is used to optimize a product and secure its user base, and Series B is about funding the business development, technology, support, and other people required for taking a business beyond its development stage. Sometime after 2016, ClassDojo will look to scale fast and wide through Series C funding-investment at this stage can reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

The ClassDojo success story for classroom practitioners and school leaders is therefore reflected and enabled by its success as a desirable product of venture capital funding, all of it framed by a buoyant marketplace of ed-tech development and finance. This marketplace is also itself framed and supported by specific kinds of discourses of technological disruption and solutionism. Many Silicon Valley companies and entrepreneurs have latched on to the education sector in recent years, seeing it in terms of problems that might be solved through technological developments and applications. Greg Ferenstein has noted that many Silicon Valley startup founders and their investors 'believe that the solution to nearly every problem is more innovation, conversation or education,' and therefore 'believe in massive investments in education because they see it as a panacea for nearly all problems in society.' The marketplace in which ClassDojo is located, therefore, is framed by a discourse that emphasizes the importance of fixing education systems and institutions in order to make them into effective mechanisms for the production of innovative problem-solving people.

Expert knowledge & discourse
As already noted above in relation to ClassDojo's connections to education policy agendas, an emerging educational discourse is that of personal qualities and character education. 'Education goes beyond just a test score to developing who the student is as a person-including all the character strengths like curiosity, creativity, teamwork and persistence,' its co-founder and chief executive Sam Chaudhury has said. 'There's so much research showing that if you focus on building students' character and persistence early on, that creates a 3 to 5 times multiplier on education results, graduation rates, health outcomes. It's pretty intuitive. We shouldn't just reduce people to how much content they know; we have to develop them as individuals.'

Underpinning the policy shift to character development of which ClassDojo plays a small bit-part are particular forms of expertise and disciplinary knowledge. The particular forms of expertise to which ClassDojo is attached are those of the psychological sciences, neuroscience and the behavioural sciences, in particular as they have been translated into the discourse of character education, grit, resilience and so on. One of the key voices in this emerging discourse is Paul Tough, author of a book about educating children with 'grit,' who has mapped out some of the networks of psychological, neuroscientific and economics experts contributing their knowledge and understandings to this field, including names such as Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck.

Duckworth and Dweck are both directly cited by ClassDojo's founders as key influences, alongside other 'thought leaders' such as James Heckman, and Doug Lemov. Heckman is a Nobel prize-winning economist noted for his work on building character. Lemov is a former free-market advocate of the charter schools movement and author of the popular Teach Like a Champion. Duckworth has her own named psychological lab where she researches ' personal qualities' such as 'grit' and 'self-control' as dimensions of human character. The relationship between ClassDojo and Carol Dweck's concept of 'growth mindsets' is the most pronounced. In January 2016, ClassDojo announced a partnership with the Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS), an applied research center at Stanford University led by Dweck that has become the intellectual home of the theory of growth mindsets.

The partnership between ClassDojo and PERTS takes the form of a series of short animations on the ' Big Ideas' section of the ClassDojo website that help explain the growth mindsets idea for teachers and learners themselves. They present the brain as a malleable 'muscle' that can constantly grow and adapt as it is put to the task of addressing challenging problems. The presentation of the brain as a muscle in ClassDojo is part of the recent popularization of recent neuroscience concepts of 'neuroplasticity,' where the brain is seen as constantly adapting to the social environment. Rather than being seen as a structurally static organ, the brain has been reconceived as dynamic, with new neural pathways constantly forming through adaptation to environmental stimuli. The videos are basically high-production updates of instructional resources previously developed by Dweck and disseminated through her Mindset Works spin-out company. ClassDojo approached Dweck about adapting these materials, and the videos were produced by ClassDojo with input from PERTS. The ClassDojo website claims that '15 million students are now building a growth mindset'-this figure is presumably based on web analytics of the numbers of schools in which the videos have been viewed-while at the time of writing in September 2016 the ClassDojo Facebook page was promoting 'Growth Mindset Month' .

ClassDojo is increasingly aligned with psychological and behavioral norms associated with growth mindsets, both by teaching children about growth mindsets through its Big Ideas videos and, through the app, by nudging children to conduct themselves in ways appropriate to the development of such a growth-oriented character. In this sense, ClassDojo is perfectly aligned with the controversial recent federal law which allows states to measure the performance of schools on the basis of 'non-academic' measures, such as students' non-cognitive social-emotional skills, personal qualities, and growth mindsets. This governmental agenda sees children themselves as a problem to be fixed through schooling. Its logic is that if children's non-cognitive personal qualities, such as character, mindset and grit, can be nudged and configured to the new measurable norm, then many of the problems facing contemporary schools will be solved.

The close relationship between ClassDojo, psychological expertise and government policy is indicative of the extent to which the 'psy-sciences' are involved in establishing the norms by which children are measured and governed in schools-a relationship which is by no means new, as Nikolas Rose has shown, but is now rapidly being accelerated by psy-based educational technologies such as ClassDojo. A science of mental measurement infuses ClassDojo, as operationalized by its behavioural points system, but it is also dedicated to an applied science of mental modification, involved in the current pursuit of the development of children as characters with grit and growth mindsets. By changing the language of learning to that of growth mindsets and other personal qualities, ClassDojo and the forms of expertise with which it is associated are changing the ways in which children may be understood and acted upon in the name of personal improvement and optimization.

^^^
ClassDojo is prototypical of how education is being reshaped in a 'platform society.' This sociotechnical survey of the ClassDojo assemblage provides some sense of its messy complexity as an emerging public sphere platform that has attained substantial success and popularity in education. Approached as a sociotechnical assemblage, ClassDojo is simultaneously a technical platform that serves a variety of practical, pedagogical and social functions; an organizational mosaic of engineers, marketers, product managers and other third party providers and partners; the subject of a wider regulatory environment and also a bit-part actor in new policy networks; the serious object for financial investment in the ed-tech marketplace; and a mediator of diverse expert psychological, neuroscientific and behavioural scientific knowledges and discourses pertaining to contemporary schooling and learning.

