During the centurial media debate between Clark and Kozma, we were students already experiencing changes in teaching methodology and media evolution. We feel a deep connection to Kozma’s statement that, “Educational technology is a design science (Simon, 1981, Glaser, 1976), not a natural science” (Kozma, 1994, p. 2). Educational Technology is not the same as physics or chemistry, where we can perform experiments and gather data. This current era has seen its share of educational experiments, leaving us with more questions than answers.
We navigated our reflecting thought process between Clark and Kozma perspectives and views from two techno-deterministic contemporary news of two different target groups: autistic children and higher education students.
https://www.thestar.com/business/mars/2021/09/21/education-has-just-been-transformed-overnight.html
In the recent Toronto Star article above, the author described the current growing gaps in literacy and numeracy because of a lack of readiness in schools to effectively move to online learning, consequently causing societal losses. She discussed companies like Gepeto that use technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) to help kids with autism and leverage their research to add other digital tools to their toolkit. Like Gepeto, many teachers were tech-aware, but unprepared for a 100% digital teaching environment. While we agree that, as Mann (2001) said, “Instructional technology only works for some kids, with some topics, and under some conditions – but that is true of all pedagogy. There is nothing that works for every purpose, for every learner, and all the time” (p. 241), we no longer have the choice of all of the historically available instructional methods. Also, the parallel rise of social media as the penultimate cool media, requiring little to no completion (e.g. participation) by learners (McLuhan, 1964), yet delivering much (mis)information by reinforcing existing anxieties while people doomscroll (Watercutter, 2020) has shown that we need to close the completion gap so we can get some learning done. This completion gap is what we believe Kozma (1994) predicted when he warned against not having “forged a relationship between media and learning” (p. 7), so we would not “find ourselves on the sidelines of our own game (Reigeluth, 1989)” (Kozma, 1994, p. 7). “he would agree that our lack of integration of media and learning has been overlooked”? On the other hand, we believe that Clark would likely say that, since the majority of our society has adopted virtual applications for learning (e.g. video-based computer use), this is the new “usual uses argument” (Clark, 1994, paragraph 8, line 1) for our age and we can and have gone beyond the former usual uses of this medium. He would conclude, and we do agree that we now have a huge social experiment that we can use to design the studies that he called for in 1994.
Kozma’s prediction of lack of connection between media and learning and Clark’s collective virtual adoption for learning applications have both relevance in the next techno-deterministic news from LinkedIn that we talk about here. Keep reading!
References:
Clark, R. E. (1983). Reconsidering research on learning from media. Review of Educational Research, 53(4), 445-459.
Clark, R. E. (1994). Media will never influence learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21-29.
Kozma, R. B. (1994). Will media influence learning: Reframing the debate. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 7-19.
Mann, D. (2001). Documenting the Effects of Instructional Technology, A Fly-Over of Policy Questions. In W. F. Heineke & L. Blasi (Eds.), Research methods for educational technology ; v. 1: Methods of evaluating educational technology (pp. 239249). Greenwich, Conn.: Information Age Pub.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. MCB University Press, 9(5). https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
Reigeluth, C. (1989). Educational technology at the crossroads: New mindsets and new directions. Educational Technology Research and Development, 37(1), 67-80.
Watercutter, A. (n.d.). Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health. Wired. Retrieved September 25, 2021, from https://www.wired.com/story/stop-doomscrolling/
Hi Corie,
Your comment “many teachers were tech-aware, but unprepared for a 100% digital teaching environment” made me reflect on how we use tech in our regular lives and how those behaviours could transition to a different task. For me, tech is, for the most part, a social or entertainment resource or strictly for learning or work. Where you have related the Kozma’s notion of creating the relationship between learning and media, do you think that part of the challenge is developing, marketing, and optimizing a medium for both learning and entertainment purposes? Both Gail and Luis’s and Alisha and Angela’s posts mention the Tiktok app, which is popular but likely not for its educational content. What would need to happen for it to break away from this image and becoming a learning app as well?
Thanks for a great question Jolee! I found McLuhan’s work on cool and hot media really interesting. I only dabbled a tiny bit during this assignment and am looking forward to reading more.
What he talked about for “cool media” was stuff that you don’t have to do as much for, like social media. Come to think of it, TikTok is a great example of this, as is the “doomscrolling” I mentioned. It’s simply consuming what’s there without consciously connecting it to learning or education, and I think we’re really seeing the results of many years of working towards this sort of consumption now, with all the misinformation that’s going around.
If you check out the link to the other half of our blog post for this assignment, I think we managed to connect this idea to adults and career management. It answers your question really well.
What will it take to break away? I feel sort of negative in saying it, but we might be too far down that cool media road. It’s going to be a long hard road for educators to get something sexier going that will be more attractive than late night Facebook or TikTok scrolling. Like we said in the other half of our post, it will “will create false hopes for students, fooling them into an app without true learning”.