Dr Jamie Manolev, whose research examines how education is mediated by power, including in ways that produce disadvantage and inequality, says while edtech clearly presents new opportunities for engaging students, supporting personalised learning, improving access and streamlining school processes, most tools are data-hungry, capturing information during every interaction from lessons and assessments to communication and monitoring.
This risks, he says, turning students into datapoints, limiting their potential as human beings, and raises concerns about student wellbeing, privacy, and surveillance.
“Furthermore, while edtech is designed to level the playing field – especially for students in rural or remote areas – barriers like internet access, data bias, and cost can still leave many behind,” Manolev says.
The University of South Australia academic says a lack of transparency around edtech raises real concerns, and he believes children should not just be taught ‘with’ technologies, but ‘about’ them, which centres on the knowledge and competencies of each teacher, who should be supported to understand the inner workings of the programs they use.
“That’s probably for me, one of the most important ways we can address this issue, is to educate our students about how these platforms work and what they’re about,” Manolev tells EducationHQ.
“It requires teachers to have that knowledge as well, and it’s through the teachers that we can make that work happen.”
Manolev says this means considering how the tools work, for what purposes they are being used, and whose interests are being served through the use of these technologies.
It’s important that teachers query what data is being produced by the platforms or technologies, how that data is being collected, where it’s going, and what values are embedded in those technologies, he says.
Dr Manolev says edtech products have flooded classrooms worldwide, outpacing regulation and research. “As a result, many tools have been adopted without understanding their long-term educational or ethical impacts,” he says.
“Also what ways of learning are embedded in these technologies, and how that’s reinforced by their use,” he says.
“The way that happens in the school and the way it’s used then inadvertently shapes the way teachers and students think, and their behaviour, because the technologies, through their design, encourage particular ways of thinking, particular regimes of learning.”
Manolev is one of a group of international researchers who are urging a critical rethink of digital technology in schools, warning that many classroom tools are collecting student data in ways that could threaten their privacy and wellbeing.
Their work has been collated in a new book titled Handbook of Children and Screens, pulled together by British researcher, Dr Velislava Hillman.
Hillman asked colleagues and researchers to each contribute a chapter which raised some of the consequences that they have identified in research on edtech over the last few years.
Including experts from the University of South Australia and the London School of Economics and Political Science, the group say the hidden workings of edtech make it difficult for schools and teachers to know what happens to the data they collect behind the scenes about children.
Hillman says teachers need greater support to understand how education technologies work, including how data is collected and used, so they can make informed decisions in the classroom.
“We need to move beyond the idea that more tech is always better,” she says.
“Stronger regulation is essential to protect students and ensure that technology supports their learning without compromising their privacy or wellbeing.
“We must prioritise children’s interests to safeguard their future in a safe and ethical way, in an increasingly digitised school environment.”
Not surprisingly, Manolev urges educators to exercise vigilance when engaging wildly popular platforms such as GoGuardian, Gaggle and ClassDojo.
Indeed, his PhD research investigated the ways in which ClassDojo is influencing contemporary education, in particular school discipline practices and pedagogies, stripping away all nuance and fuelling student competition in a worrying way.
“Without even thinking about all the professional development that might need to happen to help teachers in these areas, they can even just think about, are these platforms requiring teachers to surveil students extensively?” he says.
“Are they requiring teachers to use data produced about students in ways that might shame students or pick out particular groups of students and frame them in ways that are kind of unhelpful? These kinds of things.
“I think they’re not that difficult to recognise, and I think teachers do this stuff in a lot of the other work that they do - so it just requires them to think about, ‘is the technology pushing us to do these things when normally we wouldn’t do that?’”
Speaking to EducationHQ last year, Michael Kaissis, head of PDHPE at St Charbel’s College in Sydney, said as a sector, our educators have been fooled by the vacuous claims of tech companies and have relinquished control of classrooms to those who care only about lining their own pockets.
Kaissis we should see the evidence behind each edtech product handed down by a third external independent party.
Instead he said educators are blindly – and dangerously – lapping up the word of marketing gurus and so-called edtech ‘experts’ spruiking their shiny wares.
“It’s becoming increasingly common that we are just throwing technology into our classrooms and we’re not really sure about if it’s effective, or if it’s not effective, or if the results are mixed,” Kassis said.
Encouragingly, Mandolev says a really useful tool that’s emerging is being worked on by a colleague at the University of Sydney, Professor Kal Gulson, whose team has been developing an assessment toolkit for education technologies.
“I’m not sure whether that’s been released yet, but it looks really, really useful for teachers and schools and probably education departments to adopt in terms of assessing edtech technologies, platforms and whether they’ll be useful - not just in terms of kind of the harms around privacy and surveillance, but it also looking at the quality of education produced through these platforms.
“That’s a very exciting new development that’s happening from the education research field.”
