Rossella Magli
Laboratoire d'Anthropologie de la Communication
University of Liège
"When we talk about computers in education, we should not talk about a machine having an effect. We should be talking about the opportunity offered us, by this computer presence, to rethink what learning is all about, to rethink education".
(Seymour Papert)
Where do we come from and where are we going
?
The idea behind MAILBOX was initially the product of two people
who extensively attended the European arena of R&D in
communication and information technologies in school environments.
These two people were often puzzled and somehow disappointed with the
dominant approach, which seemed to be largely inspired by a lot of
wishful thinking supported by implicitly prescriptive questions.
These questions could not but lead to pre-formatted answers ("yes, by
using computers, learning is more effective"; "certainly, computers
make learning cost-effective"; "space and time barriers are
overcome"; "wider access = extended democracy"... Or the contrary, it
does not matter).
We felt we could not be alone in our uneasiness in front of this
awkward research: a research so miraculous, that it could produce
results even before any implementation in real settings had taken
place. We formed a European team, grouping people from different
backgrounds: anthropology, psychology, economics, political sciences.
The challenge was clear: to come out of the deadlock that
self-referential approaches had generated and to open a breach in the
consensus developed around computers and schools, be it glorification
or demonization. The task was difficult: to formulate new questions
which would allow to have a better understanding on the short and
long term dynamics implied by the use of ICT in specific school
environments and in specific cultural contexts. We felt that the
people concerned, the teachers and the children, should not be
excluded from the process negotiating the priorities in the domain.
School has been for too long an abstract concept, a flag waved for
opportunistic reasons, a misconceived world.
We felt that it was time for the implicitly prescriptive questions to leave the floor to an explicitly descriptive approach. Only an ethnographic method could bring some fresh air to the stagnating domain: going to the field, observing the activities and the interactions taking place, participating to them, reporting them, eliciting the subjective perspective of the observer, trying to restore the liveliness of the real context. Almost a literary work. And then, sharing the data in our composite, multi-cultural and multi-national partnership, in spite of the difficulties derived from comparing culturally different settings observed by "indigenous" researchers.
There are a few questions we would like to share with the audience. To us, they seem to have a relevance for the decision-making platform concerning ICT in school. These questions presuppose the awareness that school is first and foremost a place of socialisation and that there are learning achievements that transcend the explicit curriculum. In school, children learn not only to read, write, count. They not only learn practical skills for the labour market, as a new trend would like to stress. They also learn how to become individuals and members of society, they learn behaviours, they learn values. This is what we call implicit learning (and what John Dewey called collateral learning). Do technologies affect this latent process? And, if so how? That was the starting point of our investigation. It led us into new vistas, and new challenges for the field: the relationship of the child with the self and others; learning "generating schemes of practices", as opposed to learning contents; the status of error and uncertainty; the question of trust between teachers and children; the status of pleasure and play in school; the functions of ritual in electronic communication; the relationship between magic and real; and, finally, the power relations between actors in school.
My presentation will focus on two statements commonly raised when computers in school are at stake and on the way our observations can change the perspective. Our data show that the way these assumptions were formulated actually concealed the essence of the experience and the complexity underlying it:
Commonplace 1
E-mail correspondence is good for learning foreign languages and intercultural communication.
Commonplace 2
Teachers are the main vectors of the resistance to change and
therefore to computer implementation in schools. They need to be
trained technologically in order to become willing supporters of
change.
These common assumptions share a vision of the computer in school as
the primum movens of the pedagogical and organisational changes
taking place. That is: you put a computer in a classroom and someone
able to operate it and everything will change: pupils will become
motivated, parents will become partners, knowledge will circulate,
intercultural communication will flow, social differences will be
abolished... Or, the symmetrical belief: computers will bring
isolation, moral turpitude, disturb family relations, upset the
balance of powers between teachers and pupils...
What we see here at work is what we might call an essentialist
vision of the computer: it is as if the computer had magical
properties in itself, either divine or satanic. The computer thus
enters the realm of the supernatural and is best attended by priests
in specific temples.
Needless to say, our observations make us doubt of the intrinsic
qualities of computers. We are prone to suggest what we might call a
contextualist conception of computers in education: in order to
understand what computers are all about, we need to look at them in
the very many contexts of their very many uses. Computers are never
by themselves: they are always to be seen in relationship not only
with the user they face, but also within their social, organisational
and ideological settings. To illustrate with a very basic example:
when computers are locked up in a special room and require either a
permit or an authorised supervisor to be accessed, the relationship
that students will entertain with them (and with their teacher, and
with the school, and with their peers, and with the adults' world,
and with the "forbidden", and...) will most probably be very
different from those which can be developed when they are freely
accessible.
In our research, we did not try so much to assess the effects of the
introduction of computers into schools, than we were observing the
actual usage and gratification allowed by computers. It happens that
most present day usage of computers in schools are far ahead of the
intellectualised questions we ask about them. There is a gap between
the fluid experiences run by trials and errors in schools across
Europe today and the usual theoretical and pragmatic questions
addressed to computers in school. The gap is so big that only a major
leap in conceptual imagination combined with a very focused (and
modest) empirical attitude will allow us to understand the game.
Text presented at the :
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