Norty Antoine | Let’s be SMART about access

In 2015, I conducted a rather small study on the impacts of WhatsApp group chat on tertiary-level students’ perception of a first-year composition course that they were pursuing. That study was eventually presented at a conference in Ohio themed’ Computers in Writing’ because it represented a new area of interest for many institutions globally. Student-based technology was indeed challenging the status quo of whether the teacher as the specialist in the classroom should be expected to bring all the tools to be used in the interaction. At that time, teachers (including lecturers/professors) were very unwilling to use their personal devices to facilitate students in a WhatsApp group chat format as a majority believed that work should not conflict with their home/personal space and time.

Five years later, and we are here without a choice. Nowadays, a teacher without a class WhatsApp group is an outlier. Work is now simply part of the home space and time. The numerous memes of frustrated teachers, hilarious bouts of incompetence among teachers/facilitators and students themselves, the untimely background noises from animals, naughty neighbours, angry siblings, and frustrated parents prove that. The fact is, the pandemic has started to derail and, in some cases, debunk some old beliefs about how a classroom should operate, but there are some fundamental ideas about a classroom that have not changed.

The reliance on (Smart) technology should not be equated to increased students’ performance. In fact, data from a majority of countries that we look to for economic, educational and social models prove that there is no direct link between the availability of technology and students’ performance. In research conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2015, it was found that “computers do not improve pupil result”.” Instead, in a glaring statement, Andreas Schleicher, the OECD director, noted that school technology had raised “too many false hopes”.

In Jamaica, we seem to be at this very point where both parents and school administrators are unified in their belief that simply accessing computers for online/mobile learning will create a platform for high performance and equity in education. Clearly, we need to proceed with caution as even developed countries like Australia, Denmark, Greece, Sweden, and Spain, which reported very high daily usage of the computer for school purposes, saw a stagnation in students’ results, particularly in reading, math and science – courses that we understand form the placenta of literacy in other subject areas.

The report shows that countries that spend more on computers in learning actually cater to underperformance or stagnation. In 2015, global spending on educational technology was £17.5 billion (Gartner, 2015) with the UK alone accounting for £900 million, giving its schools one of the highest levels of computers per student at 1.4 computers to every student. In contrast, Asian countries and cities like South Korea, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Japan, which not only spent less on technology, but which restricted students’ use of the devices, continued to outperform other countries in international tests. My own study revealed that a whopping 83 percent of my respondents believed that technology made the course easier, but in fact,, the final course results that year were relatively the same as before WhatsApp was introduced.

RELATIONSHIP WITH TECHNOLOGY

While we cannot deny the benefits that technology in the classroom (albeit fully digital or face-to-face) affords, as a country, we need to understand our relationship with it. WhatsApp, for example, increases teacher involvement, can create positive attitudes/perceptions towards subjects, allows student-centred experiences, creates greater responsibilities among students, allows for more frequent student-student, student-teacher, student-content communication, and serves as a repository for class content. But those benefits come at the expense of over-reliance on the teacher, teacher burnout, the risk of a classroom becoming largely informal, and the sense that the teacher is always at work. These do not represent a healthy balance.

Surprisingly, access to technology generally does not equate to equity either. Schleicher comments that technology does not lower the socio-economic gap among students. Rather, it may exacerbate it. To better comprehend this point for Jamaica, we need only to imagine achieving our goal of having every household outfitted with a computer/tablet but with no changes to the cost of electricity, and Internet connectivity in Jamaica. Can you hear me now? So how do we correct the fallacy that access to technology is a panacea at this time? I recommend that we rethink the training of our teachers and students and unplug to maintain our humanity.

Continuous training for teachers and students beyond the rushed training sessions that were conducted mid-pandemic to get our educational machinery churning again must be a priority. As recommended by Koole’s (2009) Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Education (FRAME), this has to happen simultaneously as we work on access to the technology. Koole believes that mobile learning results from the interaction of three events: the convergence of mobile technologies, human learning capacities and social interaction. Social interaction is a given. What we need now is to build the human capacity as much as we want to improve access to the mobile/Smart technology.

Clearly, we started on the wrong foot. As we know, but do not speak too loudly about, years ago, a certain curriculum had advised schools with limited numbers of computers to have only a selected few students pursue Information Technology at the CSEC level, leaving a majority of students to exit high school without proper information literacy and basic computer knowledge. Back then, we safely assumed that the advent of Smart devices multiplying across the world and the transformation of Jamaica’s telecommunication sector with competing service providers would naturally cater to those students who were left behind. Ironically, those students are now the teachers and parents today. This is why some of us are shocked when we realize that young people online really do not know much about the computer beyond the social media platforms. Their parents, and many of their siblings, were never taught formally, so the trickling down effect dictates the present predicament.

Therefore, access to the device is not all. More training is needed, and that training must begin with the teachers. The ministry must be commended for initiating large-scale Zoom meetings in that regard, but that is not enough. A formal train-the-trainer model (not like the one we used for the rolling out of the NSC) needs to be initiated, where there is an assessment of who knows what about online learning at the school level and some form of compensation is agreed on to have the truly computer literate ones among us dedicated to the task of transforming their assigned schools as a part of a school task force.

UNPLUG

My second recommendation is that families (including single adult students) dedicate time to unplugging from the device. This is not as contradicting as it seems. Modern life is more than tedious with information flowing from multiple sources. We become absorbed in these information streams, and we eventually drown our identities, which we should be shaping from actual interaction with family and friends, religion, and intra-personal communication. Moderate use is best. The OECD, in its 2015 report concluded that “students who use tablets and computers very often tend to do worse than those who use them moderately”. As it concerns language specifically, the world’s current citizens represent the most written communication that humans have ever produced.

But this comes at the cost of speech with each other. Daunting CSEC English and English proficiency test results at the tertiary level continue to evoke nightmares in that regard. Yes, we are under the heavy restriction of a pandemic that lowers physical interaction, but we should not deny ourselves human connection. It is an absolute necessity. We need to speak to each other to learn new words, practise displaying and reading non-verbal cues, and in accordance with some medical experts, such practices may even improve our immunity. Simply watching others do that via social media memes and forwarded content does nothing for our own growth. So as we gain access to the technology for school, we also need to maintain our humanity. Teachers can help by requiring more assignments that cater to realistic human scenarios. These approaches may force students to interact with their friends, families, and community while understanding how formal education connects to real life, even from 6 feet.

I want to be absolutely clear that I am not against computers in school, nor am I against the Government’s thrust to improve access to technology in a bid to give students at all levels “ a chance,” but rather, I am for an approach that sees access as well as knowledge of the technology as equally important. I am also cognizant of the fact that the pandemic has created new territory that we are yet to fully understand, and so we must allow time for trial and error. In the meantime, let us not deny the data from the same countries and people that we are emulating in our quest to be better. Some trials and errors are expensive, and where we can save a dollar in these times, why shouldn’t we?

Norty Antoine is researcher and lecturer of Academic Writing. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com