"Social Software, Personal Learning Environments and the Future of Teaching andLearning"

Graham Attwell, Pontydysgu and Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick,graham10@mac.com

The study of the use of new technology in education is complicated. Especially when it comes topredicting the future. Indeed reading the various discourses would lead one to believe that either education is entering a brave new world of technology enabled learning and knowledge for all or that technology and the internet is ‘dumbing down’ education with potentially disastrous results.Many accounts of the changes in education tend to be driven form a technologically deterministviewpoint. As Josephine Green (2005) points out “given the West’s love affair with a rationalisticand technological approach, and contrary to historical evidence, too often attention and emphasisis given to the technological and economic aspects of change and not to the social aspects.Taken to the extreme, a technological and economic determinism drives the assumption that thefuture will arise out of a continuum of technology roadmaps and market forces. Put simply: thattechnology and economics determines the future.”However contextualist approaches to the history of technology have emphasised the socialdimension of technology implementation. Staudenmaier (1985) says a contextualist approachshows "the internal design of specific technologies as dynamically interacting with a complex of economic, political, and cultural factors" Such approaches emphasize the particularities of thesocial and historical conditions in which different technologies have developed (Pannabeker,1995).Within education, Georgia Kontogiannopoulou-Polydorides (1996) has suggested “the adoptionof educational technology is shaped by and shapes the educational paradigm.” She goes on tosay “The characteristics which lie in the core of what is named as educational paradigm arecurriculum content, teachers discourse and teaching practices, and decision making processes.”Even accepting a wider discourse in terms of examining the interaction between educational andpedagogic practice and Technology Enhanced Learning is open to controversy. Enthusiasts for the possibilities of new technologies in learning have often championed a movement towardsstudent centred and enquiry based constructivist pedagogies. Yet as Ivo Hartmann (2006) pointsout, many “old fashioned” teachers would subscribe to an idea that knowledge is constructedbased on the learner's previous experiences and knowledge and so an interaction between one'scurrent knowledge and new ideas or situations.What is perhaps surprising is that the educational paradigm has been so successful in shapingthe adoption of educational technology. Thus successive waves of technology have beendeveloped to support the management of existing schooling systems with the development of Virtual Management Systems and Management Information Systems. Even in the pedagogic

sphere the development of ‘virtual classrooms’ has tended towards supporting and evenreinforcing traditional pedagogic approaches and teacher-learner relationships – albeit whilstextending the potential for access to classroom based education. It is little surprise that theleading commercial educational technology platform is named ‘Blackboard’.The adoption and effective of any innovation use is not solely a function of the affordances of newtools (Rogers, 2003) (Bijker, 1999) (cited in Anderson, 2008). Innovation is socially constructedand constrained by the social context and the individuals who are offered opportunity to use theinnovation (Fulk, 1993). In seeking to explain the relationships between learning and technologyand the social construction and context of educational innovation it is necessary to explore further the relationship between the educational paradigms and other social and economic paradigms. Incomparing Vocational Education and Training systems, Attwell and Hughes (1999) said “What israrely taken into account is the syntax which exists between the paradigms, a syntax which isdetermined by the culture which generated it and is as culturally specific as the rules of grammar are language specific. The syntagmatic relationship (or syntagm) which defines the way in whichone paradigm articulates with another is, for the most part, ignored but it is here that thedivergences across member states are located.”It may be that a better understanding of Technology Enhanced Education can be understood inlooking at the relation between educational paradigms and the culture which generated andsupports it. Furthermore the potential for shaping of new technologies of learning may be moreeasily understood in the changes in economies and wider social structures and in particular in theways in which technology is being used outside education than at looking at technology formwithin the educational paradigm.This paper will look at social software and the future of education. The term social software isused in many different contexts. In education Terry Anderson (2005) describes it as “networkedtools that support and encourage individuals to learn together while retaining individual controlover their time, space, presence, activity, identity and relationship." In particular the paper willexamine the potential of social software and Personal Learning Environments as both a disruptivetechnology (Anderson, 2008) and as a response to changes in the way we create and exchangeknowledge within society.We are aware that concepts as 'information' or 'knowledge' are mostly taken for granted(reference) and will explore different understandings of knowledge development and their implications for curriculum. However, given the importance of school – or schooling – for education we will first look at the history of schooling and its relation to the economy and toproduction. We will also briefly examine critiques of the schooling system. We will go on to look atpressures on the schooling system resulting from the changing forms of production and economyin the present period of intense technological change on the one hand, and the changing ways in

which people are using technology for communication and knowledge development. In the finalsection we will examine the different technologies which may influence future educationaldevelopment and will suggest that the Personal Learning environment may herald a profoundchange in education systems and in the relationships between educations systems andinstitutions and learning.We are aware of the danger of technological (and historical) determinism in such an analysis andwould prefer to rest on the idea that technologies are an enabling factor opening up differentpossibilities for the social shaping of societies.

Models of schooling

In a previous paper (Attwell, 2008) I wrote that the present ‘industrial’ model of schooling evolvedto meet the needs and form of a particular phase of industrial development. At least in the UK,prior to the industrial revolution of the 1840s, schooling was the preserve of the privileged few,based on class and wealth. Parents hired tutors for home education for their sons and (less often)daughters. The church provided what schooling there was. Indeed until as late as the nineteenthcentury, all university fellows and many schoolmasters were expected or required to be in holyorders. Schoolmistresses typically taught "the three Rs" (reading, writing and 'rithmatic) in dameschools, charity schools, or informal village schools (Boushel, Fawcett and Selwyn, 2000).However, the majority of young people had little formal schooling. That is not to say they did notlearn. But, learning was through what we would now call work based or practice based learning.In a predominantly rural economy this took the form of helping in the family smallholdings from anearly age. Apprenticeship was the main way of learning in the mainly town based craft trades.Occupational choice was (as it still is often today, (Chevalier al, 2004) based on parentaloccupation.The industrial revolution imposed new requirements in terms of skills and knowledge – inparticular the need to extend general education to much wider layers of society. In 1893 theElementary Education (School Attendance) Act raised the school leaving age to 11 and in 1902the state took over education, through the organisation of Local Education Authorities and theprovision of funding for schools from taxation. It is notable that there was opposition to thesereforms based variously on the idea that this would make the labouring classes ‘think’ and couldlead to revolt and that handing children to a central authority could lead to indoctrination. Thesereforms were based on a perceived need for Britain to remain competitive in the world by being atthe forefront of manufacture and improvement.

Some of the speeches and documents of the time bear an uncanny resemblance to debatesaround the European Union’s Lisbon Declaration3