INJUSTICE EMBEDDED IN GOOGLE CLASSROOM AND GOOGLE MEET: A TECHNO-ETHICAL AUDIT OF REMOTE EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES

Main Article Content

Benjamin Gleason
Marie K. Heath

Abstract

Forcing pre-COVID-19 structures of school onto the realities of the global pandemic ignores the systemic structures embedded in public education which made pre-pandemic school places of harm for students marginalized by racism and neoliberalism. Informed by critical theories of educational technology, this study investigated how the design of technologies central to emergency remote education carry powerful perspectives about the nature and dimensions of learning. We used the conceptual framework of a techno-ethical audit which asks scholars and practitioners to analyze technologies in order to uncover assumptions of pedagogy, implications for democracy, and complicities in injustice inherent to the design of the technology. The audit found a system that limited meaningful interaction, envisioned students as technology users with little agency or control, and predisposed students to unnecessary practices of surveillance and monitoring, all while subjecting them to regimes of data collection and sharing for corporate profit. Applied at scale and in marginalized communities, the current system denies justice for millions of students subjected to harmful educational practices. Through this study, we present three recommendations to improve online learning: teach the crisis; implement project-based learning; and investigate experiences with technology.

Article Details

Section
Articles - Special Issue

References

Apple, M. W. (2004). Creating difference: Neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the politics of educational reform. Educational Policy, 18(1), 12-44.

Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new JIM code. Hoboken, NJ, US: John Wiley & Sons.

Cammarota, J. (2007). A social justice approach to achievement: Guiding latina/o students toward educational attainment with a challenging, socially relevant curriculum. Equity & Excellence in Education, 40(1), 87-96.

Cattafi, K. (2020, September 11). Edgewater school called police after sixth-grader had Nerf gun during Zoom class. NorthJersey.com [blog]. Retrieved from https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/bergen/edgewater/2020/09/11/edgewater-nj-police-called-after-student-had-nerf-gun-during-zoom-class/3468499001/

Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2020, October 13). Daily updates of totals by week and state provisional death counts for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). [Report]. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

Chen, G. (2020, August 13). Students of color disproportionately disciplined in schools. Public College Press. COVID-19. [blog]. Retrieved from https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/appalachia/blogs/blog29_dropout-prevention-in-COVID-19.asp

Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and machines: The classroom use of technology since 1920. New York, NY, US: Teachers College Press.

della Cava, M. (2020, April 18). Latinos disproportionately dying, losing jobs because of the coronavirus: 'Something has to change'. USA Today. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/04/18/coronavirus-latinos-disproportionately-dying-losing-jobs/5149044002/

Dumas, M. J. (2014). ‘Losing an arm’: Schooling as a site of black suffering. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 1-29.

Evelyn, K. (2020, April 8). 'It's a racial justice issue': Black Americans are dying in greater numbers from Covid-19. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/its-a-racial-justice-issue-black-americans-are-dying-in-greater-numbers-from-covid-19

Ewing, E. L. (2018). Ghosts in the schoolyard: Racism and school closings on Chicago's South Side. Chicago, IL, US: University of Chicago Press.

Feenberg, A. (1991). Critical theory of technology. New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.

Faubion, J. D. (Ed.). (2000). Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 3. Power. New York, NY, US: The New Press.

Fox, C. (21 January 2019). Google hit with £44m GDPR fine. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46944696

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2001). Critical thinking, cognitive presence, and computer conferencing in distance education. American Journal of Distance Education, 15(1), 7-23.

Gleason, B., & Von Gillern, S. (2018). Digital citizenship with social media: Participatory practices of teaching and learning in secondary education. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 21(1), 200-212.

Gleason, B. (2013). #Occupy Wall Street: Exploring informal learning about a social movement on Twitter. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), 966-982.

