The NEN Interview - Neil Selwyn, professor at the Faculty of Education, Monash University
"Taking devices away is another way to be seen to be doing something when you're not actually doing much."
This special interview with Neil Selwyn is produced in association with SETT, the Nordic region's leading meeting place for K-12 educators. For the first time in 2024, SETT will feature international perspectives with the launch of a new Nordic Track. It will bring together colleagues and experts from across the region to network, share experiences and gain a wider view of the most important issues in education. Book your tickets here.
Neil Selwyn is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Nordic Track event and is a professor at the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne.
He has spent the last 30 years researching the integration of digital technology into schools, universities and adult learning. His work includes projects for national research agencies and funders in Sweden, the UK, Australia, the US and Uruguay.
I caught up with him just before Christmas and a transcript of our conversation (edited to bring you all of the very best bits) follows below.
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Many thanks, Jonathan
Jonathan Viner (JV): As this interview is to promote SETT’s new Nordic Track, let’s start with a definition. Which countries do you include when you refer to the Nordics?
Neil Selwyn (NM): Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden would be the four that I would usually concentrate on. Although Estonia is also really interesting because it's always pushed as the leading digital society, with fascinating policies such as Tiger Leap.
Sweden is of particular interest because it covers so many bases - there’s a clear marketisation element, but it also has free schools chains, lots of policy activity and a clear aim to develop a national digitisation strategy, which is super interesting to me.
JV: You’ve clearly got a close connection with Sweden. Can you explain where that comes from?
NM: I’ve been researching education technology with a critical perspective since 1995 and there's always been a strong strand of interesting work from the Nordics.
In 2016, I worked as a visiting professor in Gothenburg for six months and have gone back almost every year since then. There’s growing interest in the work I do in Sweden and it's just a fascinating example of government involvement in a different education system to the usual case studies.
Academic research in the Nordics also comes from a more democratic, socially-minded perspective than you often get in a lot of EdTech discussions. So I like that there's a slightly different flavour to how people think about technology.
JV: Can you give me a little more detail on what you mean?
NM: When you talk about EdTech in the UK, for example, one of the big criticisms has been that it’s been very much led by the private sector and that there’s been no real engagement with the education profession.
When you say that to a Swedish audience, they look at you very strangely. They say: “That can't be your conclusion. We must be more democratic and work together to come up with better solutions.“
There is a fundamental assumption that schools, teachers, parents, unions and everyone involved should have a say on what goes on in Nordic schools. Which makes it a great place to research what happens if schools and teachers actually do have a bit more say in how things work. Does it actually make any difference to digital transformation or outcomes?
JV: Of course Jantelagen (Jante’s Law) and concepts of equity and equality are key Nordic values. But they have, I think, got lost in the recent debates here about screens, phones and books.
NM: Agreed and it's an important point to make. Because as we know from previous pushes elsewhere, when mobile phones are banned from schools, the middle class schools carry on using the technology where they need to, in the ways that they want to. It’s the same when funding is pulled - the more well resourced schools will carry on doing what they want if they see there's a need. So you do get digital divides building up.
One of the great benefits about government involvement in EdTech, I think, is that it gives learners an equal chance to use technologies that they wouldn't usually be able to access from home or in their communities. You could even make the argument that the next Spotify will come from an inner city kid coding on their phone in their bedroom with ChatGTP - that's nothing to do with the school at all.
So schools are great places to experience and experiment with different types of technology. If that opportunity is taken away from big swathes of different demographics, then you’ll get a two tier system with the digital haves and the digital have-nots. That’s something the Nordics, and Sweden in particular, have avoided to date because of their clear and relatively progressive digital strategies.
JV: So knowing that, what explanation can you give about the de-digitisation policies being explored by many Nordic governments at the moment?
NM: Well, there are some genuine conversations that I think we need to have. Do we want preschoolers using digital devices? Probably not. Should we have more books in school? Probably yes and those valid debates got rather glossed over in the push towards digitalisation.
