See the Technologies for the classroom section for information about apps for use in teaching

Educational technology is not neutral

In her first blog post of 2020 prominent ed-tech critic Audrey Watters asks 'What if ed-tech is totally inseparable from privatization, behavioral engineering, and surveillance? What if, by surrendering to the narrative that schools must be increasingly technological, we have neglected to support them in being remotely human? What if we can never address the crises of our democracies, of our planet if we keep insisting on the benevolence of tech?

Resources

The 100 Worst Ed-tech Debacles of the Decade - Audrey Watters

This site is useful: Ethical EdTech - a collaborative wiki of tools for ethical pedagogy

An Entangled Pedagogy (Tim Fawns, University of Edinburgh)

Pedagogy and technology are inseparable in an iterative and entangled design process, along with context, purpose and values.

“If tech could drive pedagogy, teachers & designers would just need to wisely choose & use tools. If pedagogy could drive tech, they would just need to wisely choose methods, & then use tools to support those methods. From an entangled view, many things need to come together”.

https://cdrg.blog/2022/08/23/entangled-pedagogy-design-and-the-messiness-of-education/?noamp=mobile

Use of institutional EdTech:

Zoom

The University has acquired an institutional licence for Zoom and it is their recommended tool for the remote teaching we are now engaged in. Privacy experts have been sounding warnings about Zoom’s privacy settings, cautioning that they’re a quagmire of over-intrusive elements that can learn far more about you than they actually need to. Here's an interesting article: Zoom is a big privacy headache. Here’s how you can lock it down. And USS Briefs, 97. 'Zoom Out: Why universities need autonomous technological capacities' is clear on the topic.

Canvas

Instructure, best known for its Canvas learning management system, announced on 4.12.2019 that it is set to be acquired by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo for approximately $2 billion. After some speculation over whether TB plan to monetise the student data captured by Canvas, latest developments suggest that Instructure are responding to pressure and will in fact not sell data, and will explore opt-out for students and staff. See this article 'What's the LMS Worth?'

An opinion pice by Davies (2020) which considers the current value of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), and associated technologies such as e-portfolios, from the perspective of both lecturers and learners concludes by highlighting the need for flexibility in the ways in which universities utilise technologies for teaching and learning.

Turnitin

Students write, and then their work gets extracted by TurnItIn, which in turn sells access to a database of student work back to schools. Or as Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris put it, 'A funny thing happened on the way to academic integrity. Plagiarism detection software, like Turnitin, has seized control of student intellectual property. While students who use Turnitin are discouraged from copying other work, the company itself can strip mine and sell student work for profit'.

Studiosity

An email earlier this year from ITS suggests it is planning to introduce Studiosity to provide 'feedback' on students' writing. As Benzie & Harper (2019) point out 'These products appear to offer universities the opportunity to outsource the task of developing student writing, however they position writing as a technical process and elide the role of social context in determining what "good" writing is... For commercial success, third-party products rely upon a simplified, generic and text-based conception of writing which disavows writing as a messy, ongoing, complex, social and situated practice. Although these products are offered and employed as a panacea, they may actually be unhelpful, because they contribute to a context for writing that is unbounded, generic, and fragmented'.

'If you're looking for examples of rampant consumerism & marketisation of HE look no further than the introduction of packages such as Studiosity. Promoting surface level writing and an 'on-demand' mindset' (Ella Turner, Twitter 10.12.19)

Use of Lecture Capture:

In an analysis of the education research literature on lecture capture Huyssen notes that 'above all, what nearly every study shows — and emphasises — is how much students like LC. "There is strong evidence", as one study puts it in its introduction, "that students place significant value on lecture recordings deployed via the Internet". Such surveys of the existing research literature give the impression that LC can only help, not hurt student learning... In fact, neither existing surveys of the literature nor the literature itself substantiates claims that adopting LC or webcasting improves overall student performance. At best, those that attempt to claim a positive effect on student achievement do so in very narrow terms. At worst, they display methodological flaws or analytical contradiction so apparent as to render their conclusions useless, if not actively deceptive'. He concludes that 'With business interests, government, university administrators, and students lined up behind LC for non-pedagogical reasons (i.e., profit, economic growth, industrial-relations control, and preference, respectively), the technology’s adoption is well beyond questions of intellectual justification. It is now a question of power' (Huyssen 2018).

Literature review:

Adrian Kirkwood & Linda Price (2014) 'Technology-enhanced learning and teaching in higher education: what is "enhanced" and how do we know? A critical literature review'. Learning, Media and Technology, 39:1, 6-36, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2013.770404

Frameworks:

'European framework for the digital competence of educators'. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/european-framework-digital-competence-educators-digcompedu

Association for Learning Technology Strategy 2017-2020

Resources:

EduTech Wiki - a resource kit for educational technology teaching and research

'Innovating Pedagogy'. A series of annual reports produced by Institute of Educational Technology and published by the Open University which explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation.

Sheffield Hallam Univeristy (n.d.). 'Teaching approaches menu, including technologies that can support them'.

Weller, M. (2020) Twenty Five Years of Ed Tech. Athabasca University Press (free to download). Weller advocates for a critical and research-based approach to new technologies, particularly in light of disinformation, the impact of social media on politics, and data surveillance trends.

Breen, P., 2018. Developing Educators for The Digital Age. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book13

Free e-book download - Haverman, L. and Sherman, S. (2017) (eds) 'Assessment, Feedback and Technology: Contexts and Case Studies'. Available at: https://www.ble.ac.uk/ebook.html

Bibliography:

Benzie, H. J. & Harper, R. (2019) 'Developing student writing in higher education: digital third-party products in distributed learning environments', Teaching in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2019.1590327

Byrne, R. (2019) Practical Ed Tech Handbook. Free to download

Davies, C. P. (2020) 'Are VLEs still worthwhile?' Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. Plymouth, UK, (18). doi: 10.47408/jldhe.vi18.577.

Edwards, M. R. & Clinton, M. E. (2019) 'A study exploring the impact of lecture capture availability and lecture capture usage on student attendance and attainment'. Higher Education 77: 3, pp 403 - 421. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0275-9

Higher Education Policy Institute. (2017) ‘Rebooting Learning for the Digital Age: What Next for Technology Enhanced Education?’ Available at: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2017/02/02/rebooting-learning-digital-age-next-technology-enhanced-higher-education/ (Accessed 25.1.2019)

Huyssen, D. (2018) 'Lecture Capture: dubious scholarship and market forces'. In USSbriefs Number 62

McMillam Cottom, T. (2019) Rethinking the Context of EdTech. Educause Review

Nordmann, E., Kuepper-Tetzel, C. E., Robson, L., Phillipson, S., Lipan, G., & Mcgeorge, P. (2018) 'Lecture capture: Practical recommendations for students and instructors'. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sd7u4

Rosell-Aguilar, F. (2016) 'User evaluation of language learning mobile applications: a case study with learners of Spanish'. In: Palalas, Agnieszka and Ally, Mohamed eds. The International Handbook of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning. Beijing: China Central Radio & TV University Press, pp. 545–581. Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/48777/1/__userdata_documents8_fra8_Documents_Research_Papers_Completed_2016a%20MALL%20Handbook_The_International_Handbook_of_MALL-Chapter-19.pdf

Watters, A. (2015) Claim Your Domain And Own Your Online Presence. Solution Tree.