Reading through Danial Chandler’s Technological or Media Determinism I was intrigued by his thoughts on technological autonomy, or the belief that we really have no control over the direction that technology is taking us. “Technology which no-one seems to control seems to have ‘a will of its own’. This stance involves anthropomorphism or technological animism in its crediting of an inanimate entity with the consciousness and will of living beings.(Chandler, 1995, Technological Autonomy” para.8) This fascinates me because even within technologies relentless march forward in this world I feel our education system is moving at a snail’s pace to adopt its advantages.
Within my school more than half of our teachers don’t touch the computers and our photocopier remains our most used machine. If technology is something that cannot be stopped then why is its adaption into education so slow? I believe what slowly happens is as Chandler states “What is more common is an interplay between newer and older media which may involve subtle shifts of function. (Chandler, 1995, “Techno-Evolution as ‘Progress’” para.1) Gradually teachers will shift their classes to digital, paperless environments. The functionality of the copier is just transferred to a different medium that does not require physical paper to achieve the desired goal. It is however something that will be slow to adopt and it will take years for everyone to move into this new way of storing and presenting information.
I also wanted to look at the way we have chosen to assess our students in our present education system. A students writing assessments from K-7 are passed through a portfolio system from teacher to teacher, year to year until they reach high school. Within these portfolios students are marked as either not yet meeting, minimally meeting, meeting or exceeding. These are paper writing assignments that are determined that year to provide a snapshot of a students ability and give the next teacher a “heads up” to see what level they are working with. Should the students writing be the benchmark that displays the level of literacy that a student is currently at. Is perhaps multimodal literacy better suited as a way for students to construct, represent and present knowledge. Ong talks of “the shift from oral to written speech is essentially a shift from sound to visual space” (Ong, 1982, pg. 115). So now do we transfer from visual space to moving images?
Looking to Chandler who states “The bias in which writing is privileged over speech has been called graphocentrism or scriptism. In many literate cultures, text has a higher status than speech: written language is often seen as the standard” (Chandler, 1995, “Conclusion” para.1). Just as oral has been seen as a lower form of communication than writing, currently video and multi-media is being denied as a dominant form of communication within our school system. Why do we create assessment practices that look at physical pen and paper written work over multimedia presentations for our students yearly capstone projects. Their is no denying that writing is and always will be a vital skill to practice and perfect but is it still a relevant form of expression to assess our students. These digital natives have been raised in a digitally drenched climate where writing is gradually disappearing and being replaced by new forms of expression.
In our current world how do students communicate with each other and with their environment outside the school? It certainly is not through written expression but rather through multiple digital tools. Lim looks at “specific semiotic resources (e.g. language, gesture, images) co-deployed across various modalities (e.g. visual, aural, somatic), as well as their interaction and integration in constructing a coherent text.” (Lim, 2015, pg. 917) What needs to be passed onto the next teacher is a snapshot of the students literacy across a broad spectrum. Reluctant writers can deliver amazing videos that show creativity, imagination and an ability display “above expectations” on multimodal texts.
It is here where I agree with Chandler that “writing is no ‘better’ than speech, nor vice versa – speech and writing need to be acknowledged as different media with differing functions.(Chandler, 1995, “Conclusion” para.9). Within this I would add students ability to create multi media such as slides, infographics, animations and video as a forms of literacy competence. We need to be weave these practices into our current outdated assessment tools. Our sequence and scope of how we assess our students ability to communicate in a rapidly evolving digital landscape needs a drastic overhaul and while writing is an important part of literacy it is not the only form of expression.
References
Chandler, Daniel. (1995) Biases of the Eye an Ear. Daniel Chandler’s Homepage. Retrieved May 30, 2018 from http://visualmemory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/litoral/litoral1.html
Chandler, Daniel. (1995) Technological and Media Determinism. Daniel Chandler’s Homepage. Retrieved May30, 2018 from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet
Lim, F. V. , K.L. O’Halloran, S. Tan and M.K.L. E (2015: 917), ‘Teaching Visual Texts with Multimodal Analysis Software’, Educational Technology Research and Development 63(6), 915–935.
