I recently found myself reading this 2014 piece again, a good entry in the annals of dispelling the still too ubiquitous myth of young people as “digital natives.”

One choice bit:

Siva Vaidhyanathan, chair of the media-studies department at the University of Virginia, describes Ms. Hargittai as a “pioneer of empirical Internet studies.” It is “absolutely untrue” that young people understand how the Internet works when they enroll in college, he says. “That myth is in the direct interest of education-technology companies and Silicon Valley itself. If we all decide that young people have some sort of savantlike talent with digital technology, than we’re easily led to policies and buying decisions and pedagogical decisions that pander to Silicon Valley.”

sidebar: For more on digital natives, see most recently a good overview in 2020 this, especially the handy summary chart, and, from 2008, this. As these and many other studies make clear, the injection of “digital natives” into the educational bloodstream resulted in a panic about how to meet the needs of these supposedly technological students. Edtech of recent decades has been built, in part, on educator and administrative fear that they are not meeting the needs of so-called “digital natives.” That this group of mythical “natives” (or “immigrants”— choose your nuance) does not exist or may not have the characteristics ascribed to it demands more critical approaches to the familiar educational technologies that have become so widespread in a short period of time.

Similar to the course and methods described in the article, I too have tried to teach students about online identity and the amount of information left behind. One shocking thing in the intervening period since 2014, anecdotally for me at least, has been watching students become increasingly nonplussed about the amount of information they bleed out to big tech online. Even when I do similar exercises of revealing everything about them through google or geneaological databases or the like, most don't really care. (Or at least they say it doesn't matter.) At the same time, the public discourse around big tech seems to have become much more prominent. But the reaction I get for 90% of my class is always that they really don't care that much. They see tech as inevitable and themselves as relatively powerless to do anything about it.

I suspect that much of this resignation to the status quo comes from having used technology as entertainment and communication for as long as they can remember. There was no shifting to a new way of doing things or being observed; they have always been recorded and observed and tracked.

Educational technologies bear significant blame for this normalizing of surveillance behavior, but I'm more interested in the way that by not adequately confronting the myth of the digital native, we've robbed students of the possibility of taking control of their own technology. The myth of the digital native is one of effortless mastery, where the youthful savant masters tools that are mysterious and magical to their elders. Quite the contrary in practice, these lines from that 2014 article ring even truer today:

The findings paint a picture not of an army of app-building, HTML-typing twenty-somethings, but of a stratified landscape in which some, mostly privileged, young people use their skills constructively, while others lack even basic Internet knowledge.

I've spent much of the past five years teaching groups that are, to say the least, widely divergent in their technological background and training. The gaps between the most facile (and, yes, often privileged) and the least are huge. Nowadays we are more likely to recognize this as a “digital divide” due to external factors, but it is still a far too binary view of the wide range of understandings and experiences young people have about technology.

Educational technology demands more training in technology, both a form of “data literacy” and a form of technological skill building. This runs counter to the way that edtech is typically marketed. There it is a “solution” that replaces some otherwise pedestrian function or fosters engagement or some other thing. Edtech does everything possible to pretend that it is not in fact a technology that requires training and skill and reflection. This is simply mistaken. All the talk about digital natives or generational divides feeds into false narratives about technological inevitability in education.

To use educational and academic technologies better we need to start with the fact that it is not a seamless, frictionless, or magic solution to what ails education. And we need to start with the fact that students are, as in all subjects, a diverse mix of interests, experience, skills, capacities, and understandings. Technology is a thing, complex perhaps, something made and something to be studied, inspected, questioned. That isn't just a concern of school IT or teachers. That should be front and center a matter of discussion, debate, and education for students. This may seem strange at first — how often do we contemplate the nature of the humble pencil, or the whiteboard, for example — but I think it would be valuable. X-ray and dissect the edtech tools you use with students, not apart from students outside of class. Expose how it works. Own and pause on where it fails. Let them think about what difference it makes that you choose to use one tool over another or that you use it in the way that you do.

Digital natives don't exist. All students need training from the ground up. The fact that there are a few who can do amazing things at a young age only shows what is true in any field — there are always the hyper-interested, the advanced, the prodigies. They can all benefit from critical engagement with technology. If that also means we might end up realizing that some of this technological stuff just isn't necessary, then all the better.

#digitalnatives #highered #minimalistedtech #dataliteracy

These past months have been a stress test for academic technologies. Videoconferencing tools and LMS systems have had to do the maximum, especially for remote or hybrid learning, but across the board as things that might have been done face to face were offloaded to technology. Both in my own teaching and in watching my kids' experience in K-12, there are some common threads of failure.

Unclear guidelines for best practices: One area where teachers have been let down (I suspect) by the guidance they've been given has been in the area of technological best practices. And I should say, I think this is simply one of those things that easily falls to the side when other matters press; I am not suggesting fault or blame, simply that this is something that needs to be done better. It's a perennial information technology problem. No one uses technology the way it was intended, despite lots of training; and there often aren't significant incentives to level up with technological tools. My own students have long complained about the way that their instructors use the shared LMS (Canvas in this case) in wildly different ways. So they have a range of expectations to meet depending on the instructor. They have expectations of finding material in one place but then find it elsewhere; some faculty post due dates for when they should be started rather than completed (utterly strange). For my own kids (using Schoology) some teachers put assignments in the calendar, others post things via announcements, still others post pages in their main area. It is bewildering where to find things.

