Harm – Sonya's Blog

Photo of a phone with a thinking emoji on screen — Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

CSET 2025, Critical Studies of Education and Technology, is a global research project, organised by Neil Selwyn, Professor of Education at Monash University, Australia, to bring together academics and educators with an interest in digital technology to discuss the issues we are facing in small groups, to feed back to the central project and to build local communities. I was pleased to find that Durham University had picked up the initiative in the North East and a number of representatives from Sunderland were able to attend the event. Rather than recapping the discussions at the event itself, I’ve instead decided to give my individual written response to each of the four research questions below, but informed by those conversations.

1. What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround EdTech in our locality? What questions do we need to ask, and what approaches will help us research these questions?

I think it’s increasingly difficult to separate ‘EdTech’ from ‘technology’ in general, and my first thoughts about the impact of technology on the ‘issues, concerns, tensions and problems’ on people in the North East of England, and Sunderland in particular, one of the country’s most deprived cities, is how social media has, over the past 10-15 years, destroyed the idea of a common truth.

This is a concern which should be at the heart of universities as places of learning, but instead I feel that our time and efforts are increasing spent at the whim of whatever tech craze is current, struggling to stay ahead with little criticality. Just in my time as a learning technologist, the hype bubbles I’ve seen come and go include virtual reality, the blockchain, MOOCs, machine learning, the metaverse (VR again), and now generative AI (sparkling machine learning). Big Tech has sold every one of these innovations as the next big thing, driving us to adopt virtual and augmented reality head gear, or convert our modules to fully self-directed, online courses, only for the benefits to be rather niche. Meanwhile, the Canvas.net modules I helped develop have been quietly abandoned and then deleted, and the Meta Quest sits atop our lockers gathering dust.

I will grant that generative AI feels a little different, as the pressure there feels more like something which is coming from the bottom up – from student’s use and misuse of them, to which we have to respond to uphold the integrity of our degrees and awards. AI literacy is something that we really need to get on top of.

2. What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and education in our locality?

There is a lack of ownership when it comes to technology. The big, central VLE is a university-owned and controlled space, with students as consumers of content, and when we provide spaces which try to flip the pedagogy and make them student-owned, like an ePortfolio, I find that use is limited. Instead, students develop their own personal learning environments on platforms like WhatsApp and WeChat. It was perhaps ever thus, going back to my own university student experience the Facebook groups which used to pop up for each module were invaluable sources for information and sharing things that perhaps our teachers and the institution wouldn’t want us sharing, old exam papers for example. But these informal spaces can be problematic too, from inequalities of access, to bullying and harassment which is hidden away.

There is also an increasing problem of rentier capitalism, as technology has shifted from a model of buy once and own the software, to recurring subscriptions where you lose your access and data if you can’t pay. Many of these services are also tiered, with better off students able to pay higher subscriptions for more or better features, which exacerbates poverty and contributes to wealth inequality, the everything bagel that is behind pretty much every social and political problem of our age.

3. What does the political economy of EdTech look like in our region? What do local EdTech markets look like? How are global Big Tech corporations manifest in local education systems? What does EdTech policy look like, and which actors are driving policymaking? What do we find if we ‘follow the money’?

Follow the money, and you’re going to end up in the USA. Maybe Australia. Australia has quite a nice little pocket industry of learning technology, e.g. Studiosity, but whichever side of the world you end up in, EdTech is dominated by their own tech giants like Blackboard, Instructure, and Turnitin. This means that we are often working around design and teaching conventions from a US market that don’t work in the UK. At Sunderland, our Canvas modules use a repurposed ‘syllabus’ page for our module template, despite the concept of a syllabus not being a thing in UK HE. Secure and private data storage is always an issue, and I don’t have a lot of faith in the integrity of the various ad-hoc data sharing agreements between the US and the UK / EU which have cropped up since GDPR and EU privacy legislation came into effect.