Like any digital assemblage, ClassDojo is mutating and evolving in response to the various elements that co-constitute it. As policy discourse shifts, ClassDojo follows suit-as its shift to embrace growth mindsets and its positioning in relation to policy discourses of character and positive behaviour support demonstrate. It is benefiting financially from a currently optimistic ed-tech marketplace, which is itself now being supported politically via the Every Child Succeeds Act. Its engineering blog also demonstrates how the technical platform of ClassDojo is changing as new code and algorithms become available, while its privacy policies are constantly being updated as data privacy regulation pertaining to children becomes an increasing priority and a concern-as it demonstrated in its response to a critical New York Times article in 2014. ClassDojo is not being 'scaled up' in a simple and linear manner, but messily and contingently, through a relational interweaving of human actions and nonhuman technologies, materials, policies, and technical standards.

Given its rapid proliferation globally into the practices of over 3 million teachers and the classroom experiences of over 35 million children in 180 countries, ClassDojo can accurately be described as a public sphere platform that is interfering in how teaching and learning take place. It is doing so according to psychological forms of expertise and governmental priorities, supported by financial instruments and organizations, and is being enacted through a technical infrastructure of devices and platforms and a human infrastructure of entrepreneurs, engineers, managers, and other experts, as well as the users who incorporate it into their own practices and extend it through the creation of user-generated content and materials. As it continues to scale and mutate, it deserves to be the focus of much further in-depth analysis. This work-in-progress has surveyed ClassDojo to point to possible future lines of inquiry into the reshaping of education in a platform society.

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A sociotechnical survey of a public sphere platform Ben Williamson The world's most successful educational technology is ClassDojo. Originally developed as a smartphone app for teachers to reward 'positive behaviour' in classrooms, it has recently extended significantly to become a communication channel between teachers and parents, a school-wide reporting and communication platform, an educational video...

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This resource discusses the provision of formal credit for open education - open accreditation - and the role of higher education. This is discussed in relation to the Mozilla Open Badges...

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I was stopped in my tracks as I was leaving the house the other morning when I heard Donald Toon, Director of Cyber Security at the National Crime Agency, talking to John Humphrys on the BBC Today programme. They were discussing the risks that arise when devices such as home freezers and fridges are linked to the Internet of Things and can be hacked to launch a cyber attack or to steal our personal information.

Mr Toon explained that hackers can use a range of tools and specialist software to harness the power of the Internet of Things. "Freezers you say!" exclaimed an incredulous Mr Humphrys. "Why would I want to connect my freezer to the internet?" Ah, well, explained Mr Toon to an increasingly agog interviewer, as long as an appliance, such as a fridge or freezer, is capable of being connected to the Internet, it can be hacked, even if the appliance is not actually currently connected to the Internet.

This is because hackers can still use software to trigger a connection and then connect to other devices to steal personal information - or worse still, harness the computing power of your device, and link it to other people's devices or appliances to launch a distributed denial of service cyber attack. These attacks are very hard to spot and a surge in wifi usage may be the only clue. As we all rush towards ownership of billions of connected devices, do we know what we are doing, I wonder as I leave the house?

Part of the problem is that as we all seek to control our heating from the train, get our fridge to restock itself through the online supermarket and speak to Alexa or Siri to check the weather, the next bus or the latest football score, we need to stop and think - are we giving away more of ourselves than we intended? The benefits of a connected world are huge but they don't come for free and we all need to understand enough about our technology to prevent us from endangering ourselves, our family and the wider community.

We certainly need to make sure our education system is preparing children to protect themselves. The subject of cybersecurity has recently attracted attention from many students, with 1250 people applying for the 23 cyber security apprenticeships made available earlier this month. This is encouraging, and with businesses increasingly keen to employ people with cybersecurity skills and knowledge to help them protect their companies the 23 lucky apprentices will no doubt be at a premium once trained. But it's a drop in the ocean and a long way from what most students learn - and an even longer way from what most people probably understand.

And yet education has to be an important part of our defenses against what must be an increasing risk of cyber attack. We all need to understand enough to ensure that we don't leave the virtual door open to our private property for anyone who wants to come along and misuse it. We must of course be able to rely on large companies such as the social media providers to protect us from inappropriate and abusive material BUT we also have a responsibility to equip ourselves and our students with the wherewithal for self-protection, because no system will ever be completely bullet proof.

If we want to control our devices and connect them to the Internet then we need to understand that, as Mr Toon pointed out, these smart watches, phones, fridges and freezers are mass produced with their online capability built in. Their security is poor and the vast majority of people don't change the default settings. These default settings include passwords, so it is like buying a car and leaving all the doors unlocked.

We need to start working with young children in school and provide training for all the adults who want to use social media and the Internet of Things to connect their lives. Of course we need to teach them about how to devise secure passwords AND we need to give them good techniques for memorizing them so they don't need to write down all the numerous complex passwords they have to use.

But we also need to teach people the basics about how devices connect and what we all need to do every time we buy a new smart tool or join a new social media site: CHANGE THE DEFAULT SETTINGS. There is an irony in all of this, because ' nudge' theory, so popular a while back and the foundation for the government's behavioural insights team (now a limited company), is all about encouraging people to do the things we want, such as sign up to a workplace pension, by making this part of the default package they are offered. Nudge may well have come back to bite us, just as we need people to be saying "Hey mum, the fridge would have let the burglars in if we had not changed those default settings when we bought it home".

Photo by Yvaneich Agno via Creative Commons

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Hey mum, the fridge has just let the burglars in

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Rose Luckin. I was stopped in my tracks as I was leaving the house the other morning when I heard Donald Toon, Director of Cyber Security at the National Crime Agency, talking to John Humphrys on the BBC Today programme. They were discussing the risks that arise when devices such as home freezers and fridges...

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Has Hypothes.is failed the 'Audrey test'?

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Has Hypothes.is failed the 'Audrey test'?

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(read the rejection here)

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Hypothesis: Meeting the Audrey Test for educational technology - Hypothesis

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Anyone working on or with educational technology should take the work of Audrey Watters-widely known as the "Cassandra" of #edtech-very seriously. If your work withers under Audrey's critical gaze, you've got more work to do. In that spirit, I wanted to hold Hypothesis up to the kind of scrutiny that Audrey might provide.

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What is the "larger shift of political thought" this article refers to?

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What is the "larger shift of political thought" this article refers to?

