Is It Ethical to Use This Technology? An Approach to Learning about Educational Technologies with Students
by Dan Krutka and Marie Heath
In this blog post, we are excited to introduce new pages on our Civics of Technology site! These pages represent the culmination of the work of a collaborative of edtech teacher educators and scholars who have been pursuing technoethical questions for the last few years. This line of inquiry started as a number of us expressed concerns with how quickly technologies—both those created for education and those created for broader audiences—were taken up in education without much consideration about possible harms or downsides. To echo Jurassic Park chaos scientist Ian Malcolm, edtech is so preoccupied with whether or not they could use edtech, they didn't stop to think if they should.
It is often assumed that using educational technologies in schools will help students learn, but rarely considered that these technologies might do harm? What if the technologies illegally harvest students’ data, or the facial recognition technology of a program doesn’t recognize darker skin, or if the software leads to unnecessary surveillance of students’ home lives? What if the technologies have biased design, contribute to larger problems in the world, or harm the environment? Educators should not only aim to do no harm to students, but pass that lesson on.
As a start, we pulled together some of the work being done to share a four-step approach for making ethical and just decisions about technology in your classroom, school, or home. We want to thank Ryan Smits for assisting in creating these pages. The steps we offer here are flexible and educators or students may choose to use them in different and creative ways. We recommend doing whatever works for your class! We see this four-step approach being particularly useful for educational technology courses. If you end up using these approaches in your classes, please let us know!
Most of the information in this blog post duplicates what we have made available on our site, but there is more details, examples, and resources for each step on the site. YOU CAN ACCESS THE FOUR-STEP APPROACH ON OUR SITE THROUGH THE CURRICULUM PAGE.
Here are our four steps for technoethical integration:
Step 1: Spur Dystopian Imaginings. New technologies are introduced into people’s lives today at a rate unprecedented in human history. The benefits of technologies and the onslaught of corporate messaging can result in a pervasive techno-optimism that leaves people unaware of the downsides or collateral effects of technologies until harms are already done. With the show Black Mirror as muse, we propose two activities educators can employ to engage students’ technoskeptical imaginings. The first is a MadLib activity that employs play as a means to creatively speculate about technologies. The second is a fill-in-the-blank creative writing activity that builds on the MadLib activity while providing students more flexibility in crafting their own dystopian stories. Teachers and students should recognize that while this may be an imagined dystopia for some groups, it can be closer to the existing lived realities of other groups. We hope this approach and these activities can work toward protecting those who are most vulnerable to the harms of technologies.
Step 2: Identify EdTech. Teachers must regularly make decisions about which technologies to use in their classrooms. New technologies can include a wide range of tools from classroom management systems to screen reader technologies to interactive quiz apps. Educators may rely on recommendations from colleagues or their own trial and error, but on this page we turn to websites that offer reviews of educational technologies. None of these sites’ recommendations are full proof and educators should always be wary of conflicts of interest. However, these sites can offer starting points to find new technologies, read reviews, and make decisions for your classroom or district.
Step 3: Conduct EdTech Audit. Making ethical decisions about technologies, or technoethical decisions, can be challenging because there are an array of possible questions, concerns, and issues. We draw on three different approaches developed by contributors to our Civics of Technology project to help ask the types of critical questions necessary to avoid harm to those in our classrooms, communities, and world. The three approaches include (a) conducting a technoethical audit, (b) conducting a discriminatory design audit, and (c) asking our 5 critical questions about technology. We hope that the earlier dystopian imagining activities will spur students to think critically about the technology they audit. Ultimately, students and educators should draw conclusions about ethical issues and make decisions about whether to use a technology as is, modify settings or uses of a technology, or not use a technology. They then may take informed action to encourage other classrooms, districts, or communities to use, modify, or exclude particular technologies.
Step 4: Choose Integration Approach. Finally, the fourth step of this process is to identify and use a technology integration approach in your classroom or district. There are a number of models that exist and we include four here: PICRAT, TPACK, RAT, and SAMR. We link to an article describing each model and a short video which explains the approach. Each model has different benefits and drawbacks. Educators should evaluate each and choose one that they believe they could regularly turn to in order to make wise pedagogical decisions about their integration of technology into classes. We find the PICRAT article particularly helpful, as it offers an example of possible arguments for and against different approaches that can help educators critically make their own decisions.
We want to shout out all the people who have worked with and inspired us, including Bret Staudt Willet, Autumm Caines, Torrey Trust, Ryan Smits, Ben Gleason, Pamela Segal, and Royce Kimmons among others. We reference and recommend the work of many of these folks on the technoethical integration pages. Like much of the Civics of Technology project, this was a community effort.
We’d love to hear what you think! How do you ensure technoethical integration in your classes? What did we miss? What should we add? Please continue the conversation in the comments.