Today’s Technology:  A Help or Hindrance to Learning?

Before entering the world of professional development in higher education, I spent many years as a lecturer in physics, teaching amongst other things the development and applications of solid-state electronic devices. With my students, I would often discuss how the invention of the transistor in 1947 by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley (for which they won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956), was one of the pivotal moments in technological history. This small component and the development of the integrated circuit not long after (in which billions of transistors can be fabricated on one single microchip) transformed our modern electronic devices and consequently, our lives.  Since then, computers have gone from room-sized behemoths to the pocket-sized, mobile devices we carry today, each holding exponentially more data. This miniaturization and increased efficiency has resulted in the high-speed processing required to handle the vast amounts of data and calculations required by AI.

These developments have drastically altered our lives and this is also being reflected in the way we learn.  However, a fundamental question arises, have we increased efficiency, or have we introduced new habits, some of which might be perceived as “lazy”?  Either way, if Theodore Roosevelt’s famous sentiment is true, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty”, how should academic staff respond to what I see as the “shortcut-society” generation?

In today’s information-rich world, we can access more knowledge than previous generations could have imagined. Yet even in 1971, Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate and social scientist, famously said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”, highlighting that information overload takes a toll on our ability to focus and process information. Since then, scientists have continued to raise concerns that digital distractions can create an unfavourable environment for developing higher cognitive functions in children and adolescents, and hinder the development of both grey and white matter, and verbal intelligence in children.

Technology has not only led to the increased availability of information with the pros and cons this may bring with it, but it also helps to foster greater flexibility and personalisation. As technology has become increasingly mobile, I think it has paradoxically made us less mobile. When your phone rings, you don’t need to walk over and take the phone off the wall; you simply pull it out of your pocket. You want to turn your TV on or off? You grab the remote. You need to adjust your lights or heating? An app on your phone can do that for you. Ordering a takeaway? You can do that easily online and have it delivered. And in 2023, the Netherlands had more online stores than physical shops, demonstrating the huge rise in our preference for online shopping!

Given this change in how we interact with the world, it’s only natural that students bring these expectations into the learning environment. Students can now watch lectures online at their convenience, skim Wikipedia summaries or use apps to learn instead of reading textbooks. They can also watch videos at a playback speed of 1.5x or 2x or subscribe to services that summarise books and read them aloud.

Another trend is the crowdsourcing of knowledge. Students can access vast online communities via platforms like Reddit or Quora, and GenAI can also be seen as a type of crowdsourcing, since it is trained on data generated by all of us.  The more personalised and immediate answers that students can get from GenAI also changes student expectations.  For example, I hear from my colleagues that students prefer to email their tutors to ask simple questions that could be answered by reading the course manual, because they are used to a personal response that saves them having to read through a whole document. They are accustomed to asking tools like ChatGPT to summarise whole articles instead of having to invest time in reading anything longer than a few paragraphs or bullet points.

This approach to learning could be seen as laziness, but it could also be seen as students taking more control over how and when they learn, or freeing up time to take on a side-hustle.  There was a time when higher education was only for the elite, but in the last century it has become more available to the masses. Whilst this has given more people the opportunity to learn, mass education has also made the learning experience more impersonal, with hundreds of students sitting together in crowded lecture halls.  So perhaps this modern drive for personalisation and flexibility will be an improvement to the learning experience, as these are the very characteristics of education that are encouraged, for example, by the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach to teaching.  UDL focuses on making education more accessible and engaging for all learners and eliminating barriers to learning.

With these thoughts in mind, our goal shouldn’t be to stop students from using technology like GenAI altogether, but to teach them how to use it effectively so they continue learning without becoming overly dependent. Over the past year, I’ve observed that students are most likely to rely on AI to do their work when they are under pressure, for example from lack of time or lack of understanding, or when they don’t see the value in the assigned task. While measures like enforcing examination conditions or using plagiarism checks can help curb over-reliance, more positive interventions are needed to encourage students to embrace the benefits of independent learning and hard work. Approaches such as creating authentic assessments that foster growth, creativity, enjoyment and personal expression, or offering greater choice in how students demonstrate their achievement of learning outcomes, can be highly effective.

These are some of the ideas I’ll be exploring in more depth at my OEB24 Learning Café, where I will share some examples of real course adaptations that either motivate students to become better self-regulated learners, or to use GenAI in more constructive ways, so that they learn from and with AI. I hope that the ideas put forward and discussions that take place during my session will help you to encourage students to engage more deeply in their learning and avoid shortcuts, whether these take the form of over-reliance on the wealth of technology we have at our fingertips, copying from peers or social loafing.

Further inspiration

Donna’s OEB24 Learning Café AI as a Learning Partner or Barrier: Potential Impact and Interventions will take place on Thursday, November 28.  You can also check out one of Donna’s online lectures about the development of modern electronic devices here.

Universal Design for Learning focuses on designing education to include multiple means of Engagement, Representation and Action & Expression. Richard Powers, Online Operations & Learning Designer for Virtual Exchange at the University of Stuttgart has a OEB24 pre-conference workshop on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) 3.0: What’s New & Why It Matters on Wednesday, November 27.

If you’re interested in reading a more about the history and development of learning technologies, you can check out these articles by Professor Gilly Salmon, founder and CEO of Education Alchemists Ltd:

Navigating the Learning Technology Odyssey: 30 Years of Adventure

May the Fourth Be with you: Creating Education 4.0

Professor Gilly Salmon, Wilfred Rubens and 8 other colleagues from around the world (including Donna Carroll) also invite you to their collaborative learning café called The Trend is your Friend at OEB24 on Friday, November 29.

Finally, before you decide to have a digital detox, you can read more about how the Internet may be changing our cognition in this 2019 article by Firth et al or check out this 2008 article by Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Written for OEB Global 2024 by Donna Carroll.