Information technology in schools: Should the product be marked hazardous?

Abstract

One of the things that make some tools hazardous is that when you plug them
in you have considerable power in your hands. False moves and you may
lose a body party. ICT, I argue in this paper, is such a tool and yes it should
be marked hazardous. How powerful? Why hazardous?
The power and the hazard go together. By means of ICT we can do more
quickly and comprehensively what we could only do more slowly before. And
if aspects of what we were doing before were problematic, they will be even
more so thanks to the amplification provided by ICT. The amplifying power
of ICT is one of the central themes of this paper. If instruction is routine and
boring, computers can make it much more so. If products for schools were
driven by commercial considerations before, they can be much more so with
ICT - the investments are much higher. If schools had ways of monitoring
teachers and children before, computers enhance that many times. If
technologies were thought to drive what happens in schools before, ICT
magnifies that potential many times.
In short, computers allow us to do what we did before only more so - so if we
did not do well before IT, we may well do worse with it. Or we may do
better. We need to keep these questions open. The biggest danger is that in the
rush to conform to visions of ICT we may stop asking them. We need a
dialogue. The desire for dialogue has, however, frustrated many ICT
advocates who see it as a form of resistance to change (Ameral, 1983; Papert,
2001; Yelland, 2002). From a philosophical point of view, we need a dialogue
that considers the techniques of practices and the goods that such practices
seek, as Macintyre (1981) and Strike (nd) point out. Practices involve skills
and techniques - which do not once and for all define the practice and which
over time change the practice as the goals of practice - in this case teaching -
change over time.
In the first part of this paper I look at how ICT has come to play such a
dominant role in schooling. Over the last 20 years we see a continuous press
to adopt this technology. What we do not see is a debate about the plusses
and minuses of computers in schools based on experience. This is a cause for
concern. In the second part of the paper I look at what happened in schools
over this time and the beginnings of concerns about ICT. In the third part of
the paper I look at the response teachers might make to ICT as it evolves.