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Use of ICT To Assist Students With Learning Difficulties: An Actor-Network Analysis
Use of ICT To Assist Students With Learning Difficulties: An Actor-Network Analysis
An Actor-Network Analysis
Tas Adam, Arthur Tatnall
this paper the term Learning Difficulties (LD) will be used to cover all of these other
terms [4]. The definition for the term Learning Difficulties that is used in Australia is
similar to that used in the USA:
A generic term that refers to a heterogeneous group of students who have
significant difficulties in the acquisition of literacy and numeracy and who
are not covered in the Commonwealth’s definition of a student/child with a
disability… Learning disability is believed to be a difficulty that is intrinsic to
the individual and not a direct result of other conditions or influences [5].
Given the complexity of the definition of learning difficulties, one way to represent
the differences is with the following Venn diagram where the term Learning
Difficulties is used to refer to a large group of children who need extra assistance with
schooling and Learning Disabilities refers to students who constitute a small sub-
group that exhibit severe and unexplained problems.
Learning
Difficulties
Learning
Disabilities
Although policies have existed for some time in many countries to integrate
students with learning difficulties into the mainstream classroom, this has not always
provided the best learning environment for these students [6]; hence the need for
some Special Schools. Bulgren [7] and Agran [8], support the view that some students
with LD required an alternative approach to their learning and numerous ‘integration’
or ‘remedial’ programs have proved inefficient towards the total learning of this
group of students. The literature also shows that in some selected fields, for example
in mathematics and social studies, specialist instruction has been applied to this group
of individuals with little success.
Special Schools are complex socio-technical entities and research into their
curriculum needs to take account of this complexity. A significant difficulty arises in
framing research in a situation like this that involves both technological and human
actors. When dealing with the related contributions of both human and non-human
actors, actor-network theory [10-12] provides a useful framework. Actor-network
theory (ANT) reacts against the idea that characteristics of humans and social
organisations exist which distinguish actions from the inanimate behaviour of
technological and natural objects, instead offering a socio-technical approach in
which neither social nor technical positions are privileged.
The actors involved in the adoption of this technology to assist students with
special needs include: students, parents, teachers, school principals, school ICT
specialist teachers, the School Council, the Web, computers, Education Department
policies, learning technology policy, the school environment, classroom
environments, learning approaches and paradigms, delivery methods of instruction,
engagement methods, thinking processes, technology infrastructure-bandwidth,
curriculum, Internet resources, digital libraries and other schools.
In an ANT framework, actors are seen to contest and negotiate with each other in
an attempt to influence the final outcome in a direction to their own liking. The
Education Department, for example, might want ensure that all schools offer a similar
level of service to students and to ensure their accountability. The parents of a student
with LD, on the other hand, would want the best for their own child regardless of
Tas Adam and Arthur Tatnall
what was going on in other schools. The technology (both hardware and software)
itself acts in the way it was designed, both intentionally and unintentionally, to act.
A major challenge to schools of this type is to get all these actors to form a
common problematisation [10] of their task – to all see the problem in the same way.
If this can be achieved then all the actors can work together to achieve a common
goal, and ANT offers some ideas on how this might be achieved. ANT considers
associations and interactions between human and non-human actors but its proponents
make no claim that this approach can do any more than shed a little light on how a
given approach is taken or technology is adopted. Despite this, we believe that if a
researcher understands how the factors involved in the adoption of a new technology
interact then it is possible to affect the outcome by assisting favourable interactions
and doing one’s best to reduce unfavourable interactions.
The concept of an actor underlies ANT, where an actor is the term used to
represent any physical entity that has an effect on the phenomenon under
investigation [10, 13]. An actor is considered as any entity able to associate texts,
Use of ICT to Assist Students with Learning Difficulties: An Actor-Network Analysis
humans, non-humans and money [14]: “Accordingly, it is any entity which more or
less successfully defines and builds a world filled by other entities with histories,
identities, and interrelationships of their own” [14]. An actor is an abstraction which
enables the analysis of situations where heterogeneous entities are encountered [13].