The UK has traditionally had quite a strong open source contingent, the Moodle and Mahara collaboration, but I feel like that’s fallen away a little in the past few years. The problem with open source solutions is that the software may be ‘free’, but they aren’t free to run, and HEIs using this approach need to have a team of learning technologists and developers to look after them, something which I fear can be seen as a cost saving in a move to hosted solutions with SLAs. But the more consolidated the sector becomes the less power we have to drive change in the direction we want. I am glad that we still have organisations like Jisc and ALT that can advocate for us, are indeed formed of us, and can negotiate and innovate from a more powerful position. More of that in my answer to the next question.

Vendor lock-in is another issue with the big EdTech companies. There is EU regulation on data sharing and ownership, but propriety features and functionality render this next to useless in my experience. When I ditched Spotify and started buying music again, I was able to export a huge spreadsheet of my library, which is lovely, but I can’t do anything with it! I feel like EdTech is even worse. When Sunderland migrated from Pearson LearningStudio (don’t ask…) to Canvas, we had to start again from a blank canvas, if you’ll pardon the pun. I’ve also attempted migrating my ePortfolio from PebblePad to Mahara using the Leap2a standard which technically worked, but with very poor results.

4. What grounds for hope are there? Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment? What local push-back and resistance against egregious forms of EdTech is evident? What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures?

I worry that I’m becoming increasingly grouchy about technology as I get older, and my youthful optimism in general has been taking a battering since 2016. Yes, very specifically 2016. But there are reasons to be hopeful! There are events like this which bring like-minded people together to share our experience and, if nothing else, afford us the opportunity to really pin down the issues we are dealing with.

Then there are the industry bodies and communities like Jisc, ALT, Advance HE, and even our wee North East Learning Environments group that has sprung back to life like an elephant-shaped phoenix, that are leading a collective response to emerging challenges and finding innovative solutions. A good recent case being Turnitin who, having captured pretty much the entire UK HE sector with their originality checking tool, tried to do the same thing again with their AI detector by offering it for free on a limited time basis to everyone, only for a collective response to emerge from the community to say ‘no’, we want the ability to turn this off and make decisions that are best for us as individual institutions. A feature which was then added.

Modern EdTech, for all its problems, has also created huge opportunities to expand education to people for whom a tertiary education would have been unobtainable even a generation ago. I am myself an Open University graduate who was unable to follow the conventional post-18 university route for a number of reasons. Many of the tools and systems also bring big quality of life improvements to all of us, genuinely making our work as educators easier. Last week, for example, I received an automated email from Canvas alerting me to a number of broken links in the module I’m currently teaching which I was then able to easily find and fix.

Finally, there are still great tools and solutions being created by smaller teams and often shared as open source or under a creative commons license. A great example from our region in this space is Numbas, Newcastle University’s bespoke solution to online maths testing.

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Placebo’s ‘Too Many People’, anthem for the Facebook generation

I’ve started to notice myself becoming disenfranchised and disillusioned with social media, both in terms of how I interact with it and the effect it’s having on me personally, and what it’s doing to our society as a whole.

Like many in education I was an early adopter, and fan, of Twitter. It’s was the anti-Facebook at a time when I still wasn’t on Facebook. New, exciting, open, posts were deliberately short and sweet and you got them in a simple, clear chronological timeline. But as it got bigger and more popular it started filling with bots, fake accounts and became a haven for the extreme right due to the lax and variable application of its own rules and, of course, the disgraceful impunity given to Trump to spread his hatred and fearmongering. The gradual change to an algorithmic feed annoyed me, but I understand the reasons for that, as I do the logic behind the more recent increase to the character limit. I’m not sold on the ability to thread a series of Tweets though, and taken together all of these things have made the platform lose the brevity that was part of Twitter’s initial appeal. Seeing the word ‘thread’ proclaimed in a Tweet has come to fill me with dread as what could be an interesting discussion is shoehorned into a bunch of 280 character chunks which is harder to read and follow than a blog post or an article, which is what they should have been in the first place.