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Key Takeaways

The rise of educational technology is part of a larger shift in political thought, from favoring government oversight to asserting free-market principles, as well as a response to the increasing costs of higher education.

The technocentric view that technology can solve these challenges combines with a vision of education as a product that can be packaged, automated, and delivered to students.

Unless greater collaborative efforts take place between edtech developers and the greater academic community, as well as more informed deep understandings of how learning and teaching actually occur, any efforts to make edtech education's silver bullet are doomed to fail.

Educational technology - known colloquially as edtech - represents efforts to design, develop, and use technology to achieve a never-ending array of desirable educational outcomes, including improving learning, increasing retention rates, enhancing teaching effectiveness, reducing costs, and increasing access. Throughout its history, edtech proponents have assumed positive impacts, promoting an optimistic rhetoric despite little empirical evidence of results - and ample documentation of failures. ¹ Regardless, edtech continues gaining momentum as a solution for the problems facing education. Why? Why is there so much interest in edtech when many of its practices run counter to the research, history, and theories of academic research on edtech?

In this article, we posit that the rise of broad cultural interest in edtech is a sociocultural and ideological phenomenon. In particular, we assert that edtech

is a response to the increasing price of higher education;

represents a shift in political thought from government oversight to free-market oversight of education;

is symptomatic of the belief that education, like training, is a product to be packaged, automated, and delivered; and

is symptomatic of the technocentric belief that technology is a solution to the perils facing education.

Understanding the environment that surrounds the edtech phenomenon is important; such knowledge may enable educators, administrators, researchers, and industry stakeholders to better understand our current social and cultural landscape. This greater understanding of unstated assumptions, biases, and sociocultural realities could contribute to practices that lead to more desirable social outcomes rather than continuing to use edtech in a way that may ultimately exacerbate rather than mitigate the very problems it promises to solve.

Here, we describe the above assertions and the sociocultural context that supports the prominence of edtech. We then offer recommendations aimed at addressing some of the shortcomings associated with edtech practice.

Assertion 1. The edtech phenomenon is a response to the increasing price of higher education.

In April 2015, Arizona State University (ASU) and edX, a massive open online course (MOOC) provider, announced the Global Freshman Academy partnership to offer a full year of freshman courses and credits to anyone who takes, pays for, and completes the courses in a satisfactory way. The partnership between ASU (an accredited institution) and edX (a technological platform) is just one response to the current high cost of a degree and its unclear return on investment. The Global Freshman Academy represents a longstanding interest in edtech as a way to slow down, stop, or even reverse the continuing cost increases in higher education.

This initiative and its coverage in the popular press are indicative of a larger trend to question both the viability of a college degree and the future of higher education institutions. Media coverage - such as The Atlantic magazine's August 2014 cover story, " Is College Doomed?" and Kevin Carey's 2016 book, The End of College ² - reflect a growing frustration with the rising cost and uncertain financial returns of higher education. Over the past 30 years, the cost of attending college in the United States has risen by more than 225 percent, while the number of students attending degree-seeking college programs has more than doubled. ³ As enrollments and tuition have increased and state funding has declined, students themselves bear a higher percentage of the cost of education, leaving many of them facing considerable debt and hardship. ⁴

Commentators and scholars have wondered whether the increasing costs and decreasing value of a college degree represent an education bubble on the verge of bursting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, education writers in the US, as well as in Australia, Canada, and the UK, have questioned the relevance and value of higher education. ⁵ Others go further; for example, the Thiel Fellowship - designed for "people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom" - offers youth $100,000 to pursue a pathway other than college.

Assertion 2. The edtech phenomenon reflects a shift in political thought from government to free-market oversight of education.

The rise of edtech is partly predicated on the curtailment of government involvement in education. Reducing governmental involvement and increasing emphasis on market forces in education has provided a space and an opportunity for the edtech industry to flourish.

To better understand this, we must examine the changing ways that education is funded. Though future federal support for higher education under the Trump administration looks grim, ⁶ cuts to education budgets have been ongoing. In the past decade, US states cut 10 percent of their funding for the 101 top public universities, ⁷ and higher education appropriations in 46 states have declined. In 1971, for example, the state of California provided 70 percent of the annual expenditures for the University of California, Berkeley; state support fell to 30 percent by 1999 and to just above 12 percent in 2012. ⁸ Similar reductions have occurred outside the US. Between 1980 and 2007, for example, governmental financial support per full-time student decreased for most Canadian postsecondary institutions. ⁹ At the same time, learning institutions continue to purchase edtech products, and, even though venture capital investment in edtech has recently slowed down, the edtech industry is described as "2017's big, untapped, and safe investor opportunity." ¹⁰

If we view higher education as an economic marketplace, the reduced state support could be seen as an attempt to address the negative effects of government intervention on that marketplace, enabling the private sector to respond to market imperfections. This perspective, labeled neoliberalism as early as the 1960s, is largely based on the idea that a free market economy is most suitable for all aspects of society because competition will drive businesses to improve services and reduce costs/prices, and thus provide better products for consumers, improving society in the process. In recent years, an increasingly popular narrative in Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK proclaims that education, insulated from the free market, is bloated due to its protection from economic influences. If education were to function in a free market, the theory goes, costs would be driven down and better services would be offered. To address education problems, reform committees in these countries have recommended market-based reforms, including reductions in government funding, deregulation of tuition and fees, and increased competition among universities.

These policies point to a trend in which "lawmakers are taking up the minutiae of higher-education policy, pushing for increased performance and cost containment" toward an economy that approximates the free market. ¹¹ In the US, federal discussions of legislation to reduce the cost of higher education

promote online education as an inexpensive alternative to traditional approaches,

encourage technology-based public-private partnerships,¹² and

ease accreditation restrictions to allow edtech ventures in the marketplace.

