Teaching and Digital Technologies Big Issues and Critical Questions

Introduction

Digital technology is a big part of Australian schools and schooling. Schools are now awash with digital devices, learning systems, software and applications. The Australian Curriculum advocates developing ICT capability across the curriculum. This is also an area of schooling that is decidedly creating ‘big business’. Spending has grown to the point that the Australian market for education IT is estimated to be $3.2 billion (Lee, 2012). Understandably, it is an area that is characterised by big ideas, big hopes and big claims. Digital technologies are regularly talked about as ‘game changing’, students are often described as ‘digital natives’, and even federal government policies are presented in emotive terms such as the ‘Digital Education Revolution’.

It is easy for teachers to roll their eyes at such talk. After all, none of this accurately reflects the prosaic, mundane nature of everyday classroom technology use. One does not pay billions of dollars to be frustrated by wi-fi passwords, tangled cables and unpredictable internet filters. ‘Revolutions’ do not involve lengthy consultation periods and central purchasing arrangements. Yet the ‘big’ claims that surround the use of digital technology in education are worth taking seriously and giving some thought. Just why are so many people outside the immediate education community framing digital technologies in dramatic terms of wide-scale change and reform? Is there any substance to the claims that digital technology might do away with the need for teachers and schools altogether? Do digital technologies really pose fundamental challenges to everything that we have come to know as ‘education’ over the past 100 years or so?