Six ways in which Technology can get in the way of learning
The Factors that Affect Learning 7: Technology 3 of 3
SIX WAYS IN WHICH TECHNOLOGY CAN GET IN THE WAY OF LEARNING.
You might remember that a couple of weeks ago I realised that I needed to touch base with our definition of learning again. It had slipped a little in my mind and I wasn’t focused enough. This week I realised that I needed to remind myself that our brains are always learning from every repeated experience, for good or not so good. Rather than thinking about learning or not learning, we should always be thinking about good learning and not so good learning.
The title of this week’s post is misleading. Because technology is so good at delivering a certain kind of repeated experience, the danger is not that it gets in the way of learning but that it is equally effective at helping not good learning to happen. What technology can get in the way of is good learning.
Here are 6 ways in which this can happen.
1
When technology is not judged on effectiveness
When learning is the Hedgehog Concept of a school, technology has, like everything else, to be judged by the very simple concept that is used as a frame of reference for all decisions. In other words, technology has to be judged first and foremost on the extent to which it contributes to enabling children and students to get better academically, socially, emotionally and physically; to make good stuff sticky and to be engaged while in the good struggle that leads to stickiness.
This isn’t always the case in all schools. Each new technological innovation has been adopted by schools for different reasons. It makes them look modern and up-to-date; it improves their marketing pitch; it makes some teachers, at least, feel more excited (I’m looking at me here); or, they are following some external guidelines and instructions. You can judge the effectiveness of technology against each of these purposes (and others); doing so might make some teachers happier or it might impress some potential parents. The trouble is that none of them are learning.
This is not an argument against technology. It is a request that technology is not accepted without question and that it should be looked at through a learning lens as critically as anything else in the school, subject by subject, attitude by attitude, program by program. When technology is not able to demonstrate that it makes a particularly positive contribution to learning good stuff for children and students of different ages, then we shouldn’t use it.
2
When the learning technology delivers isn’t good learning
We have already touched upon this but we need to take it a little further, just to make sure we are clear.
For some years now, I have been publicly sharing my worry about the ease and regularity of access (their repeated experiences) that young people have to pornographic material through technology. Easily available, always-on, target focused, repeated experiences of pornographic material.
Technology didn’t invent pornography. Confessing more than I would like to, as a teenager, like many other boys, I hid copies of a magazine called Parade under my bed, furtively glancing at pictures of semi-naked women when I thought my parents weren’t around. The frescoes on ancient buildings contain some very public scenes of sexual activity. Chaucer wrote about the Wife of Bath’s sexual activity in his Canterbury Tales. None of this is new. But….
Even ten years ago, it was estimated that 25% of boys from about 14-17 watched porn for about an hour a day. Just think about that in terms of repeated experiences.
Three years ago, in February 2022, Psychology Today reported that ‘Exposure to pornography during adolescence is becoming the norm rather than the exception. In a study of US youth in late adolescence, 80.3 per cent reported accessing pornography.’ Furthermore, it reported that ‘A far cry from looking at a sensual magazine centrefold, today’s adolescents are viewing online pornographic videos with motions and sounds, depicting every potential sexual act that can be imagined.’
In other words, easily available everywhere, always-on, target focused and continually repeated experiences about how men treat women and how women might be expected and, apparently, even like to be treated, are all available to young people at the very point in their lives when they are beginning to sort out their own soon-to-be adult identities. And all of this, at exactly the time when their prefrontal cortex isn’t yet enabling them to deal with the complexities of all this.
Over the past two years, thousands of young men have subscribed to and been influenced by a man called Andrew Tate who is being held in prison in Romania for rape and for the procurement of young women to produce sexual videos. Back in August 22 the New Statesman magazine reported that ‘the strain of masculinity offered by men such as Tate is attractive to young boys craving validation and male role models and he explores their vulnerability.’ Moreover, ‘an inquiry of Members of Parliament found more than half of girls and young women said they had been sexually harassed by boys.’
It isn’t that I want to kill eroticism or consensual sexual pleasure between one or more people. It is that I would like to do what I can to make sure that at one of the most impressionable periods of their lives, boys and young men develop into the kinds of people that will do both of these things and more within the boundaries of respect, love and tolerance and that they will come to appreciate what each of these mean in a mature society. I would also like girls and young women to grow up free of manipulation and the pressures that all of this puts on them. Right now, technology’s ability to deliver continually repeated, always-on experiences that help these boys and young men learn the opposite is making this hope very difficult.