In the future, such trends may extend beyond instructional practice and digital platforms to the financial underpinnings of the educational superstructure. Under President Obama, the Department of Education imposed student loan system restrictions that were favorable to lenders, but the Trump administration is expected to reverse some of these changes in favor of growing private enterprise in the sector. ¹³

The reduction of public funding for education, and the associated rise in edtech to fill the voids it leaves, has many implications for higher education systems. For example, institutions face a tradeoff between outsourcing operations and conducting them in-house. David L. Kirp argues that, "whether the practice is called outsourcing, contracting out, or privatizing, the impact is the same...[and an] endless array of activities that universities used to manage" such as bookstores and health services are now run by private organizations. ¹⁴

In the edtech industry context, the market for private corporations offering online program management services - ranging from student recruitment to student support to instructional design services - has exploded, increasing from $360 million in 2011 to $1.1 billion in 2015, with a projected increase to $2.5 billion in 2020. ¹⁵ The disaggregation of some elements of educational provision is often referred to as unbundling. While some expect that unbundling might reduce costs, others look at such practices with greater skepticism, anticipating, for example, that the outsourced pieces will relegate power and control to non-institutional actors. Other concerns center on the aims of private businesses in relation to social needs and conflicts between short-term and long-term goals, where educational institutions might have different aims than for-profit businesses.

Assertion 3. The edtech phenomenon is symptomatic of a view of education as a product to be packaged, automated, and delivered.

Despite the disappointing history of previous attempts to package education as a product and automate its delivery, such efforts continue. The lack of historical awareness with respect to edtech is readily apparent. ¹⁶ As Neil Selwyn has charged, "the current understanding of schools in the digital age [is] hampered by a curious amnesia, forgetfulness or even willful ignorance of past phases of technology development and implementation in schools." ¹⁷

An early example of efforts intended to standardize, package, and efficiently deliver training to large numbers of people - what some today might call education at scale - occurred when the US began its entry into World War II. At the time, the military relied on audiovisual devices to train a large populace of unprepared military personnel and civilians. While data evaluating the impact of these technologies are not available, the perception at the time was that training films and filmstrips enabled the US to efficiently and effectively train these individuals en masse. ¹⁸ Despite a lack of empirical proof of efficacy, the quest for technologies to deliver training and education at scale has continued through successive waves of technological innovations, including radio and television. Through the early and mid-20th century, content providers and educational institutions invested heavily in information and communication technologies to deliver education via a variety of means and media. The producers of the materials were companies such as Encyclopedia Britannica and Disney, large-platform providers with the infrastructure available to create multimedia. The campus facilitators were originally reference-based professionals, under the designation of media services, people whose instructional design focus provided expertise in engaging such materials. The first wave of academic austerity coincides with the rise of personal computing, and by the mid-1990s most of the media service positions had been consolidated into other reference and library duties, with the expectation that the content itself could teach the student. ¹⁹

This is an early example of how edtech products and services often automate, package, and deliver education by removing the need for instructors; a more modern example is the numerous MOOCs depending on recorded lectures and automated assessment. Such digital artifacts "remove the need for exposure to teachers, by providing participants with peer interactions and automated coordination and testing." ²⁰ Personalized learning software - which tailors instruction to individual learners' needs, skills, and interests - is another example of efforts to automate and deliver education. Its very idea is predicated on defining discrete learning objectives; identifying content to address those objectives; packaging content into discrete chunks; delivering it to individual learners according to various behavioral, emotional, or cognitive measures; and automating the process so that it can be repeated for many different learners in many different contexts.

Understanding the current and historical efforts to use edtech to automate and mechanize education is important. Such an understanding might give administrators and practitioners insights into the types of practices and activities that edtech fosters. Such technologies are rarely neutral, and understanding their biases - especially their biases toward packaging and automating education delivery - should lead us to ask critical questions as to their goals and implications. Sian Bayne even noted that it's "not that automated methods are undesirable - on the contrary, the computational turn in education is both exciting and important - it is rather that the terms on which they are proposed are driven by a productivity-oriented solutionism which has been critiqued for decades now." ²¹

Assertion 4. The edtech phenomenon is symptomatic of the technocentric belief that technology is the most efficient solution to the problems of higher education.

Edtech's promises are premised on the notion of technology as a silver bullet. Technology's widespread impact on society has generated the expectation that it will also transform education. Such expectations have a long history. The early 2010s saw the resurgence of narratives focusing on two ideas:

techno-determinism, which holds that technology shapes its emerging society; and

techno-solutionism, which holds that technology will solve societal problems.

Both ideas indicate underlying beliefs, held both inside and outside of education, about the development of technologies. ²² Technology has been promoted as a solution to education's problems by helping students learn and instructors teach in more efficient and effective ways - despite the fact that learning scientists and education researchers have long been skeptical about this idea.

Why does this technocentric perspective persist when researchers have warned about the pitfalls of techno-deterministic thinking's pitfalls and numerous others have provided overwhelming evidence that technology access alone has little impact on learning outcomes? ²³ Undoubtedly, many reasons exist for this paradox, but work by one of us (Veletsianos) and Royce Kimmons provides a lens through which we can begin to understand the persistence of technocentrism. ²⁴ That work argues that technology use in the broader culture impacts various subcultures and, as such, technologies that were successful elsewhere are expected to succeed in education. Following this logic, we would expect technology to disrupt education in the same way it has disrupted industries such as music and photocopying. Further, the work notes that, because technophilic consumer cultures found value in online collaborative projects (such as Wikipedia, Firefox, and Linux) and the practices that surround them (such as peer review), edtech developers have sought to apply similar models and practices to education (such as peer review in MOOCs).

The technocentric belief that technology provides a solution, however, shows an ignorance of the significant history and knowledge base surrounding technology use in education. Such lack of understanding is illustrated by public comments arguing that the education system has remained unchanged for hundreds of years - most recently by US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, ²⁵ but also by edtech advocates. ²⁶ In fact, education and educational institutions are in a constant state of evolution. ²⁷

One dangerous outcome of technocentric practices and the dismissal of the field's history is the development of products and services uninformed by lessons of the past. For example, even though MOOCs were pursued to both disrupt and reimagine education, their pervasive pedagogical practices are primarily objectivist, ²⁸ marking a sharp contrast to theories of learning that imagine learning as a collaborative, active, emancipatory, and social endeavor.

Recommendations

The rise of edtech is underpinned by ideology: edtech is financially driven, adheres to privatization of longstanding public structures, desires automated or prepackaged contents and processes, and envisions technology as a solution in and of itself. From this perspective, edtech is neutral, ahistorical, and apolitical. It assumes positive impacts and is positioned as the answer to the strains and consternations of administrators, faculty, students, teachers, and learning institutions. Although this type of edtech may serve as a vehicle to improve the efficiency of various practices associated with teaching and learning, we question both its potential outcomes and its ideological underpinnings.