Ong, W. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.
michael yates
June 6, 2018 — 1:14 am
Excellent perspective, but you just brought a counter point to Chandler’s initial premise: “we really have no control over the direction that technology is taking us” and that is EDUCATORS!
By vehemently resisting change some people feel they are “in control” and no amount of professional development, encouragement or threat of dismissal will change that. My context is much the same as yours, if we had a photocopier I am sure it would be the most used technology in the building (followed second by fans and air conditioners). This is largely due to the fact and that technology is seen as a burden (sadly much of what people consider “technology” here, for example Excel templates, are time wasters and very poorly implemented) on teachers.
To be honest I think we may not have much control of the direction technology takes, but after working in education for 10+ years I am pretty sure there is some control on where technology takes “us”.
Excellent post.
steve campbell
June 7, 2018 — 8:13 pm
I really enjoyed reading your post, thank you. I was very interested in your exploration of print being held in higher regard than other forms of communication (video, infographics etc). It seems that we still revere the former dominant technologies in the beginning age of new technologies taking shape. I am reminded of a quote from Socrates in Phaedrus, “…we are to say that if their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them,…”(Plato, 1990, p. 39). At a time where written expression is coming into its own, here Socrates is giving credit to the new written technology, but still requires the written word to be translated into the orality to verify its true value. Just as you wrote in your post, “currently video and multi-media is being denied as a dominant form of communication within our school system.” We view this learning and demonstration of learning as secondary to print, just as Plato viewed print as secondary to orality. Interestingly, this very course requires a script to be submitted along with its video project.
Many more parallels in Phaedrus to our current schools’ view of digital literacy ring true. For example, Socrates describes ones who would rely on reading for learning as “they will be bearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” (Plato, 1990, p. 39). Even though our students can learn and demonstrate learning through multimodal means, we would view the student as not having achieved ‘deep learning.’ We need time to make the cognitive leap of applying esteem to new forms of communication.
It is quite amazing to see how since the time of Plato, people have not changed very much. I think this really speaks to how technological change does not necessarily mean evolutionary change. Unfortunately, schools taking so long to adjust will ill-prepare its students for the world they will enter.
References:
Plato, Jowett, B., & NetLibrary, I. E. C. (1990). phaedrus. Boulder, Colo;Champaign, Ill;: Project Gutenberg.
Alicia Lok-Malek
June 8, 2018 — 7:41 pm
This was a very thought provoking post. Thank you.
I agree that assessments should be multi-modal for all the reasons stated. I am not a teacher by profession. As a parent of teenagers in the public school system, my impression is that the system is so resource constrained and the teacher:student ratio does not afford teachers enough room in the context of their classrooms to do all the creative things possible.
While I philosophical agree 100% on the ideal, is it pragmatic for teachers to implement? To what degree do teachers themselves need to understand how to create alternatives to text before they can grade non-text outputs? How many versions of rubrics need to be created for one project? Does providing choice for learners increase the complexity for teachers?
michael cebuliak
June 8, 2018 — 10:13 pm
Thanks for this wonderful post. I share many of your sentiments concerning the singular emphasis on printed text as the seeming standard for textual information within much of the Language Arts curriculum.
Just as recently as two years ago, British Columbia’s examination for grade 10 English was primarily focused around the analysis of printed text and the corresponding emphasis on student representation by printed text. By viewing the grade 10 final exam alone, it appears that there was a real discord between contemporary discourse as to what constituted text and what type of text was seen as being most significant within British Columbia schools. This frustrated me to no end as I once was forced to teach to an exam that did not accurately reflect how students both made sense of their world and how they represented that understanding.
