Hidden Works in a Project of Closing Digital Inequalities: a Qualitative Inquiry in a Remote School
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HIDDEN WORKS IN A PROJECT OF CLOSING DIGITAL INEQUALITIES: A QUALITATIVE INQUIRY IN A REMOTE SCHOOL BY KEN-ZEN CHEN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Secondary and Continuing Education in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Margery Osborne, Chair Professor Nicholas C. Burbules Professor Mark Dressman Adjunct Assistant Professor George Reese ABSTRACT This study investigated students’ experiences and teachers' hidden works when initiating an instructional technology project that aimed to reduce digital inequality in a remote aboriginal school in a developed Asian country. The chosen research site was a small school classified as “extremely remote” by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. I intended to understand teachers’ hidden works through qualitative case study and participant research when attempting to bridge the existing digital divide at the school. The proposed main research questions were: What hidden work did teachers need to accomplish when implementing a technology reform? How did students and teachers experience the changes after learning and living with the XO laptops? How and in what way could a bridging-digital-divide project like OLPC live and survive in remote schools? A qualitative case study design was used in this investigation. Data were collected between June 2011 and Jan. 2012 and included classroom video/audio-taping, photos taken by students and myself, interviews, field notes, artifacts, documents, logs, and journals. ii The findings indicated that remote school children had experienced barriers to access technology not only because of socioeconomic inequalities but also because of the ineffectiveness of policy tools that argued to close the divides. Deploying XO laptops in the school was an intelligent choice to bridge children’s digital inequalities; however, a complete support system was necessary for this to be truly effective. Otherwise, teachers needed to devote extra effort, the “hidden works,” in every dimension to cover the system’s insufficiency to make the project work. Students’ learning experiences were exciting during my fieldwork. Students showed engagement when learning with XOs and technical devices. The XOs became part of children’s lives in the schools and at home. Students also expressed progress in learning. However, due to conflicts in the school, the effectiveness was constrained and only a few teachers showed interest in teaching with the XOs. By reflecting and analyzing my fieldwork within the literature, I connected technology diffusion and social and cultural capital from a theoretical perspective into my discussion. Treating the “closing-divide” endeavor as a kind of technological diffusion, the change agents are the key actors that make the new technology accessible and acceptable. The required actions that the change agents are expected to accomplished are iii similar to the hidden works that I demonstrated during the field study. In terms of social capital, my field study was not only an attempt to teach with the XO laptops, but also revealed a process that connected possible social relationships to transmit social capital to remote school children. My study suggests a collaborative action to close the digital divide in the field is necessary. For further studies, teamed researchers and long-term investigations are encouraged to advocate for the mission of bridging the digital divide. iv To My Beloved v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is a great pleasure to give respect to those kind people around me who made this dissertation possible. I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my dissertation advisor, Dr. Margery Osborne, a sincere mentor, colleague, and friend. Her guidance has made this study a thoughtful and rewarding journey. I would like also to thank my dissertation committee of Drs. Nicholas Burbules, Mark Dressman, and George Reese, for their support over the past years as I moved from an idea to a completed study. My committee members convincingly conveyed a spirit of adventure and reflection in regard to educational research and scholarship. In a similar vein, I’d like to recognize Drs. Sharon Tettegah, Liora Bresler, Ian Westbury, Brendesha Tynes, Bertram (Chip) Bruce, Martin Wolske, William (Bill) Cope, and Richard Herman, for the contributions that each of them made to my intellectual growth step-by-step during my years of study at the University of Illinois. Additionally, one of the most interesting and instructive interactions I enjoyed was with the faculty and vi students in Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences. In GSLIS, I found my calling as an educational researcher and instructional technologist. I share the credit of my work with children, teachers, and parents in my field location. Even though I could not disclose them because of research ethics, I am very grateful to all these individuals for their support of my research. My sincere thanks also go to Hao Chen. My fieldwork would not have been possible without his helps. Financial support was provided by the two-year study abroad scholarship of Ministry of Education (Taiwan), graduate assistantship of College of Education Online for four years, and a predoctoral fellowship by the Graduate College supported my doctoral study in the U.S. I consider it an honor to work with excellent Education Online colleagues: Adam Fein, Scott Wennerdahl, Hui-Lien Hsiao, Laura English, Eun Jee Kim, Sun Joo Yoo, and Seung Won Hong. It has also been a pleasure to study with wonderful group of peers in the College of Education. Yun-Hsuan Chen, Chang-Hua Cheng, Yen-Fang Cheng, Tangwee Teo, Chia-Chun Chang--your suggestions, comments, and criticisms have been so helpful. To Pei-Hsiu Tan, I’ve always appreciated your joyful spirit and this spirit provided the boost that made my long Ph.D. journey enjoyable. No words can express how grateful vii I am for your cheering and support. I am indebted to I-Chen Wang, who encouraged me along the difficult road to the statistics master’s program. Special thanks are due to Yu-Ling Huang, for her sympathetic understanding and listening throughout the process. I would like to thank Chi-Ting Su, for keeping patience on my odd murmuring as a picky Virgo. It would have been a lonely journey without lovely friends like them in the Taiwanese (Women) Studies Group for the six years. I owe my deepest gratitude to Taiwanese friends: Min-Feng Hsieh, Mei-Hui Lin, Wei-Feng Tsai, Chui-Wen Lin, Hui-Wen Liu, Ya-Ting Hsu, and Chinese friends: Ying-Shueh Cheng, Ming Fang, Yun-Yan Zhang, Yang Yu, Yong-Fei Yi, at The Ohio State University. Your kindness and persistent assistance both made up for the times when I was not available and saved me as a disqualified husband. Most importantly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the innumerable sacrifices made by my wife, Hsiao-Feng Tsai, in shouldering far more than her fair share of the parenting to our daughter, Amber, and household burdens in Taiwan while I pursue this final degree. My parents, my father-in-law, and mother-in-law have given me their unequivocal support throughout, as always, for which my mere expression of thanks likewise does not suffice. viii Any attempt to list the people and opportunities with which my life has been richly blessed would be like trying to count the stars in the universe. Without them, this thesis would have remained a dream. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Literature Review .............................................................................................. 9 Chapter 3: The Context ..................................................................................................... 91 Chapter 4: Methodology and Methods ............................................................................119 Chapter 5: Participating in the School ............................................................................ 137 Chapter 6: Teaching and Learning with and without the XOs ........................................ 214 Chapter 7: Discussion and Conclusions .......................................................................... 289 References ....................................................................................................................... 325 Appendix A: Letter of IRB Approval.............................................................................. 342 Appendix B: Permission to Enter the Research Site ....................................................... 343 Appendix C: Interview Protocol ..................................................................................... 344 Appendix D: Consent Forms .......................................................................................... 346 x Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Significance of Research Nowadays computer technologies are embedded into our daily lives and ubiquitous computing can no longer be resisted by schools (Lei, Conway, & Zhao, 2008). This digital age has created a new and younger generation called “digital natives, who are more technologically literate and more comfortable than the “digital immigrants”--the adults who may feel difficulties catching up with technical advancements as if learning a new language after growing up (Prensky, 2001). Such a phenomenon reverses the typical situations of learning