A microcosm of edtech's sociocultural positioning and potential to exacerbate rather than improve outcomes can be seen in the partnership between San Jose State University (SJSU) and Udacity. In January 2013, Udacity and SJSU announced a partnership to develop and teach a handful of remedial-level courses, available at a price less than a third of traditional tuition. The partnership was heralded as an opportunity to show how MOOCs could benefit underserved students and demonstrate the democratizing potential of digital learning. However, the partnership was paused after one semester and fully suspended by the end of 2013 because the scores of students enrolled in the Udacity courses were lower than those enrolled in SJSU's traditional introductory courses. ²⁹

Udacity's explanation? The course registrants were too heavily weighted toward historically underrepresented college populations, as well as students who had struggled in remedial courses before; this despite the partnership's stated purpose to serve those nontraditional students. The SJSU-Udacity partnership was one in which technology was prescribed as a neutral solution, but it actually resulted in abdication of blame and worse-off outcomes for students and the institution.

Nonetheless, if we avoid the misguided uses all too common today, the benefits of edtech lie within reach. Toward this goal, we make the following recommendations.

First, edtech programs should foster an understanding of the ideological, social, political, and economic contexts that surround use of these technologies. Such a need is only increasing; while edtech programs should continue to prepare individuals to design, develop, evaluate, implement, and manage edtech and associated instructional practices, we cannot ignore that fact that this technology is not neutral, politically or ideologically.

Second, given the divides between practice and scholarship, we recommend that individuals in the education field and its numerous associations - including EDUCAUSE - take steps to inform and educate the entrepreneurs seeking to create edtech about the essentials of teaching and learning: theory, pedagogy and emergent trends in the research. Although individuals often work for organizations that direct what they can and cannot do, many opportunities exist for academia to help bridge the gaps. Such education opportunities might include offering:

Short, intensive sessions on topics of pressing need, such as weekend-long seminars on what researchers know about scaling up educational innovations and what we have learned from successful edtech efforts

Standalone courses or informational materials aimed at education entrepreneurs

Degrees aimed at developing educational entrepreneurship

Further, organizations might pursue collaborative partnerships to create edtech. For example, researchers can partner with edtech companies to conduct independent research and evaluation or to offer formative critiques of products based on their expertise and knowledge. Similar efforts have been pursued in the past, but they are few and uncommon. For instance, Columbia University's Teachers College offers opportunities for entrepreneurs to partner with them to evaluate products.

Third, individuals working in edtech ventures can take steps to bridge the divides between their practice and existing edtech research. For example, individuals designing, developing, or funding edtech innovations could do the following:

Commit to support any claims they make regarding edtech's impact with empirical evidence resulting from transparent and rigorous evaluation processes³⁰

Invite independent academic experts to advise on prototypes and designs, as well as proposed tools and innovations

Attend conferences (such as the annual Association for Educational Communications and Technology conference) that aim to develop a critical understanding of edtech, rather than focusing exclusively on conferences that celebrate and promote the technology, and explore how conversations at these conferences might inform your edtech products

Reflect on their understanding and knowledge of education, teaching, and learning, and take actions to develop a deeper understanding of each that goes beyond their personal experiences or those of select groups of students

Moving Forward

Some organizations and individuals are already pursuing these recommended approaches to edtech. For example, one edtech developer working on a popular video platform told one of us that she sought to understand how students learn from videos by reading all she could from the literature on the topic. As another example, Pearson recently shared a list of learning design principles it is using to guide its design and development. Such efforts should be applauded; unfortunately, they are currently the exception to the norm.

Edtech as a scholarly field and edtech as practice will both continue their efforts to improve teaching and learning. However, until greater opportunities arise for these groups to understand and benefit from each another, we do not foresee a future of close collaboration. As a result, it is likely that the results of their separate efforts will continue to be, by and large, disappointing. We encourage the community to further these collaborations when they arise with the ultimate goal of advancing the value of edtech in education.

Notes

1. Craig Peck, Larry Cuban, and Heather Kirkpatrick, "Techno-Promoter Dreams, Student Realities," Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 83, No. 6 (2002): pp. 472-480.

2. Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, Riverhead Books, New York, 2016.

3. US Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics, 2010(NCES 2011-015), National Center for Education Statistics, 2011; and US Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics, 2015 (NCES 2016-014), National Center for Education Statistics, 2016.

4. Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream, University of Chicago Press, 2016.

5. Anya Kamenetz, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011; and Kio Stark, Don't Go Back to School, Kio Stark Publishing, 2013.

6. Donald J. Farish, "The Specific Threats Now Facing Higher Education," Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 15, 2016.

7. Phil Oliff, Vincent Palacios, Ingrid Johnson, and Michael Leachman, "Recent Deep State Higher Education Cuts May Harm Students and the Economy for Years to Come," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 19, 2013.

8. George Breslauer, "UC Berkeley's Adaptations to the Crisis of Public Higher Education in the US: Privatization? Commercialization? Or Hybridization?" Center for Studies in Higher Education, Vol. 17, No. 13, 2013.

9. Trends in Higher Education, Volume 1-Enrollment, Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, 2007.

10. David Bainbridge, "Edtech Is the Next Fintech," TechCrunch, August 13, 2016.

11. Megan O'Neil, "Pushed by Lawmakers, U. of Florida Dives into Online Education," Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014.

12. For example, in a 2013 policy speech detailing the government's efforts to make college more affordable, President Barack Obama pointed to a public-private partnership at the Georgia Institute of Technology with MOOC provider Udacity and telecommunications corporation AT&T; the partnership was designed to offer graduate degrees through online coursework in computer science. For more on this, see Ry Rivard, "Massive (But Not Open)," Inside Higher Ed, May 14, 2013.

13. Shahien Nasiripour, "The Trump Era Is Already Giving a Boost to Sagging Student Lenders," Bloomberg, December 11, 2016.

14. David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, Harvard University Press, 2013.

15. ICEF Monitor, "Private Partners Helping to Drive Growth of US Higher Education Online," October 27, 2015.

16. Gregory Ferenstein, "How California's Online Education Pilot Will End College as We Know It," TechCrunch, January 15, 2013; and Natasha Singer, "Silicon Valley Turns Its Eye to Education," New York Times, January 11, 2015.