The purely social or technological approaches are essentialist and deterministic in
nature, whereas ANT is designed to be anti-essentialist and non-deterministic. The
concept of an actor allows sociologists to write about the situatedness of innovation
and technology without the need to use demarcations separating the social from the
natural; or sociological conventions from technological ones. The abstraction frees the
analysis from the boundaries of disciplines, thereby allowing the observer to resist the
need to reduce complex phenomena to a few well-defined political, social or
technological categories [15].
The main method advice offered by Latour in conducting an ANT research project
is to “Follow the Actors” [11], but this is just a beginning. When using ANT the
research process that is followed is far from linear and not just simply a matter of
collecting data, analysing the data then writing it up. The process could better be seen
as an iterative one, something more like that shown in Fig 3 above [16, 17]. After the
actors have been identified and ‘interviewed’ and networks of interactions between
actors have been examined, the process continues to look for new actors and for how
Tas Adam and Arthur Tatnall
the technology may have been translated in the process of adoption. This figure
attempts to illustrate something of the complexity and iterative nature of this process.
A good deal has been written on how ANT can be employed for socio-technical
analysis. For example, Bigum [18] provides one interesting application of ANT, while
Gilding [19] and Tatnall [20] also provide studies applying ANT to Education and
Technology. Other examples include the studies of Hull [21], Law [22] and Walsham
and Sahay [23]. More recently, the Queensland education department used ANT to
investigate the impact of ICT in education [24, 25]. There are also recent examples of
how ANT was used to analyse ICT infrastructure [26], financial institutions [27], call-
centres [28] and on-line communities [29].
For this research data was collected by attending and observing specific classes at
these two schools on a regular basis. The first school was visited in 2003 and 2004
while the second was approached in 2005 and 2006. At School-B a specific project
was set up by the school community, and the researcher was asked to take part in this
through the assistance and co-operation of the Principal, as well as several key staff
members. He became a team member and worked very closely with a class of senior
students who were referred to as the Transition Group which showed varied ability
and special needs or handicap. The project was called the 1-2-1 project and it was a
significant step to providing the state of the art ‘hands-on’ resources to the group. For
example, each student was provided with a Laptop to use and carry in class or to take
home. The research was conducted in a very supportive manner. It should be noted
that funding was also provided by the school of Information Systems at Victoria
University and this allowed an analysis of the ICT infrastructure and provided several
PDAs along with Dragon digital voice recording equipment. The school gave access
to all available data at the time. The students were assessed in the main domains of
knowledge and, in particular, data were provided to the research that showed an
analysis of the key indicators for each class in ICT for teaching and learning. The
1-2-1 project was later extended to include many other groups in the middle of the
school.
The original concept by now had gone beyond what anyone could have imagined
with the introduction of Social Networking programs. The main observations
highlighted the strong self-esteem and engagement by the groups of students. Other
data were collected by the ICT coordinator to determine the background of teachers in
ICT. In fact at this time, the Victorian Government introduced the ‘ICT Potential
Project’ with the aim to diagnose the various ICT skills of teachers in schools and
how these were applied in the curriculum. The researcher became an actor himself in
this process whilst endeavouring to discover the impact and existence of other actors
and actor-networks or ensembles. Using participant observation the researcher
became an observer and participant at school meetings and regular class sessions that
involved technology and computer programs through the Web. In addition to
Use of ICT to Assist Students with Learning Difficulties: An Actor-Network Analysis
5 Conclusion
Our research shows that there is no doubt that the use of ICT can have a beneficial
impact on the education of children with learning difficulties. It can do this both by
improving their self esteem by providing the means by which they can achieve
something they consider worthwhile and also by facilitating the acquisition of useful
life skills. To achieve this result however, the actors involved, both human and non-
human must be induced to work together to produce the desired result. In this, the role
of one particular actor is crucial: the School Principal. This actor has the power to
provide appropriate funds when required, to coerce his colleagues into working
towards a common goal, to encourage the school ICT specialist to make good use of
the software and make it easy to use and to reassure the parents that the school is
doing its job well. The use of actor-network theory as a research framework facilitates
the holistic analysis of schools such as these and how they operate.
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