Currently, most students don’t learn of their world through books, they learn about their world through both multi modal forms of media and frankly just talking. So, I don’t think one can negate the importance of oral communication within the complex equation of how students learn about their world, and yet while the grade 10 English curriculum once acknowledged this by weighting around 30% of the course to such exploration, this emphasis was strangely entirely absent from the provincially mandated final exam. One would think that there should be equal focus on the contents of a final exam as to what is deemed important within the guiding curriculum. Further perplexing to me was the omission of accepting different means of student representation to express comprehension by means other than written text. So, while my First Nations students often struggled reading text, and were considerably more competent at analyzing oral language, they also were denied the opportunity to represent their knowledge of the text orally which was entirely absurd as this is the modality in which they are often most proficient. In short, it was totally unfair, and one could further argue that it perpetuated traditional colonial systems of power. So if printed text, is a technology, as is so often claimed, one can certainly conclude that technology is often not culturally neutral and people justifiably should have reservations about emerging technologies and their impact on all minorities and their respective cultures.
And I guess one could say, as you did, that the use of the incessant use of the photocopier in classrooms is rather worrisome as this is primarily a means of copying printed textual information, rather than anything approximating, and working with, the multimodal assault to which students are familiar.
Still, there is something to be said that the skills one learns through the analysis of one type of text, or through one modality, are equally applicable to other modalities. So if a student learns something about the relationship of content/meaning to form through the study of essays one could presumably apply the same principles and processes to modern forms of media. I often try to draw parallels in structure of printed text to, for example, visual text, amongst many others. However, with a singular focus on printed text students would be oblivious to ways in which meaning shares common elements of structure throughout various means of representation. The modalities addressed, through symbolic representations, within different types of text appeal to different people, but sometimes a better understanding of one text can help an understanding of another. As noted in Fosnot (2013) “symbolic representation actually affected thought” (location 618) and it follows that the more symbolic representations that are simultaneously presented to students the more probable it is that one may gain understanding and/or literacy skills in a medium other than that which they are most proficient as the text addressed through one modality may help one gain understanding with text addressed through another modality. This certainly can be seen in the manner in which music and visual media, such as film, are used and the way in which one medium compliments and augments the other.
However, when we solely focus on one text, like printed text, it makes it that much easier for others to manipulate our less familiar forms of text to their advantage, as was perhaps done in the US election whereby many people were obviously not media literate.
I love the idea of technological determinism and as you said, “the belief that we really have no control over the direction technology is taking us.” If text is regarded as a technology, as Ong (1982) certainly believes, it appears that we have more to worry about than just animism in that we can be controlled by the technology that others create and our inability to be critical of it.
References:
Fosnot, C. T. (2013). Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice [Kindle DX version] Retrieved from Amazon.ca
Ong, W. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.
Cathy Miyagi
June 13, 2018 — 6:15 pm
Thank you for your insightful post! An old colleague said to me once, “it’s one thing to not like technology, but it’s another thing to be afraid of it.” I think you can observe this in various other professions whereby a group of people are tasked with hiring or teaching others on what they don’t know.
I am not an educator but I think another component that should be added to the curriculum (to facilitate multimodal learning) is media literacy.
Out of sheer interest, I recently attended a Wikipedia editing tutorial led by the head archivist at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I recall during my years of undergrad studies (when Wikipedia was in its infancy), we were told not to cite Wikipedia as it’s not considered a reliable source. But is it now? Hasn’t it replaced encyclopedias in terms of usage and frequency?
I learned that Wikipedia is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization in which material is vetted (or in most cases, not even vetted at all!) by a team of four individuals in Washington. This brings me to question as readers, through which lens do we look to assess what’s valid and what’s not? As teachers or editors, who are we to decide what gets taught or published?
I think the same can be said with music consumption. One can argue that new sounds and new genres have emerged through technology (ie. synthesizer, electric violin, etc.) but the music itself hasn’t changed. We listened to Beethoven in a live orchestra, on a cassette tape, on a Sony walkman, then a discman, and now on cloud streaming services like Spotify. Using this analogy, I agree with Bolter in that “remediation involves both homage and rivalry…it’s a process of cultural competition between or amongst technologies and also makes an implicit or explicit claim to improve older technologies” (18).
I say this whilst chuckling over his reference to “World Wide Web sites”.
References
Bolter, Jay D. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. Routledge, 2001.