There are so many examples of how the repeated experiences delivered so easily by technology are actually or potentially creating learning that most of us would not be happy with. We can’t list them all here and each of you will have your own priorities about this depending on your views about the kinds of people you are wanting to help children and students develop into. But we might equally remind ourselves about the increase of cyber bullying amongst girls, just in case we slip into thinking that only boys are at risk here.
As I write this sentence on Friday 31st January 2025, I see that the Guardian newspaper highlights on its front page that the UK National Audit Office is reporting that ‘Women face an epidemic of violence.’ And, just yesterday morning, 2 February 2025, the UK Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, said on a television interview that ‘…they are using images of real children and abusing them, manipulating them and making them sexualised. These are then being circulated in these huge forums. What’s now happening is that AI is putting this on steroids.’
My hope is that we can accommodate the needs for both free speech and regulation in such a way that access to this not good kind of learning becomes harder and more restricted. We’ll never close it down any more than we will reach total consensus about what is good learning and what isn’t. But we need to try. Some very powerful and long-lasting bad learning is happening right now, driven and facilitated by technology.
3
When the learning technology delivers is wrong
Am I the only one to find it peculiarly ironic - flat-out worrying - that the rise of Donald Trump to his second Presidency and the understandable, if not exactly palatable, desire of everyone to suddenly want to be on his side, has encouraged Marc Zuckerberg to announce the end of formal fact-checking on Facebook and other Meta sites?
We have talked about how technology, with its opportunity to provide repeated straightforward testing in different ways is brilliantly primed to enable knowledge learning to become better. That remains true and I’m not sure why no-one has yet produced (or I have yet to see) a really affective app that allows me to enter the knowledge I want my children or students to learn and then allow them to encounter it repeatedly in engaging ways.
But, like everything else, there is a flip side. Technology can not only be used to make knowledge sticky and assess knowledge quickly; it is also used to find out fact-based information before any remembering and stickiness takes place. Technology has repeatedly helped many of us to learn to say ‘Why don’t you Google it?’ when no-one in the room can think of the answer to something or ‘Hey did you know that…’ when I come across some interesting fact as I trawl through today’s news feed. It’s just part of my life now.
But what happens when the information isn’t fact-checked, when anyone can provide me with a repeated experience of ‘factual’ knowledge that isn’t actually factual at all but simply the deliberately obstructive view of a relatively small group of people?
What happens is that I learn knowledge that isn’t knowledge. I then learn to mistrust the source of knowledge and risk becoming uncertain about the knowledge that actually is true. And, as the phrase ‘fake knowledge’ is increasingly used to diminish true knowledge that someone doesn’t like, I stop being able to discriminate between what is actually factually true and what isn’t. When that happens, the foundational status of knowledge begins to disappear; and when that happens almost all critical debate begins to cease.
4
When the technology isn’t engaging
Just recently, I couldn’t help but reflect on the contrast between Mr. Warburton’s dull pictures on his film strip (see last week’s post) and the experiences that are beginning to happen using Virtual Reality headsets. VR has the opportunity to deliver repeated learning experiences to children and young students that are truly enthralling. If VR had been available to me at home when I was younger, Mr. Warburton’s dull pictures would have been treated with scorn rather than the dull acceptance we gave them.
Schools are up against strong competition in the battle to engage learners, to keep them engaged and to help them see that learning is enjoyable. For very explicable reasons, the technology available in most schools lags behind the technology that is available to many, but not all, of them outside of school.
There is a very good chance that school and classroom technology becomes transactionally useful - it does a specific job efficiently - but, at the same time, it helps children and students learn that school and school learning is not something that is very engaging. When this happens, we need to make sure that the role of a stimulating, excited and engaged teacher, who can excite children and students, isn’t drowned out in the technological gold-rush.
Some late breaking news about this. Yesterday, Sunday 2nd February 2025, Justin Pot in the New York Times was quoted as saying that Duolingo ‘employs all of the dirty tricks that social networks and mobile-games companies use - but for the virtuous purpose of helping you learn.’ So that’s why it works for me. I hope all our children and students get something that’s appropriate and engaging for them, too.
5
When technology makes it harder for students to develop focus and resilience
In the early posts of this Substack, we spent time exploring what learning is, how it happens and what it looks like. We described it as happening differently, often based on whether the learning was knowledge learning, skills development or the deepening of understanding.
We also saw some common elements. We saw ‘good struggling’ as students move from where they were to somewhere they haven’t been before. We saw that movement described from ‘new’ learning to ‘consolidating’ learning. We saw, especially in skills learning, the progression from ‘Beginning’ learning, to ‘Developing’ learning to ‘Mastering’ learning as our skilful abilities improved and became steadily more sticky.