Grose, J. (2020, October 14). Mothers are the shock absorbers of our society: The pandemic is forcing moms out of work at great financial, societal and marital costs. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/parenting/working-moms-job-loss-coronavirus.html

Google Suite (nd). Retrieved from https://edu.google.com/products/gsuite-for-education

Healy, J. (2020, April 12). It’s “People people people” as lines stretch across America. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/coronavirus-long-lines-america.htm

Heath, M. K., & Segal, P. (2020). The trap of technocentrism: (Re)Centering pedagogy for emergency remote teaching. In R. Ferdig, E. Baumgartner, R. Hartshorne, R. Kaplan-Rakowski, & C. Mouza (Eds.), Teaching, technology, and teacher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: Stories from the field. Waynesville, NC, USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)

Heath, M. K. (2020). Buried treasure or Ill-gotten spoils: the ethics of data mining and learning analytics in online instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 1-4.

hooks, b. (1995). Killing rage: Ending racism. New York, NY, US: Henry Holt.

Klein, R. (2020, August 11). The new school suspension: blocked from online classrooms. Huffpost. [blog] Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/school-discipline-remote-learning_n_5f329829c5b64cc99fde4d64

Krajcik, J. S., & Blumenfeld, P. C. (2006). In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), Handbook of the Learning Sciences. Project-based learning. p. 317-341. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., & Mason, L. E. (2020). Editorial: Technology won’t save us - A call for technoskepticism in social studies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(1), 108-120.

Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., & Willet, K. B. S. (2019). Foregrounding technoethics: Toward critical perspectives in technology and teacher education. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 27(4), 555-574. Retrieved from Retrieved from https://citejournal.org/volume-20/issue-1-20/social-studies/editorial-technology-wont-save-us-a-call-for-technoskepticism-in-social-studies

Min, H. (2019, September 5,). Google to pay $170 million for violating kids' privacy on YouTube. CBS News. Retrieved from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ftc-fines-google-170-million-for-violating-childrens-privacy-on-youtube/

Moeller, J., Brackett, M. A., Ivcevic, Z., & White, A. E. (2020). High school students’ feelings: Discoveries from a large national survey and an experience sampling study. Learning and Instruction, 66, 101301.

Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. New York, NY, US: Public Affairs.

Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York, NY, US: NYU Press.

Pickert, R. (2020, April 23). U.S. jobless claims at 4.43 million in rout’s fifth week. Bloomberg. Retrieved from: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/u-s-jobless-claims-at-4-43-million-in-labor-rout-s-fifth-week?sref=vuYGislZ

Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practices. London, UK: Sage.

Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia (nd). Dropout Prevention in the Time of Covid-19. [report] Retrieved from https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/appalachia/blogs/blog29_dropout-prevention-in-COVID-19.asp

Romm, T. (2020, March 16). ‘It shouldn’t take a pandemic’: Coronavirus exposes Internet inequality among U.S. students as schools close their doors. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/16/schools-internet-inequality-coronavirus/

Selwyn, N. (2010). Looking beyond learning: Notes towards the critical study of educational technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(1), 65-73.

Singer, N., & Wakabayashi, D. (February 20, 2020). New Mexico Sues Google Over Children’s Privacy Violations. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/new-mexico-google-lawsuit.html

Solnit, R. (2020, April 2). What disasters reveal about hope and humanity. WAMU.org [blog]. Retrieved from https://wamu.org/story/20/04/02/rebecca-solnit-on-what-disasters-reveal-about-hope-and-humanity/

Suggs, E. (2019, March 11). Mari Copeny: Activist, 11, is face, voice of Flint water crisis. Atlanta Journal Constitution. (A3). Retrieved from https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/mari-copeny-activist-face-voice-flint-water-crisis/ltBhSYnuS7ViDK6W8DHeeP/

Taub, A. (2020, April 6). A new Covid-19 crisis: Domestic abuse rises worldwide. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/world/coronavirus-domestic-violence.html

Tufekci, Z. (2018). How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved from https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/14/240325/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/

Vaidhyanathan, S. (2012). The googlization of everything:(and why we should worry). Berkley, CA, US: University of California Press.

VanAsdalan, L.C. (2020, September 25). More students ditch York County public schools for charters. The York Daily Record. Retrieved from https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/news/education/2020/09/25/more-students-ditch-york-county-public-schools-charters/3510941001/

Williamson, B., Eynon, R., & Potter, J. (2020). Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency. Learning, Media, Technology, 45(2), 107-114.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London, UK: Profile Books.