But the digitalisation of schools has always been a political thing. Sweden’s 2017 to 2022 digital push was, for example, a great thing for the government to be seen to be doing. And over the last 30 years, many governments have really made political capital by promising a computer for every child, for example.
What we’re seeing now is just the flip side of that. Taking devices away is another way to be seen to be doing something when you're not actually doing much. But it looks good and it plays well to voters.
I don't think for a second that they're going to take computers out of secondary schools in Sweden, or maybe even the upper primary schools. I fully expect Swedish schools to carry on using digital tools and being digitised in the way that they were before. These plans actually give governments an excuse not to do the hard things that their education systems really need. Like developing a new curriculum that serves a 21st century population and future workforce needs.
JV: We’ll come back to that, but do you think there will be an impact on the Nordics’ international position as leading lights in EdTech and digital technologies?
NM: The glee with which these stories have been picked up globally has led me to believe that there is an international appetite for such plans - i.e that they aren't a completely niche or bonkers thing to do.
More books, more handwriting, less screens - these are really popular messages all around the world with families. But education experts are saying, “Hang on a minute, there is value in good technology. We shouldn't get sucked into simplistic debates about screen time etc.” But I think the politicians are going with popular opinion, and I dare say a few teachers will be quite happy to get devices out of classrooms as well. But that's not to say that we should be doing it.
JV: One argument Nordic governments are making to justify their plans is that the recent disappointing Pisa scores were down to the overuse of digital devices. What was your reading of the results?
NM: I don't think they say anything about the impact of EdTech on learning performance. Digital is not to blame for Sweden's or any other country’s Pisa woes any more than it has benefited those countries that are doing well.
Tech is always an easy thing to point to, as either a driver or an inhibitor of learning outcomes, depending on which way the numbers are going. Education is very complex and I’d argue there’s lots of other factors at play: Covid obviously, school discipline, teacher recruitment / burnout and loads of other local stuff that broad brush measures would never pick up on.
More broadly, I'm somewhat suspicious of all these international standardised measures. Their reliance on self-reporting and one-off testing is a very, very blunt instrument, so countries can move up and down significantly.
JV: You mentioned Covid, which is a clear presence throughout the Pisa reporting. But what impacts are you now seeing in schools that relate to the pandemic?
NM: I think Covid is having a delayed effect in many different ways, and we're seeing this clearly in schools. Particularly around students' sense of belonging and wellbeing. Large numbers of children in Australia and the UK, for example, are not turning up to school anymore and their parents don’t seem to really be onside with formal schooling either. That social contract has disappeared because of the pandemic and associated lockdowns.
I don’t think that anyone would deny that technology got education through Covid. But it’s worth emphasising that the tech that was used during Covid was not the best of EdTech, it was emergency remote schooling. EdTech could be a lot better than it was in Covid - we all know that.
JV: So what part could, or indeed, should AI be playing in our EdTech future?
NM: The first point I’d make is that we need to move people away from the idea that one technology or another can somehow solve education’s particular problems. AI is fascinating, but it’s clearly not the solution to every challenge a school, a teacher or a municipality has.
I’m particularly interested in the reality of when AI actually hits the classroom. What does this mean for a teacher's workload, for their skill development and what students can and cannot do? Then there's also a lot of other broader issues around data, IP and the environmental impact of AI. I sense that the current heated debates are around issues like cheating, but these more interesting, more esoteric issues will be ones that are a bit more relevant in 5 / 10 years time, rather than today.
JV: So as you gaze into your crystal ball, what does the world of EdTech look like in that time frame?
NM: In ten years time, I'm sure that AI will be to the fore, but to what extent its educational potential is realised will, I think, depend on government policy and legislation. There’s a clear history of EdTech coming in waves, so it’s difficult to say, but I’m sure that you'll still have AI and other digital technology in schools, but you will also have a lot of the long-running problems that this technology is touted as solving!
