Co-Written by Jessica Aigner and Andrea Evans Smith
Clark and Kozma represent two polarized opinions regarding technology in education, and while technology has advanced in leaps and bounds since their respective articles were published in 1994 (Clark’s Media will Never Influence Learning and Kozma’s Will Media Influence Learning: Reframing the Debate), the discussion remains relevant today. Even while technology is now more common in the education landscape than it was at the time of Clark and Kozma’s articles, we can still use their debate to question what increase in value or impact educational technologies deliver which could not be attained with other mediums or methods. A review of two techno-deterministic articles from each perspective highlights how the debate of media influence on learning is still alive almost 30 years since Clark and Kozma’s initial debate, and new educational technologies and instructional strategies should be assessed critically in terms of their potential value and educational impact.
One such educational technology which we assessed for its bold claims, to determine where their potential value and educational impact would fall in Clark and Kozma’s media influence debate, is the enterprise video software company Vidizmo. Like many Software as a Service (SAAS) companies they publish whitepapers to help EdTech decision-makers justify the return on investment (ROI) to implement their solutions. We reviewed their paper Why Video is the Future of Learning and Development which made compelling claims that using video learning with their software could “improve information retention by 650%” (Vidizmo LLC, n.d., p. 6) and reduce employee onboarding costs “to just $67 per employee” (Vidizmo LLC, n.d., p. 6). Vidizmo also claimed a main benefit of their platform was the ability to record training lectures and push those videos to employees, avoiding repetition and “saving your entire team heaps of time, effort and more importantly; money.” (p. 7). It’s clear from these statements that a large focus of this SAAS solution is the opportunity to save time and money, not the quality or effectiveness of the learning taking place.
Another educational technology we examined was Airbel Impact Lab’s pilot program in Bangledesh to use tablets “to bring child-centered, tech-enabled learning to every one of the hundreds of millions of children around the world who do not have access to quality education.” (Colby, 2019). This project was performed in collaboration with Imagine Worldwide, a company focused on technology based, child-directed education accessibility that partners with companies and governments alike to achieve this goal. The pilot saw 600 Bangladeshi children involved in tech-enabled education with a delivery method they claim will increase accessibility to “quality education” (Colby, 2019), along with a refugee camp in Tanzania where they created an after-school camp aimed at elementary aged children in need of supplemented learning that equipped them with tablets and the child-directed tech based delivery method that included “interactive, playful and adaptive content” (Colby, 2019). The program implies that by using a child-directed methodology for education with the means of their tablets, quality of learning will vastly improve in under-supported areas of the world as it lessens the need for highly trained educators and allows for caregivers and other supportive adults to fill the role of facilitators, something unlikely to be achieved with current means and methods of education.
If our two debaters were reviewing these two cases with us we’re sure they’d have a lot to say. We are confident that Clark (1994) would be critical of Vidizmo’s claims as they appear to be doing exactly what he warned of in his 1994 article by creating an ed tech solution then matching it with “problems that can be solved by those solutions”. Clark (1994) would likely also reference his “Confusion of Technologies” argument, meaning that the ease of recording training lectures and delivering them to learners asynchronously does not correlate with it being a better quality learning experience. We suspect that Clark would be less critical of Airbel Impact Lab’s project in Bangladesh, which is aiming to provide access to educational lessons to children who might otherwise not be able to access those lessons. Clark (1994) had argued that when effective learning results from exposure to media it is likely due to the presence of effective teaching methods, not the media themselves. Here the children are benefiting from access to quality education more than the media through which it is delivered. As Kozma (1994) stated: “The attributes of a medium are its capabilities” (p. 13); in this case the fact that children could continue learning through crisis situations with the Airbel Impact Lab’s project is its greatest asset. While Kozma argued that media can enhance learning, that it is a “complementary process” through which meaning is developed and problems can be solved (1991, as cited in Kozma, 1994) and there may have been some greater benefit in learning through gamified numeracy and literacy lessons on the tablets by developing problem-solving skills and an ability to apply what they learned (Kozma, 1994, p. 12), for these children in Bangladesh the greatest impact may have been the ability to continue their education during a crisis situation.
Intuitively, it seems that Kozma’s assertion that using technology as a method of delivery deepens our ability to learn and meets the needs of more learners via varied means of delivery. However, it doesn’t seem as clearly applied in our current context when taking the time to dig into Clark’s argument of separating method and means and questioning if there is truly an increase in education that could not be attained with current methods or alternative means. Whether you agree with Kozma’s stance that technology is the future of education, or Clark’s view that it delivers no new value to learning, the need for educators to be involved throughout in the development of technology in education is a must to ensure appropriate impact and influence as we continue to see more and more tech included in the educational field.
Note: Although the Vidizmo article was undated it did reference resources dated to 2016, which we felt confident enough meant it met this assignment’s brief of being created 2015 or later.
References
Clark, R. E. (1994). Media Will Never Influence Learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21–29. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30218684
Colby, S. (2019, November 14). Putting learning in the hands of children. https://medium.com/airbel/putting-learning-in-the-hands-of-children-9cea857e01d5
Kozma, R. B. (1994). Will Media Influence Learning? Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 7–19. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.167.4904
Vidizmo LLC. (n.d.). Why video is the future of learning and development? https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2295024/whitepaper/Why%20video%20is%20the%20future%20of%20learning%20and%20development.pdf