The ‘new’ connectivities of digital education

EIL

ELWYN

Institute of Education – University of London, UK

This book chapter will appear in the Sage ‘

International Handbook of the Sociology of Education’

edited by Michael Apple, Stephen Ball and Luis Armand Gandin (2009)

Reference as:

Selwyn, N. (2009) ‘The ‘new’ connectivities of digital education’ in Apple, M., ArmandGandin, L. and Ball, S. (Eds) ‘

International Handbook of the Sociology of Education’

London,Routledge

The ‘new’ connectivities of digital education

THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CONNECTIVITY

The notion of (dis)connection underpins the organization of all aspects of human life, from the biological and social, to the economic and technological. As such, connectivity has been a centralelement of societal change throughout history. Key developments in corporeal travel andcommunications technology, for example, underpinned a steady intensification of theconnectedness of everyday life throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Innovationssuch as the telegraph, railway engine and airplane were associated with fundamental shifts in theconnections between people, places, institutions and information. Yet it could be argued that the past thirty years have been subject to a set of especially accelerated and intense shifts inconnectivity. A distinct ‘imperative to connect’ is acknowledged to underpin recent geo-political,economic and technological shifts of globalization, deriving in no small part from rapid advancesin connectivity fostered by information and telecommunications technologies (Green

et al

. 2005).In particular, the connectivities afforded by the internet have been fore-grounded in popular andacademic accounts of late-modern societal change in terms of the ‘network society’, ‘shrinkingworld’, ‘digital age’ and so on. With these recent articulations of connectivity in mind, the presentchapter examines the bearing of internet connectivity on the processes and practices of contemporary education

.This chapter argues that technology-enhanced connectivity merits close consideration fromsociologists hoping to make sense of the apparently fast-changing nature of education in the(late)modern age. In particular it argues that careful thought needs to be paid to the

networked

connectivities that digital technologies such as the internet now afford – i.e. the interconnection of people, objects, organizations and information regardless of space, place or time. As Kevin Kelly(1995, p.201) noted at the beginning of the internet’s rise to mainstream prominence, “the centralact of the coming era is to connect everything to everything … all matter, big and small, will belinked into vast webs of networks at many levels”. The subsequent integration of internetconnectivity into many aspects of everyday life has prompted popular and political commentatorsto proclaim networked ‘connectedness’ as an ‘essential feature’ of contemporary society (Rifkin2000). Even within the relatively sober terms of academic sociology, the notion of networkedconnectivity is now being touted as an ‘organizing framework in which all institutions,knowledge and relationships are ordered’ (Cavanagh 2007, p.24). So if these claims are to be believed, what are the implications for education in the early twenty-first century? The remainder of this chapter considers how digital technologies such as the internet are shaping theconnectivities of education and learning, and in so doing attempts to unpack the variousdiscourses of novelty and transformation that often pervade discussions of education andtechnology. In particular the chapter seeks to challenge the dominant orthodoxy within theeducation community that internet connectivity is somehow leading to new and improved formsof education. Having laid out the basis for a critique of connectivity, I conclude by offering somesuggestions for future sociological investigations of education and learning in an era of ever-increasing internet use.

THE TECHNOLOGIES AND CONDITIONS OF NETWORKED CONNECTIVITY

Whilst the concept of connection has long been a central element of computer science andinformation systems thinking, the proliferation of the worldwide web during the 1990s and 2000shas placed networked connectivity at the heart of contemporary technology design, developmentand use. Using the worldwide web via the internet is now part of the fabric of everyday life for many citizens in developed countries – with a present global population of around 1.3 billionusers soon set to treble once the capacity for wireless internet access is extended to the world’s3.6 billion mobile telephone users (Castells 2008). The internet (

inter

national

net

work) wasdesigned to be a global network of connected computerized devices that can communicate witheach other and exchange data via a series of software protocols. Unlike previous forms of networked computing the architectural logic of the internet was predicated upon “theinterconnectedness of all elements” (Dreyfus 2001, p.10), a condition described by technologistsas a ‘rhizomatic’ connectivity akin to the underground stem systems of plants whose roots andstems are both separate

and

collective. As with these rhizomatic plants, every point on theinternet has the potential to be a recipient

and

provider of information. Perhaps more than anyother aspect of its design, it is this interconnected logic that is the defining technical feature of theinternet.The internet-based applications of the 1990s such as email and downloading informationresources from web pages marked a significant step-change in computer users’ sense of connection. The subsequent wave of ‘web 2.0’ tools during the 2000s then led to what manytechnologists describe as a ‘mass socialization’ of internet connectivity (see O’Reilly 2005,Shirky 2008). Unlike the ‘broadcast’ mode of information exchange that characterized internetuse in the 1990s, web 2.0 applications such as

Wikipedia

Facebook

and

YouTube

were predicatedupon connectivity to openly shared digital content that was authored, critiqued, used and re-configured by a mass of users - what is termed a condition of ‘many-to-many’ connectivity asopposed to a ‘one-to-many’ mode of transmission. Most recently, interest is growing in thedevelopment of ‘semantic web’ technologies that seek to augment individuals’ interactions withthe internet via machine-provided artificial reasoning, therefore fostering and supporting‘intelligent’ forms of connectivity (see Ohler 2008). Whilst differing in terms of technical design,all these forms of internet use share a common sense of individual users being connected toany

thing

and any

one

else on the internet. In this sense, the individual internet user can be seen assubject potentially to an ‘always-on’ state of connectivity.Of particular sociological interest is how these technical capabilities have informed a range of claims concerning the social nature of internet connectivity. This is perhaps most evident in thewidely-held belief in the internet somehow being able to ‘liberate’ the user from social structureand hierarchy, boosting individual freedoms and reducing centralized controls over what can andwhat cannot be done. For many commentators the various forms of internet connectivitydescribed above imply a fundamental reconfiguration of the social. At a macro level of analysis,for example, the ‘flattening out’ of hierarchies and the introduction of ‘networking logic’ to theorganization of social relations is seen to support the open (re)configuration of society andcorresponding under-determination of organizational structure (e.g. Friedman 2007, Castells1996). Conversely, a micro-level ‘sense’ of connectivity is seen to boost the individualization of meaning-making and action. Here it is argued that the contemporary condition of enhancedconnectivity between individuals, places, products and services has prompted a resurgence of more ‘primitive’, pre-industrial ways of life. For instance, the internet has long been portrayed asrekindling a sense of tribalism, nomadism and communitarianism (D'Andrea 2006, Rheingold1994). A range of claims have also been made regarding the role of the internet in providing newopportunities for informal exchanges of knowledge, expertise and folk-wisdom (Sproull and