A second perspective views technology through a value-negative lens, meaning that technology cannot impact teaching and learning in any positive way and does not belong in the classroom. These theorists often allege that technology is a waste of time, money, and public policy initiative, since the same achievement goals can be accomplished with and without technology.
A third perspective views educational technology as value-neutral, meaning that technology is neither inherently good nor inherently bad by its nature but is only as beneficial as the teaching practices it enhances. When used in tandem with effective instructional practices, technology is likely to have a number of positive impacts in the classroom including gains in student achievement, engagement, and motivation. We consider each perspective briefly.
The Value-Positive Lens
The rise of educational technology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries resulted in a call for transformational change in U.S. public policy. In their review of twenty years of educational technology policy, Katie Culp, Margaret Honey, and Ellen Mandinach (2005) wrote:
In 1995 the tone of policy reports changes noticeably. In part this is a response to the emergence of the Internet as a major force driving changes in business, civic life and, to some extent, education. During this period, policy reports begin to present education technology as a driver of school reform, rather than as a class of tools and resources that, to varying extents, could be matched to educational challenges already recognized by educators. In these reports technology becomes a tool of transformation, which promised, simply by its presence and capabilities, to cause changes in how teachers teach, how schools are organized, and how students work together and learn. (p. 301)
These policy changes reflect a value-positive view of educational technology. Initial expressions of the value-positive view took place prior to the advent of the Internet, however. In 1980, educational technology advocate Seymour Papert published the first edition of Mindstorms, his groundbreaking book about the first student-friendly computer programming language. Papert (1993) theorized that this computer language—called LOGO—would help students learn mathematics “in a context which is to learning mathematics what living in France is to learning French” (p. 6). Papert made two central claims in Mindstorms: (1) children can learn to master computer skills, and (2) once children learn to use computers, it will change the way they learn everything else. The second claim, that computers would fundamentally revolutionize the way children learn, inspired many efforts to put computers into children’s hands, including the aforementioned OLPC initiative, with which Papert was principally involved. OLPC founding members also included Google, eBay, Quanta, Red Hat, and Marvell. Partners of the nonprofit include companies such as Citigroup, Pentagram, Underwriters Laboratories, United Nations Development Program, Foley Hoag, and fuseproject. By 2013, more than two million students and teachers in the developing world had received OLPC’s patented XO laptop, despite little to no research in support of its effectiveness (Cristia et al., 2012). These organizations share the common perspective that technology has the power to fundamentally and positively change the way children think and learn.
The Value-Negative Lens
Retrospective analyses reveal that value-positive conjectures may have been overly optimistic. Educational technology, it seems, has not revolutionized education, at least to the extent originally imagined. Judi Harris (2005) commented, “Despite more than two decades of effort, technology as ‘Trojan horse’ for educational reform has succeeded in only a minority of K–12 contexts” (p. 120), and Richard Noeth and Boris Volkov (2004) stated that “despite schools flooded with computers, the evidence is mixed as to whether overall student achievement has notably increased or the achievement gap has visibly narrowed as a result” (p. 7). The U.S. Department of Education (2004) lamented, “We have not realized the promise of technology in education.… Computers, instead of transforming education, were often shunted to a ‘computer room,’ where they were little used and poorly maintained” (p. 10). In a policy review, Culp and her colleagues (2005) observed that “education technology experts, who have largely been responsible for guiding and informing policymakers’ understandings of the potential role of technology in education over the past 20 years, have provided energizing, exciting visions of how technology could potentially ‘change everything’” (pp. 302–303). However, they noted that the technological uses policymakers and researchers hoped for are not yet reflected in widespread instructional practice: “What begins to surface in these policy documents is a widening gap between the promise and potential of technology and the ways in which technology actually gains traction in school settings” (p. 302).
Indeed, qualitative data show that most teachers use new forms of technology primarily to accomplish the same tasks they were already accomplishing (such as lesson planning, information presentation, and personal productivity) rather than to restructure their practice to facilitate higher-order thinking skills (Culp et al., 2005; Ottenbreit-Leftwich et al., 2012). Furthermore, when teachers do make changes to their practice, technology is not the primary catalyst for those changes (Dexter et al., 1999). Research by Dexter and her colleagues (1999) illustrated that:
The primary reason [for change in instructional practice] was of internal origin and agency: Change was the consequence of reflecting on teaching practice, its goals, and its efficacy.… [Teachers also] mentioned specifically a catalyst of external origin: schoolwide expectations and instructional emphases, such as performance assessment, or a new instructional focus adopted at their school, like cooperative learning. (p. 227)
Iliana Snyder (1998) wrote that “no technology … can guarantee any particular change in cultural practices simply by its ‘nature’” (p. 140), and Robert Branch and Christa Deissler (2008) agreed that “the use of technology merely for technology’s sake is ineffective and often a misuse of resources” (p. 210). Technology, it seems, cannot yield achievement gains in a vacuum. Technology, on its own, is not enough.
The Value-Neutral Lens
Theorists who see technology through a value-neutral lens attempt to reconcile competing value-positive and value-negative arguments to create a third viewpoint. They concede that both value-positive and value-negative theorists make valuable points. For instance, Collins and Halverson (2009) stated, “We think that the skeptics are correct in that there are deep incompatibilities between technology and schooling but that the enthusiasts are correct in that education must change to stay relevant in the wake of the Knowledge Revolution” (p. 7). Educational technology may not have revolutionized and transformed education, such theorists admit, but that does not mean it has no place in a classroom. Despite an unrealized technological miracle, Culp and her colleagues (2005) described the preceding two decades’ increases in technological infrastructure—including a move to widespread computer and Internet access in public schools—as “major accomplishments” (p. 299).
Rather than endorsing or openly rejecting the potential of educational technology, Harris (2005) distinguished between using technology and using technology well. She encouraged educational technologists to modify the value-positive view of technology as a vehicle for education reform in favor of a more neutral view of technology integration. Harris defined technology integration simply as “the pervasive and productive use of educational technologies for purposes of learning and teaching” (p. 119). She wrote:
I urge us to consider seriously whether it is more appropriate to try to change the nature of teaching and learning through the integration of educational technologies—or to help teachers and learners use appropriate curriculum-based technological applications more pervasively in all their varied forms. (p. 121)
Rather than viewing the lackluster results from technology-fueled reform efforts as failures, Culp and her colleagues (2005) were optimistic about the gradual increase in technology use. They believed it allowed educational technology advocates to “understand