17. Neil Selwyn, "In Praise of Pessimism-The Need for Negativity in Educational Technology," British Journal of Educational Technology, Vol. 42, No. 5 (2011): 713-718.

18. Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology, Information Age Publishing, 2004.

19. Rolin Moe and Linda Polin, "TPACK as a Framework for Educational Technology Instruction and Practice," in Online Teaching in K-12: Issues, Methods, and Best Practices for Teachers and Administrators, Sarah Bryans-Bongey and Kevin J. Graziano, eds. (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2016).

20. Marisa Ponti, "Hei Mookie! Where Do I Start? The Role of Artifacts in an Unmanned MOOC," Proceedings 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014, 1625-1634.

21. Sian Bayne, "Teacherbot: Interventions in Automated Teaching," Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2015): 37-41.

22. John Coleman, "Introduction: Digital Technologies in the Lives of Young People," Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2012): 37-41.

23. Larry Cuban, Oversold and Underused: Reforming Schools through Technology 1980-2000, Harvard University Press, 2001; Seymour Papert, "Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking," Educational Researcher, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1987): 22-30; and Yong Zhao, Jing Lei, Bo Yan, Chun Lai, and Hueyshan Sophia Tan, "What Makes the Difference? A Practical Analysis of Research on the Effectiveness of Distance Education," Teachers College Record, Vol. 107, No. 8 (2005): 1836-1884.

24. George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons, "Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent Techno-Cultural Pressures Toward Open and Digital Scholarship in Online Networks," Computers & Education, Vol. 58, No. 2 (2012): 766-774.

25. Matt Frendewey, Krista Carney, Whitney Marcavage, Paul Dauphin, Kim Martinez, and Kimberly Sawatka, Teach Choice: The School Choice Yearbook, 2016.

26. David Raths, "edX CEO: 'It Is Pathetic That the Education System Has Not Changed in Hundreds of Years'," Campus Technology, 2014.

27. George Siemens and Kathleen Matheos, "Systemic Changes in Higher Education," in education, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2012).

28. There are exceptions to this model. For example, connectivist-oriented open courses are grounded on networked learning principles, and pedagogical innovations may exist within particular courses. For more, see Sian Bayne and Jen Ross, "The Pedagogy of the Massive Open Online Course: the UK View," The Higher Education Academy, 2014.

29. Ry Rivard, "Udacity Project on 'Pause'," Inside Higher Ed, July 18, 2013.

30. Phil Hill, "About Those D2L Claims of LMS Usage Increasing Retention Rates," e-Literate, May 14, 2015.

George Veletsianos, PhD, is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Technology, School of Education and Technology, Royal Roads University.

Rolin Moe, EdD, is assistant professor and director of the Institute for Academic Innovation at Seattle Pacific University.

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the rise of educational technology as a sociocultural and ideological phenomenon

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The Rise of Educational Technology as a Sociocultural and Ideological Phenomenon

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The rise of educational technology is part of a larger shift in political thought, from favoring government oversight to asserting free-market principles, as well as a response to the increasing costs of higher education. The technocentric view that technology can solve these challenges combines with a vision of education as a product that can be packaged, automated, and delivered to students.

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To what extent do we plagiarise in our LEs?

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To what extent do we plagiarise in our LEs?

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How relevant is licensing?

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Has the read/write web made academic definitions of authorship and originality irrelevant? | MSc in Digital Education

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This essay can be read in two forms, one that contains no original text (so by the strict definition an act of plagiarism), and one that contains only what the current rulings (and plagiarism checking software) consider to be an original piece of work.

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Is the "locking down of open" dangerous?

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Is the "locking down of open" dangerous?

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Like most great conflagrations, it began as a small exchange that touched on a vital point. At OER17 a couple of weeks ago a suggestion appeared via Twitter that DS106 (the pioneering online course, not the NETGEAR router) wasn't/isn't really "open" since it wasn't based on true OER (Open Educational Resources. Exception was taken. The ensuing discussion has only grown. Now nearly three weeks after the conference, the discussion (debate? argument? positioning battle?) has grown to the point that Maha Bali has organized a Hangout to discuss it further. She's also begun to curate the growing number of posts on the topic. Thank you Maha.

Back at the conference - before it blew up into such a large discussion - I had promised to blog on the topic. Alas events at my home campus have delayed that post but here it is. I hesitate somewhat given the great minds that have already weighed in, but in the interest of openness itself I think I might have a slightly different perspective to add.

OER: Permission to Use Property

The definition of OER, Open Education Resources, seems relatively clear and agreed. David Wiley has defined Open Content and OER as those copyrightable works licenses so as to permit perpetual 5R activities of retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. In practice this means Creative Commons (CC) licenses and CC-BY in particular.

I have some issues with this definition such as the exclusion of open source software, the silence regarding public domain and fair use, and Wiley's deprecation of CC SA, NC, and ND licenses, but that's fodder for another post. For this discussion, this CC-license-with-the-5R's definition will suffice to clarify OER. Thus we have it: The essence of openness for resources is permission to use copyrighted property.
note: Though it's peripheral to this discussion and worthy of its own post, I would like to remind folks that while we call copyrighted material intellectual property and the law treats it as property, it is artificial property. It's not like land or that coffee mug in your hand. It's an artificial government-granted bundle of monopoly powers that we call property.
The driver of this growing discussion then really turns on the question of what qualifies as "open pedagogy"? Wiley is pretty clear about his view. Open Pedagogy is the practice of using OER. Thus the definition of "openness", according to Wiley, has OER and its property use permissions as prerequisite. If there's not explicitly CC licensed OER involved, it's not open.

