Evgeny Morozov in his critique of technological solutionizm (in “To Save Everything Click Here”, Chapter 6), distinguishes between the restrictive/prohibitive technological design solutions and those, which instead offer a broader range of choices.
- What examples of the restrictive and the choice broadening types of solutions you know from your professional and learning experiences, or have encountered while working with educational technologies?
As has been suggested by others who have posted this week, after reading this article, it became very apparent to me that there are many future challenges that lay ahead surrounding the issues of anonymity and security when accessing and utilizing the affordances of the web in everyday educational settings. In British Columbia, and in my school district, we were recently required to take Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy training. Although I would argue that this training was not as extensive as it needs to be and as mandatory (we basically had to walk ourselves through a webinar and sign off that we had accessed it), it did give me some food for thought. I do see the merits of having the restrictive access abilities to only be using certain educational technologies with students. It protects not only their rights and freedoms, but ensures that educators are aware of how to ensure anonymity and privacy are protected.
However important these restrictive abilities are (having to use technologies that store information in local servers only), one might also argue that in order for the experience for our students to be authentic and engaging, there need be an opening up of more broader parameters for educational technology use. How this is to be done, remains to be see. I know from personal experience from those I work with, there are many conversations when the topic of using technologies in learning are brought up, that many will ultimately choose to forego the affordances that these technologies have because they are too restrictive in their use or they use these technologies with their students anyways. While my school and many throughout our district have implemented Google Apps for Education and the subsequent platforms that are available (Google Classroom), this process was a very lengthy and arduous process for our technology implementation team. Given that we are now utilizing GAFE in our classrooms, students and parents alike had to sign consent forms that let parents know that their child’s information was to possibly be stored outside of the province. What I would be curious to see now when students login to their GAFE accounts, how Google has altered through their complex systems of algorithms the search characteristics that appear for students. I know that I see how Google alters my suggestions for Youtube videos for instance.