What sort of people and institutions gain special economic and political power from this new technology? ~ Neil Postman

This question is very pertinent in an age where businesses are even more interested and bent on having a say with regards to what goes into education. Has education been sold to corporate or political interests?

While ICT has long been lauded for its democratizing effect, meaning, making education more readily available to the masses, what needs to be ask is the kind of education that the masses have been given access to. Has ICT moved the decision for the contents of a curriculum from teachers who are in the field or to instructional designers sitting somewhere in an office but away from where the teaching takes place? How much flexibility is there for the teachers to adapt their teaching when the curriculum is even more today defined and assessed by a “virtual” someone? Is the institution of the teacher under attack? Is it then a coincident that in this ICT era, teachers are seen to be even more easily replaceable especially in American schools  today? Is that the start of the trend to come globally?

Even at the tertiary level, university professors have expressed concern at how ICT has meant that “learning” has largely gone online. Has this trend strengthened the hands of the bureaucrats who see the economic bottom line as the most important yardstick for the buffet of courses on offer? ICT has made online learning relatively cheap and universities are rushing to offer such courses. Will ICT result in more automation to keep costs down in the “learning” process? Will university lecturers and professors be regarded as mere consultants an instructional design process despite promotion of “blended learning”?

This emphasis on revenues earned will (and has) attract the interest of private conglomerates to offer “education” as a product to be sold.  They in turn will only sell packages that will fit into the economic needs of the country. So who keeps an eye on what is sold to the masses as “education” especially when the political masters have chosen to defer to business interests?

Will the advent of ICT use in education also emphasize the dominance of science and technology as the final arbiter of knowledge? What is the implication of this on what is to be taught in our schools and universities? Will it only further de-legitimise non-scientific institutions in the long run?

However, there could be some positives. Traditional political institutions will have difficulty also circumscribing what is being taught. Censorship becomes all the more difficult. While political authorities can snuff out temporarily the global connections that ICT affords, they will not be able to do so permanently as seen in the Arab Spring uprisings, especially as seen in the example of Egypt.

ICT allows anyone with access to it to turn to “alternative” sources of learning. The wired world allows anyone to choose from a plethora of offerings from anywhere in the world. The officially-approved offerings in brick-and-mortar schools where socialization of political values can take place, can be bypassed. Learning can become truly personal through these personal learning networks as opposed to being a reflection of the demands of political leaders.

Neil Postman’s six questions that we should pose to ourselves whenever we want to introduce new technology is to encourage a dialogue with technology. This is to prevent us from going into an unthinking headlong rush to adapt anything that is technologically “advanced”. In my first post in this series, I alluded to the way the Amish people view technology as highlighted by Howard Rheingold. While we do not advocate a lifestyle like the Amish people, we can learn invaluable lessons from them about keeping technology in a more balanced and correct perspective.

End of series on Neil Postman’s “Six Questions”

In one of my posts, I highlighted Howard Rheingold’s post about the Amish and their relationship with technology. He suggested that instead of a mad rush to bring technology into our lives, we should have an ongoing conversation with technology. The cultural critic, Neil Postman, also has a similar view about technology. Postman in fact tries to make this conversation a little clearer by suggesting that we think about six questions that we should ask when a new technology is introduced. The six questions are:

• What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
• Whose problem is it?
• What new problems might be created by solving the original problem?
• Which people and what institutions will be most seriously harmed by this new technology?
• What changes in language are being forced by these new technologies?
• What sort of people and institutions gain special economic and political power from this new technology?

In my view, the questions are meant to prevent us from rushing into implementing or using any new technology. In the field of education, these questions become all the more important because it is going to impact and area of human endeavor, that is, education, that is clearly supposed to be designed for the future. As an educator who had been part of Singapore’s well-known MasterPlan for IT in Education (MPITE) team, I have had an abiding interest in the use of ICT in schools. However, Rheingold’s and Postman’s suggestions for a conversation with ICT, have both given me cause to reflect on the use of ICT in education. I will be sharing my thoughts on the questions raised by Postman in relation to how ICT is supposed to be used in education. So do look out for them. In the meantime, click on the book cover to read Postman’s “Technopoly”.

Several years ago, I found this article, “Look Who’s Talking”, on WIRED, by the web visionary, Howard Rheingold. Recently I revisited the article and I still think it makes for fascinating reading. What strikes me most about the article is that here is a web visionary, perhaps the first man to coin the term “web communities”, talking about a group of people who are often seen to be modern-day Luddites (which they are not). Rheingold is fascinated with how the Amish leaders’ approach to deciding what technology is to be used by the community.

What Rheingold discovered then was that the Amish were not anti-technology but they were very mindful of the impact of technology on their community especially with regards to their “togetherness”. According to Rheingold, the primary question that the Amish leaders ask when discussing the use of a new technology in the Amish communities is “Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?” To the Amish community, nothing must damage this principle. So in the Amish communities you see brand new state-of-the-art gas-fired barbecue pits but no cars or internet. Barbecue pits goes down well with the Amish because it encourages family and community togetherness while cars will lead members further away.

When Rheingold started to find out about the Amish use of technology he had a few questions in mind. He wanted to know:

What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance (of new technology), as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?

I think the questions above are valid for most modern societies, like Singapore too, that have been enthralled by science. Rheingold’s questions has me taking another look at how Singapore has been approaching the issue of ICT use for education. I would be the first to admit that I am an unabash proponent of the use of ICT for education. Of course, Rheingold’s questions goes beyond schools only. But after reading about the new ICT initiative, FutureSchool@Singapore, by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore, about using new technologies to help students learn, I wonder often if we are moving “ahead” without deep thought about how these technologies are going to affect us, more specifically, the students in Singapore schools. Technology is often “unleashed” upon us. We are expected to be technology-conversant but we seldom seriously conduct conversations about our use of technologies. As Rheingold puts it:

I never expected the Amish to provide precise philosophical yardsticks that could guide the use of technological power. What drew me in was their long conversation with their tools. We technology-enmeshed “English” (the Amish description of the non-Amish American world) don’t have much of this sort of discussion. And yet we’ll need many such conversations, because a modern heterogeneous society is going to have different values, different trade-offs, and different discourses. It’s time we start talking about the most important influence on our lives today.

I came away from my journey with a question to contribute to these conversations: If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?

Today, we just hurry to get enmeshed. Are we behaving Borg-like and just assimilate everything that we come across? Are we also in too much in a hurry with adopting technologies for education without considering their real impact? What do we become if we continue with this Borg-like behavior?