Many of the posts discussing "what's open pedagogy?" take a turn towards defining it differently. Some use open in practice/praxis terms. Others use it in terms of the "open web". I think we can consider the use of open web approach as one emphasizing open access, whether that access is to read or to publish. Either approach, the praxis/practice approach or the accessibility/open web approach seem to still emphasize the written materials as the center of the issue. In other words, the focus shifts to what's done with the materials? Is the Internet and its affordances utilized? Jim Groom in I Don't Need Permission to be Open stakes out the position closer to my heart:

I think the locking down of open is dangerous. I think it draws lines where they need not be, and it reconsolidates power for those who define it. More than that, the power around open has been pretty focused on a few people for too long, and I count myself amongst them. More and more on this trip in conversations with others, I think we as a field need to do a better job of bringing the next generation of ed-tech folks to the fore, stepping back, and letting them frame what's next. Even this post shows my harkening back to work I did 6 years ago, I don't want to have a corner on open or ed-tech, I want something that gets me excited and passionate. OER17 certainly did that, and I crave more. What I see as hardline definitions of what is and is not OER or open need not police the discussion. I would hate for an edict about what is and is not open pedagogy to get in the way of people "coloring outside the lines" of the 5Rs, to appropriate Brian Lamb's gorgeous turn of phrase from one of this 3 tweets in response to the avalanche.

David Kernohan in his comment on Jim's post, though, really nails my position:

I don't need 5Rs permission for the inside of my head. And if I want to share what's inside my head with others, that's my business. The fact that some of the ideas in my head have been put there by corporate idea salesmen, and that I need to refer to those ideas to express mine, is immaterial.

Make art. Dammit.

I would just add to David's comment the admonition to "Make Art. Or Science. Or Philosophy. Or Whatevs. Dammit"

Property, Process, Pedagogy, and Power

The core of my objection to the "OER as prerequisite to being open" position is that OER are resources. They're things. Commodities. Property. Or, at least they're treated as property in a capitalist US-Western economic system that increasingly dominates the global economy and culture.

Pedagogy isn't property. It's not a commodity. It's a process. It's a method of creating a desired outcome. For me the analogy is to business process analysis: pedagogy is the production process. It may be mass-production oriented or it may be artisinal. It's the way things get accomplished - or at least it's the way we intend to accomplish things. For those without a business analysis background who may recoil at anything smacking of "business" in education, let me use a different analogy. As educators, we intend to help students to have some kind of particular experience: learn something, change perspectives, grow, mature, create, collaborate, etc. Of course in the modern lingo we call those "learning outcomes" (don't get me started on that!). My point here is that pedagogy is the intended process by which we enable students to reach those outcomes and have that experience.

As a process, pedagogy, makes use of resources. Any production process uses resources, but the resources are not the essence of the process. In the case of pedagogy, what we normally think of as "educational resources", books and written materials, whether they be closed ER or OER, aren't even the most important resources. The most important resources are human - the labor, communication, dialogue, and care of humans. Other critical resources include technology and its affordances embodied in what we economists would call capital. The methods and rules we use to combine all these resources, the property, the humans, and the technologies, is the process, the pedagogy.

If licenses and legal permissions to use property make resources open, then what makes pedagogy open? It can't be licenses or permissions. Pedagogy isn't property. It also can't be that open pedagogy simply means using open resources. The resources may be openly licensed, but that says nothing about the openness of the process, the openness of the humans, or the openness of the media & technology.

A process, like a pedagogy, can be conducted in isolation removed from any other activities or parts of life. Or, the process can be conducted in the open, connected to rest of human activity. Humans are the center of pedagogy or educational praxis. It's students and teachers and their interactions that are the essence of pedagogy. That means that pedagogy is not just about some instructional design strategy, it's about power relations. Who gets to do what? Who gets to tell whom what to do? Who sets the bounds and the rules? What are the limits of activity? Who tells whom what to write about? Who defines the limits of the audience the student can reach? Who defines meaning? To me, any pedagogy is primarily about power relations and therefore freedom.

Now I think we can get to the essence of openness in pedagogy. Since pedagogy is about process and power relations, then openness in pedagogy is about freedom and connection. It's about the degrees and ways in which a pedagogy is free and mutual. Openness in pedagogy then starts to overlap with critical pedagogy. It is no wonder then that a discussion of "what's open pedagogy" should emerge from an OER17 conference with the theme of the "Politics of Open".

Recognizing Openness in Pedagogy

I don't think a simple, checklist definition of open pedagogy is possible. It's a pointless and ultimately dangerous endeavor to attempt to judge pedagogy as open or not according to some abstract checklist. To do so risks reifying both pedagogy and education as something that exists independent of the students and teachers engaged in it. We already all too often talk about education as something to be acquired rather than an experience or activity that's lived.

Freedom, power relations, and learning are very multi-dimensional. So while a strict, abstract, checklist definition of open pedagogy isn't useful, we can describe dimensions of openness. I would love to see our discussions of what's open pedagogy evolve these lines. So let me try a few examples of dimensions of openness in pedagogy. I am grateful to my colleagues Jeff Janowick, Regina Gong, Meg Elias, and Leslie Johnson for recent discussions that helped my understandings of these dimensions. For each of these examples, the dimension is described as running from more closed to more open.

Isolation vs. Connectedness: Does the pedagogy and learning activities exist predominantly in a closed, isolated space such as the traditional classroom or do they engage and form connections with the larger, outside world? Using this dimension, courses where students create materials on the open web, accessible by the public, makes the pedagogy more open.

Disposable vs. Permanent, Public, or Authentic assignments

Temporary Interactions vs. Building of Lasting Community

Defined, limited activities vs. opportunity for expressing more creativity

Controlled, limited use of learning materials, including which sources are approved vs. Accessing and using the range of publicly available resources on the Web.

Teacher as "the" authority vs. Students being able to bring other sources of authority.

This is just a beginning. I would be very interested in hearing what others might think and of other dimensions in which pedagogy may be more closed vs more open.

If openness in resources is defined by permissions to use property, I argue that openness in pedagogy must be measured in terms of freedom, authority, and power of the learning process. To place the resources, the OER, as the prerequisite of openness of pedagogy is to commoditize and reify education itself, ultimately denying the possibility of critical pedagogy. Open pedagogy, and therefore open education and open learning, are more about freedom of action and authority than they are about property permissions.

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Like most great conflagrations, it began as a small exchange that touched on a vital point. At OER17 a couple of weeks ago a suggestion appeared via Twitter that DS106 (the pioneering online course, not the NETGEAR router) wasn't/isn't really "open" since it wasn't based on true OER (Open Educational Resources.

