Post by Penny Wheeler
How does your institution work to protect its community from these harms?
Welcome back to day 2 of CSET2025, where we extend our critical view on educational technology, out beyond the school or university into society.
Later this week we can consider the benefits that educational technology can bring – but what about the harms it causes? Is this something that we can consider at a regional level, or are we affected by wider forces?
Take, for example, the software available to check that submitted assignments are the students’ own work. The University of Canberra recently changed to using Turnitin rather than the text-matching software Ouriginal: UC insiders can let us know how and why this change was made, but the acquisition of Ouriginal by the bigger company must be a major factor.
Similarly, in April 2023, Turnitin incorporated an AI-generated text detector, and every university with Turnitin in its workflow had to decide whether to use it or not. For a local example: ANU first enabled, and then the next year disabled, this functionality – this post from ANU’s TELT blog discusses the ‘tough question’ of accuracy, which may have been part of this decision. For our topic today on social harm, however, it’s the software company’s decision to hide this tool from student users which highlights issues for the relationships between staff and students, or between institution and staff.
The 2024 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report – Teaching and Learning edition highlights data privacy and security protection as one of its top six trends in technology. Teaching about and taking measures to combat cyber threats is important everywhere but has heightened importance in Canberra, where staff and graduates are closely entwined with the work of the federal government and with nationally significant research, and security clearance is required for most public service roles.
What issues or harms are you concerned about in relation to platforms used for education? What steps can be taken to mitigate these harms, by educators, education technologists, or institutions?
What are your priorities for mitigating harm for your students, and how prepared are you to deal with them?
Social harms related to technology can also include cyberbullying, online harassment, misogyny, and racism, and we as educators are aware and perhaps a bit overwhelmed by our responsibilities to support students and colleagues. In response to these issues, the Australian government passed world-first legislation which will ban anyone under the age of 16 from using social media. However, there are significant concerns from the Australian Human Rights Commissioner that a complete ban of social media use for young people will cut off valuable support networks and reduce their agency, and ANU academics have noted that there is much that is unclear in exactly how the ban will work and how age will be verified on these platforms.
For those who work with young people, what are your thoughts on the harms of social media or the impact of the ban on their online experiences? What approaches do you use in your daily practice around moderating the use of social media in the classroom, or for educational purposes?
Further reading
Gillen, J. J., Freeman, M., & Tootell, H. (2017). Human behavior in online social networks. 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISTAS.2017.8318979. Dr Holly Tootell is a Senior Lecturer in STEM education at UC, and a recent Science and Technology Australia Superstar, who researches online communication networks, personality, and how young people understand and react to cybersecurity risks.
For a great overview of the literature on critical approaches to ed tech, see Macgilchrist, F. (2021). What is ‘critical’ in critical studies of edtech? Three responses. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 243-249. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2021.1958843 Macgilchrist’s three perspectives on ed tech are transformation, stability (inequalities and injustices) and speculation.
Pelletier, K., McCormack, M., Muscanell, N., Reeves, J., Robert, J., & Arbino, N. (2024). 2024 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition. EDUCAUSE. https://www.educause.edu/horizon-report-teaching-and-learning-2024
Gilliard, C, and singh, s, s., Eds. (2021). Themed issue on surveillance and educational technologies. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Vol. 20. https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/toward-abolishing-online-proctoring-counter-narratives-deep-change-and-pedagogies-of-educational-dignity/
8 thoughts on “CSET2025 – Topic 2: What social harms are we seeing in Canberra associated with digital technology and education?”
I work in quite a specific area – inclusive and accessible learning design and teaching. I regularly see the accessibility of ed tech being a very late consideration in procurement, implementation and/or upgrade activities. Inclusivity is rarely considered at all.
This is mirrored in teaching, where ed tech is often used without considering the needs of all students.
Ed tech can be a tool for creating more equitable and inclusive learning experiences but too often it actually promotes further inequality.
So, what can we do? Knowledge about accessibility and inclusion needs to move from sitting with an ‘expert’ advisor to being a fundamental part of the learning and teaching skillset. Easier said than done!
One problem made worse by educational technology is further casualization of 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 just entering the profession. It turned out that while completing their computing degree my mentee had been working on a Canberra university student inquiry desk and is now part time on tech support at a private education provider in Canberra. They were sacked by the university due to budget pressures. 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.
A related concern here is the underlying belief by many in HE leadership that using ed tech reduces the amount of teaching required, leading to having fewer teaching staff overall or fewer permanent and more casual teaching staff. Integrating ed tech into learning and teaching changes how we teach – it does not (or should not) reduce the effort put into teaching.
This makes me think of today’s article in the Future Campus arguing that fully online learning is not sufficient to grant a degree: https://futurecampus.com.au/2025/02/18/the-real-cost-of-convenience-online-learnings-moment-of-truth/
“The key concern lies specifically with degrees conducted entirely online without any supervised verification of student learning. While online learning and the assessment of it can be an excellent complement to traditional education or even comprise almost all of a degree program, allowing completely unsupervised assessment of online learning necessarily compromises the integrity of that award.”
The idea that learning online is “less than” (such as the perspective in this article) or requires less resources is definitely pervasive!
Hi Katie,
I really appreciated your point about fully online learning and its legitimacy. I think it might affect students socially in various ways also. Since we area all spending more time on screens—for work, study, sodating, and entertainment. While digital tools work well for those who prefer being online, they can also lead to a disconnect from real-life interactions.
I know this is a very obvious observation, but it’s still worth mentioning.
I think it is really important to bring up because it’s one of those “wicked problems” that affects our work very directly. I hope we can find some balance in this space to support flexibility and inclusion for online students while simultaneously not contributing to overall disconnect from in-person interactions. You might appreciate some of the case studies and examples shared in the Day 4 post about “hopescrolling”!
For me, transparency is the key issue here. Instead of banning or keeping these tools hidden from students, institutions should have clear policies on how they are used. When students don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, it can create stress and uncertainty and even push them to find ways around the system.
It’s also important to have open conversations about the real impact of these tools with students, both the benefits and the potential downsides, so students can make informed decisions about their learning.
The first step in making this work is for management, educators, and learning designers to be on the same page. A clear, shared understanding of the policy and how to implement it will make it easier for students to navigate and engage with these tools effectively.
Thank you so much for these thoughts: together they made me wonder whether technology (use and accessibility) is part of student advocacy services at our HE institutions in Canberra. Student advocacy is an interesting function, often provided by the student union and funded by the Student Services and Amenities Fee, interesting for critical studies of education because its existence implies that students may sometimes need protection from institutional harms. I went looking for how support for digital accessibility, cyberbullying, inclusive digital learning environments, and fairness in systems, and this is what I could find, publicly available:
* ACU (no tech on this page) https://www.acu.edu.au/student-life/student-services/student-advocacy
ANU (accessibility a separate service) https://www.anu.edu.au/students/learning-platforms/support-available
CSU (wide ranging support) https://www.csu.edu.au/current-students/support/rights-and-responsibilities/advocacy-and-support/student-advocacy-services
UC (part of health and related services) https://www.canberra.edu.au/on-campus/health-and-support
UNSW (many kinds of support, not tech-related) e.g. https://www.unsw.edu.au/canberra/about-us/equity-diversity-inclusion
At your institution, are digital accessibility services located in Information Technology Services or (for those universities that have one) the central learning and teaching workgroup?