Can technology be neutral?
Unpacking what technology gives us and what it takes away
Technology has the potential to connect, and divide us. The more I read about new technologies in education, the more I feel we should view them through the lens of what they give us, but also what they take away from us. There’s a common myth that technology is neutral - but its impact depends entirely on whose hands it’s in. In the hands of some, it empowers and connects; in the hands of others, it can control, exploit, or exclude.
What does technology give us?
This is a divisive question as it depends on a few factors. For those who can afford devices, internet access and AI - you might argue that technology presents us with a way to organise our lives, connect and communicate. However, for those who go without, technology can widen existing inequalities - deepening digital divides, limiting access to education, services, and opportunities that others may take for granted.
Smuggled into our consciousness is the idea that technology has become an extension of us - we are part machine. Drawing lines between the human, and the machine is becoming increasingly difficult in some regions of the world. There is an allure to new shiny technologies, often presented in utopian images of a glittering antiseptic world. Technology then presents us with a landscape of exhaustive possibility.
We can categorise what technology gives us into a cluster of real-world applications:
Connection
Access to knowledge
Efficiency
Creativity and Expression
Medical advancements
Innovation
Each category plays an important role and serves a purpose for the user, but I want to focus on connection and access to knowledge, as I believe this is the foundation for everything else.
Connection
Vignette 1
I arrived in the Future Classroom five minutes before the lesson was due to begin. As always, there were no desks, just flexible spaces designed for movement and collaboration. At first glance, the room looked exactly as it usually did. Except for one unexpected detail: a life-sized robot head, positioned confidently at the centre of the space.
Curious, I walked toward it. Without warning, a voice greeted me and it lit up.
"Hi, Sir. How are you?"
The robot head was AV1, a telepresence robot that connects absent students to learning. Its purpose is to ensure belonging, and support reintegration back to the classroom. For a child who cannot attend school due to health or crippling anxiety, AV1 represents a connection between the home and the classroom. We saw this on a grand scale during lockdown, but this is more personalised.
The robot head becomes the Child's ears and eyes, interacting in real-time with the teacher and the class. The child joins the lesson remotely so has a presence via the device. During the lesson they can engage as the robot’s eyes light-up and it can raise its hand to ask questions. The real beauty revealed itself after the lesson ended, when the child’s peers gently picked up the robot head and carried it outside to socialise. The true magic lay in that moment of connection - friends engaging with technology in a way that felt natural, joyful, and deeply meaningful.
Vignette 2
It is Wednesday, 2pm. The classroom is quiet as the students selected for this project are yet to arrive. The screen above me crackles and within seconds fifteen sets of eyes are looking directly at me. The smiles follow. ‘Hello, Alex - can you hear me?’ I see Daniel (the teacher) on the screen and the class behind him, sitting patiently. They are in Accra, Ghana. Despite being 8000 km away we are connected instantly. Today our classes will be learning together about climate change.
Connections can be a powerful thing. And now, those connections aren’t just physical, they are digital, global, and transformative. The evolution of digital schooling is pointing the compass in a new direction - one we don’t yet have a map for.
Access to knowledge
‘To imagine the futures possibilities, we need to have the future’s knowledge’
(Gopnik, 2009)
People tend to treat knowledge as a commodity, something to have, to use and to trade with. In a digital age, there are new gatekeepers as players like Google and Wikipedia have democratised knowledge and made it ‘open source’. What it means to ‘know’ then has shifted. Sugata Mitra argues that knowing will be obsolete, it will be ‘finding out’ and fact checking that replaces it.
In educational arenas there are fierce defenders of knowledge and for good reason. You need knowledge as a foundation for making an informed decision. As Robinson in Trivium 21c puts it ‘teaching about unicorns is as real as teaching about lions to one who has seen neither’.
When it comes to technology, and how children use it - knowledge and skills need to co-exit, not compete. Children of the future will need to be able to type at least 28 words per minute to complete on screen exams, troubleshoot issues with web browsers, navigate fake news hourly and identify deep fakes. As Artificial Intelligence and the technologies that surround it grow in power, our children will have to work harder to stay ahead. You can imagine a roadmap for this in developed countries but what about those who do not have access to technology, and knowledge?
Knowledge lives in many forms - from the tribal branch passed down through generations to the taught form in physical places. It has endured time and evolved. However, since the arrival of the internet where knowledge is instant, divides have been drawn between those with access, and those without.
Digital Divides
Digital poverty is a wicked problem that demands our attention. Defined as the inability to interact with the online world fully, when, where and how an individual needs to this form of poverty surfaced as a contentious issue during the recent pandemic. On the edges of society and in the difficult to reach places, children suffer in a digital silence.
These ‘digital-divides’ see critics rallying against what they see as ‘social harms’ (Shelby et al, 2022). To extend on this, there is a feeling in education that AI powered learning tools threaten to replicate trends of social injustice due to affordability and access. Take AI, for example - it is neither neutral in its design nor equally accessible to all. AI is exclusive to those with the means and ways to access it. In the past, technology’s reach has been determined by two factors: access to devices, and connectivity.
Children growing up in digitally poor households face disadvantages when it comes to both factors. This creates a vacuum of social isolation and widens the inequality gap as some children fall behind their peers academically and socially. In the race to invent tomorrow we are leaving some young people behind, and this is not good enough. Access to knowledge via a device and the means to access it is a problem for today. Although it may be camouflaged at times, digital poverty is real, it’s just difficult to see unless you are really looking for it.
Solutions
I often find myself on the sharp end of this problem, working with companies to bring technology and opportunity to the difficult to reach places. I want to share some lessons I feel might offer us hope moving forward.
On knowledge - knowledge needs a relationship with the past to shape the future. Technology is a means to share knowledge, not a walled garden to protect it.
On poverty - we tend to view poverty as a local issue, confined to what we can see around us. This way of thinking limits our potential in schools as the world can be our classroom. Even when money is tight, we can open up our classrooms and learn in other places to bring knowledge and experience to children who need it. At a touch of a button we can join other classrooms and work together. Technology has made this possible.
On digital poverty - we need the tech giants to step up here. They have the power and funds to connect the disconnected and put devices in the hands of those who need them the most.
On connection - technology has made the world a global village. It is a new superpower for those who possess it. For everyone else, they are watching on lurking in the wings of the conversation. If knowledge today is to become a collective memory of us as a species - we need to drag down the walls that surround it.
References
Gopnik, A. (2009) The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Shelby, R., Rismani, S., Henne, K., Moon, A., Rostamzadeh, N., Nicholas, P., Yilla, N., Gallegos, J., Smart, A., Garcia, E. & Virk, G. (2022) Sociotechnical harms: Scoping a taxonomy for harm reduction. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05791v1 (Accessed: 15 June 2023).
Robinson, M (2013) Trivium 21c: Preparing Young People for the Future with Lessons from the Past. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.