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Vulnerability and Socially Networked Learning | MSc in Digital Education

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Through this paper I seek to explore the factors which contribute to feelings of vulnerability when learning within networked publics, "publics that are restructured by networked technologies; they are simultaneously a space and a collection of people" (boyd, 2010, p. 41).

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How digitally literate are you and your students?

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How digitally literate are you and your students?

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This Mathematician Says Big Data Punishes Poor People

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Algorithms that we use daily actually thwart equality, says Cathy O'Neil, author of 'Weapons of Math Destruction'

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Online Education: A Science and Technology Studies Perspective / Éducation en ligne: Perspective des études en science et technologie | Hamilton | Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l'apprentissage et de la technologie

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Online Education: A Science and Technology Studies Perspective / Éducation en ligne: Perspective des études en science et technologie

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When did the internet impact education in the US?

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When did the internet impact education in the US?

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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Teens, technology, and school

Teen use of the internet at school has grown 45% since 2000

The vast majority of teens and their parents believe that use of the internet helps students in the classroom and in their studies, but some teens believe too many of their peers use the internet to cheat

The internet is an important element in the overall educational experience of many teenagers. Schools are a common location where online teens access the web, although very few online teenagers rely exclusively on their school for that web access. Further, there is widespread agreement among teens and their parents that the internet can be a useful tool for school. However, 37% of teens say they believe that "too many" of their peers are using the internet to cheat. And there is some disagreement among teens and their parents about whether children must be web-literate by the time they begin school. Additionally, large numbers of teens and adults have used the web to search for information about colleges and universities.

The results reported here were gathered through telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates for the Pew Internet & American Life Project between October 26 and November 28, 2004, among a sample of 1,100 parent-child pairs. Teens in these surveys are young people between the ages of 12 and 17. For results based on the total parent or teen sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling and other random effects is +/- 3%. For results based on online teens or online parents, margin of sampling error is +/- 4%.

Internet accessibility at school

The most recent Pew Internet Project survey finds that 87% of all youth between the ages of 12 and 17 use the internet. That translates into about 21 million people. Of those 21 million online teens, 78% (or about 16 million students) say they use the internet at school. Put another way, this means that 68% of all teenagers have used the internet at school.

This represents growth of roughly 45% over the past four years from about 11 million teens who used the internet in schools in late 2000. In the Pew Internet Project survey in late 2000, we found that 73% of those ages 12 to 17 used the internet and that 47% of those in that age cohort used the internet at school.

For a growing portion of the online teen population, schools have become an important venue for internet use for a significant number of teens. About one in five online teens (18%) who use the internet from multiple locations list school as the location where they go online most often. This figure is up from 11% in December 2000.

Still, while these figures suggest greater internet penetration and use in schools, they also show that 32% of all teens do not use the internet at school at all, despite the fact that 99% of public schools have access to the internet.

Interestingly, less than 1% of online teenagers who go online from school say that school is their only location of access. This means that while many teenagers do go online at school, very few rely exclusively on their school's internet connections. These teens find additional locations outside of school to connect online, even if they are not wired at their own home. For the teenagers who reported that they go online at school (N=758), 87% also go online from their home, 75% go online from someone else's house, 61% go online from a library, and 11% from a community center of some kind.

Just 13% of teens who connect to the web from school do not also have web access at their home. These teens tend to be online much less often than all online teens who have access from home and school. Twenty-eight percent of teens who go online at home and school report going online several times a day and 28% go online about once a day. Of the teens who go online at school and not from home, only 7% say they go online several times a day and 15% say they go online about once a day. While school can be a location that allows teens to get access to the web when they do not have access as readily elsewhere, those teens with online access at home are able to go online much more frequently.

Of all the teens who do not go online at school, either because they do not go online at all or they go online elsewhere (N=342), 23% live in a household with an income of less than $30,000 per year while 31% live in a household with an income of $75,000 or greater. This would suggest that the reason that some teens do not go online at school is not necessarily economic. Perhaps these teens choose not to go online at school because their school's access is inconvenient due to old machines, filtering, or limited availability of computers.

Views about the internet, school, and cheating

There is agreement among teens and their parents about the role that the internet plays in teens' education. Eighty-six percent of teens, and 88% of online teens, believe that the internet helps teenagers to do better in school. Eighty percent of parents and 83% of parents of online teens agreed with that proposition.

There is more of a disagreement when it comes to use of the internet for cheating on schoolwork. Some 37% of teens said that "too many" teens today use the internet to cheat on schoolwork. That compares to 27% of parents who say the same thing. In December 2000, 18% of teens said that they knew someone who had used the internet to cheat on schoolwork. Notably, in our recent survey there is practically no difference between teens who are online and those who are not as to whether they believe too many teens cheat using the web.

There is an even more substantial difference in opinion between parents and teenagers about the need for children to use the web by the time they have started school. One-quarter of teenagers agreed that if a child is not using the internet by the time they start school, they will fall behind their peers while 44% of parents believed the same thing. While most parents and teens view the internet as a helpful academic tool, parents are more likely to believe that children must be familiar with the web by the time they start school.

Instant messaging and school work

Three-quarters of online teens use instant messaging - that represents close to 16 million youth. Of those 16 million, 78% say they use IM from time to time to talk about homework, tests or schoolwork. Online girls are more likely than online boys to do this, and older girls (those ages 15-17) are the most likely of all to do this. Teens with broadband connections at home are more likely than dial-up internet users to use IM this way.

Use of the internet to search for colleges and other schools

The internet is a common tool that many teens use to search for information on colleges or other schools. Fifty-seven percent of online teens have gone online to get information about a college, university, or other school they were thinking about attending. Our November 2004 survey of adults showed that 45% of online adults have done the same thing. Among teens, girls are more likely to search for schools on the internet than boys, 61% to 53%. The likelihood that a teenager has searched online for school information increases with age. About a quarter (27%) of 12-year-old internet users have done this, compared with 85% of 17-year-old internet users. There is no significant difference between the percentages of teens who have looked for such information with dial-up connections and those with broadband connections.

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Teen use of the internet at school has grown 45% since 2000 The vast majority of teens and their parents believe that use of the internet helps students in the classroom and in their studies, but some teens believe too many of their peers use the internet to cheat The internet is an important element in the overall educational experience of many teenagers.

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What evidence can help us as LE architects?

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What evidence can help us as LE architects?