Particularly as some of the most pervasive uses in education are in administrative and institutional technology, rather than instructional technology. Schools and municipalities are now beholden to those tech systems - they can't possibly run without them. So, the debate about screens or the pros and cons of a particular technology is moot. We have digitised education systems, whether you like it or not. And no one's really saying that we should go back to paper-based administration.
I’m pretty sure that most students will sit fully online exams in ten years time. I also expect to see more mainstream interest in AI-powered, personalised learning and more automated recommendation systems where students are guided through their course by a chatbot or someone who is not their classroom teacher.
But I do think that face-to-face schools will continue to be around for a long, long time and I wouldn't want to see the concept or purpose of public education revolutionised. But I do think that universities will be in for a shock!
JV: How do you think they might be transformed?
NM: Well, it’s clear that Covid has ruptured the contract between students and the traditional notion of universities. The pandemic proved that students didn’t need to go into their institution to learn, so a lot of students are happy to do online Zoom or recorded lectures. Particularly if they are juggling part time jobs, caring for an elderly parent or have kids. In those cases, university is just a small part of their lives, so why would they devote a lot of time to it?
So I think that we’ll see more of an appetite for accelerated degrees as well as a lower % of people actually going to university in the first place. We may even see a two-tier system where you pay top dollar for face-to-face tuition in small classes, but much less for an online-only course. Ultimately, universities are market-driven and have to go where the customer wants, so change is likely to be quicker and more dramatic than in schools.
JV: If you could advise ministers to make three dramatic changes in order to create a Nordic education / EdTech utopia, what would you suggest?
NM: The first thing I would do is to make sure that there is a good level of accessibility that allows everybody to have the opportunity to learn online. That's not just giving everybody an iPad, but it’s also key to ensure that the wraparound stuff is also there - at home and at school. That could mean subsidising internet connectivity or even allowing families that don't have internet connectivity to have it for free. Without that, you end up with huge inequality in access and provision as we saw during Covid.
The second thing I would definitely recommend is to give teachers more choice - allow them to choose what to use or not to use, where and when they want / need. It’s crazy to mandate or ban the use of particular technologies - banning phones, for instance, just takes away the opportunity to use what are very powerful digital devices in really creative, really collaborative or really innovative and engaging ways.
Having said that, it’s important also to support teachers and schools to make those choices. It cannot just be left up to individuals. I’d argue that building an open-access, non-proprietary portal for teachers to swap information / advice and develop ad hoc professional learning communities should be a key part of that.
Similarly, there’s also certainly a role for the state to say: “Here are 20 tools we recommend for maths in Y6, that we've actually road tested and that we think are really appropriate for your use.”
JV: SETT is, of course, a huge professional learning community / opportunity. Can I ask what you’re going to be doing in the Nordic Track at the event?
NM: What I hope I can do is to start a conversation about what digitalisation might look like over the next five years. I think it is a really good opportunity for teachers and other educators to begin to have a serious, grown up conversation about what it is that we really want from EdTech, particularly in the light of this provocation from national governments.
We need to have a level-headed, balanced conversation, that isn’t so black or white. Because that leads to a worrying division between digital and analogue resources, which suggests schools need one or the other, when really the answer is that both are necessary.
I also want to come up with some better ways to make the most of technology. But also realising where we may have perhaps tipped too far the other way before.
JV: Do you think that there are education institutions that have been over-digitised?
NM: I think the compulsion was, if you weren't sure what you were doing, that you might just use technology for the sake of it because it's there and easily available, and it was seen to be the correct thing to be doing. As a result, there are lots of what you might call “empty uses of technology.”
I want to get rid of the hype around EdTech and to demystify it. We need to begin talking about what we want technology to do and what technology can do for us. Let’s not be driven by politicians looking to score quick points with voters, and instead try to work more collaboratively to agree on a common way forward.
I think the Swedish word lagom is a really neat way to think about it. That's where everyone wants to be and that’s where I think we're going to end up, despite all the rhetoric.
JV: Thanks for reading and please do share your thoughts / comments below.
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