Post by Penny Wheeler
Welcome, everyone, to CSET2025 (Canberra edition): it’s great to have you here this week! The theme for the week is ‘problematising education and digital technology’, and we’re going to consider this theme via 4 topics, today’s being:
What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround EdTech in Canberra and district?
Canberra is a highly educated and highly credentialed region, with nearly three-quarters of the population having completed Year 12 (as compared to Australia as a whole, only 56.8%), and with 43% holding a degree, Bachelors or higher, compared to 26.3% of Australia’s population. The ABS report on education and work (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2024) says nearly 17.9% of the ACT population aged 15-74 are currently enrolled in study (a larger proportion than any other state or territory).
To teach these people, there are at least 8,000 teachers in the ACT public schools, and more than 8,000 staff working in the universities with campuses in the ACT. Each of these universities have strong interests in digital technology, computing and widespread applications of technology, but despite this and despite our commitment to education in general, Canberrans don’t often get a sense of the critical conversations around educational technology that are happening locally, or have opportunities to learn from each other and from local developments.
Hence our discussions this week for CSET2025. What kind of concerns does educational technology, its application and its future, raise for you, where you are working? Are you thinking about any of the following issues, for example?
- Our schools in Canberra are relatively well staffed and also well resourced as far as ed tech goes. Are we making good use of it?
- Are we considering the ethics of a technology when the Directorate buys it for our school or the University buys it for our faculty or college?
- Do decision-makers consider the teachers’ point of view when purchasing ed tech?
- What kind of curriculum is best suited to ‘personalised learning’?
- What are the environmental impacts of buying and discarding ed tech equipment? Do they go beyond the Territory?
- Do managers think ‘artificial intelligence’ can substitute for my work in teaching?
— perhaps the last is a pretty live question, given the redundancies flying about at the end of 2024!
This is just a starting point – please add your questions and concerns in the comments below: what are the pressing issues around ed tech for us in Canberra? You can take your thinking further – how would we conduct research into these issues, locally?
Friday this week: If you are able to attend or listen in to the Friday evening CSET2025 event at the end of this week, you will have the pleasure of hearing Kate Highfield, Associate Professor of Education at the University of Canberra, start our evening discussions with her thoughts on how digital technology relates to the needs of staff and children in early childhood. We have included a couple of Kate’s articles in the ‘Further reading’ below.
Further reading
Bushnell, I. (2023, 2 August). Canberra’s status as a tech “supercluster” driving growth and job creation. Riotact. https://the-riotact.com/canberras-status-as-a-tech-supercluster-driving-growth-and-job-creation/688741
Edwards, S., Nolan, A., Henderson, M., Grieshaber, S., Highfield, K., Salamon, A., Skouteris, H., & Straker, L. (2020). Rationale, design and methods protocol for participatory design of an online tool to support industry service provision regarding digital technology use ‘with, by and for’ young children. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(23), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17238819
Lansdown, S. (2023, March 9). How schools are bringing artificial intelligence into the classroom. Canberra Times https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8106758/how-schools-are-bringing-artificial-intelligence-into-the-classroom/
Nolan, A., Edwards, S., Salamon, A., Straker, L., Grieshaber, S., Skouteris, H., Henderson, M., Highfield, K., & Bartlett, J. (2022). Young children’s agency with digital technologies. Children and Society, 36(4), 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12512
9 thoughts on “CSET2025 – Topic 1: What are our problems with EdTech?”
Penny, thanks for the very timely analysis. I assume this is the right place to post, but I don’t see any others. Do I not see them until after I post? Anyway, here goes…
Rather than ‘problematising education and digital technology’, I hope we can do some ‘solutionizing’.
The pressing issue for me with EdTech is keeping up with new stuff and working out what is going to save me time with my computer students.
So far today, I have discovered that despite spending much of the weekend processing the backlog of applications for course credit from students, another 14 popped up this morning. If only there was an AI thingie, which could do these.
Then I went to a lecture (yes, an actual lecture in a lecture theater), where the internet students got their briefing, the students and staff introduced themselves. That is the last lecture for the semester, with the learning management system being used to keep track of everything.
The last thing this morning was meeting the staff for a multi-university project to attract more diverse students to STEM. EdTech could be a big part of that, reducing the intimidating feeling of the average Australian university campus.
ps: Do we really need to read all those readings? It is a bit like homework. Fortunately several were behind firewalls, so I could skip them.
I like the “Canberra Triangle” in Ian Bushnell’s article. I identified a smaller “Canberra Start-up Business Boomerang” between ANU and Civic: https://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/2015/04/designing-innovation-course-part-3.html#cbb
Thank you, Tom, for starting the discussion in exactly the right place.