What these elements have in common and, therefore, what different kinds of learning have in common is focus and resilience. It’s very hard to get better at something good if we are unable to focus on what we are doing and we are resilient enough to stay the course. Engaging technology can help us do this provided it is connected with the good stuff we are trying to learn.
Yet again, though, with technology there is a flip-side. It can be extraordinarily good at providing me with repeated experiences that help me learn that I don’t have to be resilient or focused. When my Spanish learning isn’t going well, the same devices that deliver it provide me with endless and easy opportunities to go to many other less challenging places and flip through those instead. As I try to focus on my Spanish learning, alerts pop up that tell me the latest score of my team, a tantalisingly click-bait message from some website or another, a notification that a friend has just messaged me. It takes strength for me to ignore all of this and keep focused. Most of the time, I can just about hang on in there; thinking about me as a nine year-old or fourteen year-old, I’m far less confident that that would be the case.
Learning isn’t just getting better at knowledge, skills or understanding. It involves developing attitudes such as focus and resilience that will help learners through their good struggles. Anything that encourages me not to be focused or resilient by providing me with bright candy-coloured experiences is likely to be unhelpful to me as a learner.
6
When it is harmful to children and students
There appears to be a huge upswing in the number of 13-17 year-olds needing (and only sometimes receiving) help for mental health conditions that range from the mild to the very serious. Not all students are struggling but the rise in those who are is very worrying.
There are many contributory factors to this, too many for this post to begin to pull apart. For example:
13-17 year-olds have always been the most ‘troubled’ of students as a general rule. We know that this is partly because they are at the stage of life when their brains are going through a final reconfiguration before adulthood. In other words, some of it is unsettling but ‘normal’.
These naturally confused minds are faced with big issues to which they are very open, often through technology; unemployment in their families; reduced circumstances; their job chances, climate change and more. These are all added pressures.
Technology can be of help to these young people. It can create online communities of shared interests that help develop a sense of identity. It can allow conversations and explorations between friends and others that are very difficult to have in the open and might otherwise be suppressed.
But, as we have seen earlier, it can create an unrelenting negative repeated experience and a de-personalisation of communication, allowing me to say things to you that I might not say if I was with you in person or if I was being observed by other people in my group.
The evidence base is still growing about the mental health issues of 11-17 year-olds and the contribution that social media makes. Most of us don’t seem to be in any doubt that a connection is there, although the researched evidence, again, is not as good as we need it to be. Last week, a report in The Guardian suggested that things might not be as bad as we think they are, that there is a correlation between the rise in mental health and the rise in social media but no definite causation. But, in my local paper on the 31st January, The John Wallis Church of England Academy in Ashford reported that banning the use of phones in school during the day has resulted in 40% drop in serious behavioural issues amongst its students.
What does this have do with learning? Two things. First, mental health issues created through technology get in the way of good learning, causing cognitive overload that leads precious little space to deal with what should be good struggling. Second, they simultaneously helps students to learn things about themselves and others that may not be helpful but become sticky too quickly.
THE TECHNOLOGY CHECKLIST
Technology is moving very fast. For most of us access to AI was futuristic only a short while ago. Now we have it freely available on our phones. AI is moving fast, too, and will have changed within six months of this post being published. Providing a checklist that will last is harder than it is for many of the other factors that affect learning. But, for now, here goes:
To what extent:
Is your use of technology in schools helping children and students to benefit from rapid repeating experiences to make their knowledge sticky?
Do programs you use in school provide children and students with feedback and support that helps them learn more effectively?
Does the technology you use engage children and students or does it seem dull compared to access they have out of school?
Does the technology you use in school help children and students to continue their learning out of school; especially, the learning they are struggling to consolidate?
Does the technology you use provide you with better data analysis that helps you identify where learning is and is not happening and why?
Does your technology enable better parental access to and involvement in their children’s learning?
Do you undertake a regular analysis of the positive and negative effects technology is having on different kinds of learning and make decisions based on that evidence?
Is the technology you use enabling children to learn more bad stuff than good stuff?
Does the technology available to children and students in school enable them (or not) to develop resilience and focus?
Does your curriculum contain effective plans for learning about technology that help children and students begin to develop an awareness about its strengths and weaknesses?
That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll look at the effects governments and other similar outside bodies have on helping learning happen, or not. Have the best week, possible.
Martin