I did eventually succumb to Facebook as a matter of convenience, just like a quarter of the planet has. I never trusted Facebook though, and kept a tight rein on my privacy settings and was careful about what I posted and shared. Nevertheless, I came to like it well enough until recently when I’ve found myself quietly groaning at the banality of so much of what I’m seeing on my newsfeed. I can’t place when exactly this happened, but I suspect it’s something that has been triggered as the number of my ‘friends’, groups and pages has grown. Like Twitter, Facebook now has its own wider problems with bots, fake news, hate speech, and the inconsistent application of its rules. A recent post by one of Facebook’s senior managers did a quite excellent job of identifying its various problems, for which kudos, but then shamelessly places the burden of responsibility for change on its users, meaning it’s not going to actually do anything. To paraphrase, the solution to Facebook’s problems is to use Facebook more.

From Facebook to Instagram, which I joined more voluntarily and like for its ability to push posts into Twitter and Facebook. It is perhaps because it’s the most recent platform I’ve joined that it’s the one that least troubles me. LinkedIn I’ve been on for years as a matter of professional etiquette, but it’s a quagmire of corporate bullshit that I do my best to ignore. Similarly, Google enrolled me to Google+ whether I wanted to be on it or not, though fortunately no-one uses that. And finally, I do have my own YouTube channel (again, thanks Google!) which I use to back-up my dodgy gig vids more than anything else.

The bots, the spread of hate speech, and the fake news is one thing, but there is now an increasing body of research showing tangible harm being done to the psychological development of the generation growing up who’ve never not known a world without social media. I’ve read more than one piece linking social media and smartphone use with increasing incidence of depression in children and teenagers. Part of the problem is how these services and devices use push notifications to constantly update you about new content, something called digital distraction.

That’s definitely part of my problem. I hate all such notifications and pop-ups and like to clear them straight away. My inbox at work has nothing unread in it, and at any one time there’s likely only to be around a half dozen emails flagged for future work as they can’t be done immediately for whatever reason. This in contrast to a colleague who mocks me with his 6,968 unread emails (at the time of writing), though he claims it’s okay because only 356 of them are on the work account.

So, having identified the problem, what actions have I taken to address it? The big change I’ve made is to turn off notifications for all social media apps on my phone. I’ve had them off for LinkedIn pretty much since I joined, and only check it when I have something to update, which is a couple of times a year, or when the app gets updated (to clear the notification that the app has been updated… I know, I’m a lost cause). For Twitter and Facebook, I have left on the badge icon, otherwise, knowing myself, I would end up checking them to see if some such has been commented on or whatever. Finally, I’ve started being a bit more critical when I am scrolling and actively unfollowing and muting accounts that I don’t get something from.

The result of these changes is that I’m using these services far less often, checking them at times of my choosing, and when I need a distraction from whatever I’m doing, instead of going to one or other endless feed I’m choosing something more useful like Memrise or picking up a book for a little while.

Twitter has actually been the easiest to let go, and I’m now only accessing it once or twice a day. Facebook is a little more regular, but I’ve always gotten a lot more notifications there so the badge icon is pretty much always on. I’ve noticed an improvement in my battery life! And it would seem that I have upset the algorithms. Phantom notifications have become a thing – the icon is lit, but nothing is there when I check, and I’m getting many more irrelevant notifications trying to suck me back in. I feel like I’m seeing a lot more ads in Twitter, and have even had ‘recommended tweets’ appearing in the notifications tab itself. That, I found out how to turn off thankfully!

I haven’t talked about the possibility of quitting, because I haven’t seriously considered it. What I wanted to do was assert boundaries on their intrusion into my life and in so doing establish a healthier relationship, though I have plenty of friends who have quit or, especially for younger people, never joined in the first place. This is not a trend unique to my peer group either. For me, Twitter is too useful in my professional practice and, like LinkedIn, and indeed this blog, it’s something that’s just sort of expected of someone in my line of work. Facebook for its part has become my primary means of discovering gigs, and is still great for managing and organising events. So, in essence what I’ve done is reduce my use of these services to their core functionalities, what they’re good at and were initially built for – Facebook for event management and Twitter for news.

I’ll leave with one last article, this in the New York Times ostensibly about the Bitcoin bubble, but interesting for its insight into how Facebook became the de facto standard for establishing identity on the internet, and how the blockchain could provide a better, more democratic solution.

Tag: Harm

CSET 2025

Antisocial Media