I very much like your Canberra Startup Business Boomerang — the Nexus sites of UNSW https://www.unsw.edu.au/canberra/about-us/our-campuses/launch would add to it, perhaps bending it a bit more. Some of these Canberra startups are education-focussed – here are a couple more that people might know: Indigitalhttps://www.indigital.net.au/, and The Easy Read Toolbox https://www.easyreadtoolbox.info/
I can see you’ve got some excellent use cases for tech-supported course management and conversations. In this week’s discussions, however, we are pausing our considerations on how technologies can solve existing problems to instead think about whether there are new problems raised by education technology (Williamson et al., 2019). Take, for example, how this article (not homework, just an extra helping) reviews the question of ed tech as a disruptor, post-COVID:
Teräs, M., Suoranta, J., Teräs, H. et al. Post-Covid-19 Education and Education Technology ‘Solutionism’: a Seller’s Market. Postdigital Science and Education, 2, 863–878 (2020) — open access link: https://rdcu.be/d97jG
Thanks as always, Tom, for sharing your thinking.
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* Williamson, B., Potter, J., & Eynon, R. (2019). New research problems and agendas in learning, media and technology: the editors’ wishlist. Learning, Media and Technology, 44(2), 87–91. https://doi-org.virtual.anu.edu.au/10.1080/17439884.2019.1614953
One problem made worse by educational technology is further casualization of the teaching staff and the support workforce.
If the teaching is coordinated, and largely mediated, via a computer system, it is much easier to have a casual workforce. Staff don’t have to be in any particular place and only need to be employed for a few days, hours, or perhaps minutes, at a time. They might just be employed until the AI works out how to do their job, and then just to do the remaining bits the AI gets wrong.
Yesterday, I met with a mentee in a program the Australian Computer Society runs for people entering the profession. While completing their computing degree my mentee had been working on a university student inquiry desk and is now doing tech support at a private education provider in Canberra. They were terminated by the university due to budget pressures and their new private sector employer doesn’t have permanent staff in Canberra, only casuals. One option for them to have a “permanent” job I suggested was to get CBRIN to help them set up a company & contract themselves out to Canberra’s educational institutions.
ps: I am relieved I am in the right place for the discussion. A few months ago I was supposed to join a slow online conversation on education but never actually found where it was.
EdTech always seems to follow trends; one moment, it’s gamification, then it’s virtual reality (VR), etc. While these innovations have great potential, they often get adopted in education without enough thought about their real and long-term impact.
The problem isn’t just that we’re jumping from one trend to the next, it’s that this cycle actually creates new challenges. Schools and universities pour resources into the latest tools, only to move on when the next big thing arrives, leaving behind half-integrated technologies. Plus, learning designers are constantly expected to keep up, often without the proper training or time to embed these tools in a way that truly benefits students.
Of course, some trends, like AI, aren’t just passing fads. AI is not something we can afford to ignore; it’s reshaping education and the way we work. But even with AI, the danger is in adopting it without careful thought.
Instead of simply reacting to the hype, we should be asking: Is this technology truly enhancing student learning, or are we adopting it without thinking about its long-term impact and who it really benefits? More importantly, how can we ensure that it genuinely serves education, integrating it in a way that not only supports learning but becomes a meaningful learning experience in itself?
I believe that researching the learning designers’ and management perspectives, plus educators and students on any emerging trend, would be highly beneficial. Even if conducted as a case study, such research could provide valuable insights into various opinions, helping the university understand both the challenges and opportunities these technologies bring. At least we can ensure that new technologies are adopted in ways that truly enhance learning rather than simply following market-driven trends.
Hi Sara, thanks for sharing this. I have had similar thoughts around new fads and moral panics around technology, and how universities rush into adopting them. (I recall being in a meeting around 2010 about how the university I worked for was planning to invest in the virtual world Second Life!)
Katie, do you mean invest actual capital or invest staff time? — some universities have ventured beyond being customers to being shareholders in the company. Is this a problem for education?
A bit of both in that example! The university was keen to invest in a locally-created virtual world app for use in education, however it never really got off the ground in the way they hoped. It’s interesting to consider the commercial versus start-up / in-house development options. When I’ve participated in procurement processes, any local or small business seeking to get started is excluded by the university as not “sufficiently mature” to engage.
Hi Sara, so great to hear from a Canberra researcher / learning designer 🙂
Your description of learning designers rushing towards the next project is a great point — not that they can’t keep up with the rigorous institutional demands, they’re used to that, I think, but that there is such a challenge to find the time to go deep into the affordances and imagine new uses for new tools as well as be able to usefully take account of the emotional reactions of their different customers – managers, staff and students. AI might give designers back some time by supporting their workflow, but only the rare AI platform — say, Riff https://riffbot.ai/ for example — encourages reflection in the user.
For me this is one benefit of working alongside a research project: research forces you to slow down and look hard and long at the problems you and others experience, and make sense of them.
Thank you so much for your comment!
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share a few thoughts on some EdTech challenges that echo earlier comments about chasing trends.
Student Experience:
While new tools are exciting, there’s a risk that an overload of technology can lead to burnout and stress for students. It’s important to consider whether these innovations truly enhance learning or simply add complexity.
Supporting Teachers:
Our teachers and support staff need robust training to effectively integrate these tools. Without ongoing professional development, even the most promising technology may not achieve its full potential in the classroom.