The key thing here is that it isn't just choice. It's a failure of the software (which is opinionated but not nearly opinionated enough) and lack of guidance as to why one might use one method over the other. Consequently it's a patchwork.

This is a familiar tech phenomenon. Everyone is reduced to the lowest common denominator when using an app or a platform as part of a team by either the highest status individual's use habits or by the team member who can only use the platform in one particular way. It happens with email chains when a member of the team can't use other tools to, for example, schedule meetings. It happens when working with shared documents. One person wants it in email and doesn't want to edit online and thus the whole team is forced to use that method. And it happens when organizations go looking for new tech tools to improve their workflow or some other process. How often is the existing software perfectly capable if only everyone would use it fully and expertly?

The other issue here is that these practices are often formulated ad hoc. As things come up teachers are forced to find a place for a review sheet or a practice test or something like that and suddenly the well-manicured course site grows weeds in unexpected places.

In theory the fix is simple: a) have an information plan from the beginning and b) put everything into assignments with due dates (because that's how most LMS-es expect content). Putting everything into assignments gives you fixed places for things and can easily be linked to static pages of content. So you can still have, for example, an exam review page that sits out there. But then when you put the assignment that says “Exam” (and it should be an assignment, not just a calendar notice), link the materials there. There are other solutions certainly and other ways to be consistent; it may just help to get outliers into one of a few obvious patterns of posting content.

On the other hand, I'd love to see an LMS that doesn't take it for granted that everyone just gets the structure of a class. What would it look like if an LMS was a bit more self-aware and verbose about how instructors have laid out material? I do this myself with a landing page that I create as the entry point for the class. It's a map of sorts to where all the content is kept in the LMS. It's easy to create and students always comment on how useful it is.

Young students don't automatically know how to navigate an LMS: This is largely a K-5 issue, but has some applicability at all levels. While in theory the structure of an LMS is simple, in practice it is a mess of classes and activities and special activities. Younger students, no matter how facile with technology for their age, don't spend their days working with office technologies. “Simple” things like retrieving a document from a specific place in the LMS are not obvious; printing documents is not obvious; and saving a document as a pdf to email back to a teacher is most certainly not obvious. (Let's not even get into the whole issue of access to technology. One of the things I've found most striking in my own teaching is the number of apparently well-off undergraduate students whose only “computer” is a smartphone. At the K-12 level, expecting even access to a smartphone is, as has been clear across the country this Fall, most certainly not to be taken for granted.)

There are tools that work with this, but the Fall has, I think, exposed major failings of most LMS platforms for young students. Solutions might involve (and have involved) valiant efforts to teach students how to use these technologies, but that seems a waste of precious time. Perhaps simplifying what gets sent and how it gets sent is a possible improvement. The LMS in this case invites sloppy practice. Young students who need simple and clear structure get in an LMS a menu of options and places to get lost. Ditch it.

Parental oversight of all scores all the time is not a good thing: I have never liked the helicopter aspect of LMS systems. There's something powerful about periodic review of things like grades. Beyond the fact that LMS systems burden teachers with the expectation of giving constantly-accessible feedback, for K-12 students in particular the way that the LMS robs them of agency and makes them constantly accountable to parental oversight or questioning runs counter to a pedagogical need to foster the freedom required for learning. Learning requires mistakes and it usually requires failures. The twist this term is that for remote learning parents have had an even more invasive window into the minute by minute drama of the actual classroom, supported and fostered by parental access to the LMS where we too as parents can view, download, and explore all the class materials.

I know some parents like this access. Parents can help their kids and intervene as they think necessary. But I see no good in this. It stresses teachers who now have another audience and have to talk, in a way, both to students and parents at the same time. It can stress students and make them dependent where they otherwise might have had to be responsible themselves. It is dis-empowering at every level.

Do you need an LMS?

I am probably an outlier. But I wonder constantly nowadays about whom the LMS serves. Is it for teachers? For students? The primary beneficiaries seem to me to be administrators and, for K-12, parents who need the salve of constant access to their students' records. I might (grudgingly) admit that the selling point of an LMS is in bringing together materials from multiple classes at one access point.

But is it worth all that hassle? If the purpose is to make materials available remotely, then you need two things: secure storage and, perhaps, some version of “posting” assignments. In that sense, strictly speaking for straightforward functional needs of teachers and students, is a password-protected dropbox/pcloud/cloud storage drive enough?

But... “Security! Analytics! We need to track these things! FERPA!” one might hear.

Bullshit. It's about goals. If your goal is to teach, then an LMS is a lot of extra hassle that you don't need to do that job. If you are a student and your goal is to learn, then an LMS is a bunch of infrastructure and clicking in between you and the content and communication you want.

#lms #k12 #highered #minimaledtech