In this section, I want to look at the affordances of a ubiquitous educational technology: The laptop.
I will draw on results from my empirical study of educational technology use in a Danish business college (see Aagaard,
2015a,
2017a). When spending time in educational practice, one quickly discovers that the popular image of laptops and other forms of information and communication technology (ICT) as benevolent forces that connect us to the world, break down traditional barriers, and afford ‘anytime/anywhere learning’ (Wright & Parchoma,
2011) fails to recognize the deeply ambivalent nature of importing such digital technologies into the classroom: Not only do laptops afford so-called ‘technologically-enhanced learning’, they also afford classroom distraction (Aagaard,
2017a). In other words, just as laptops open up the possibility of bringing the world into the classroom, they also constitute a backdoor through which students may occasionally escape. Acknowledging such multistability helps us avoid the ICT educator’s fallacy, which refers to the mistaken assumption that digital devices introduced into the classroom will be taken up for the precise purposes that designers and curriculum developers envision (Rosenberger,
2017b). With multistability thus established, an important question becomes how the relational strategies that students have developed in the course of their everyday lives intertwine with their educational use of these devices.
During interviews, students described being drawn to distraction in ways that bypass their conscious decision-making: They often experience a
habitual distraction in the form of a prereflective attraction towards certain frequently visited, but educationally irrelevant websites like Facebook (the following is based on Aagaard,
2015a). Due to deeply sedimented relational strategies that have been built, maintained, and solidified in the course of their everyday lives, the action of logging onto Facebook has become embodied in students’ hands and fingers and now occurs habitually. “It’s just F, A, and Enter”, as the student Karen said. Succumbing to this habitual distraction is deceptively easy, since it occurs independently of students’ conscious willpower. Jacob put it like this: “You’re looking out of the window and going, ‘Oh, it’s raining’, and then you look back, and now you’re on Facebook. If you stop listening for
one second, you’re already on Facebook”. This, of course, does not mean that digital distraction is
never a conscious choice, but deliberate use of Facebook is limited to visits that involve a specific purpose. “If I'm there thinking that I'm going to go on Facebook, that's because I just have to write to someone or make an appointment”, said Dan. “Otherwise, it’s a habit”. To resist this solicitation and obstruct the habitual slide into distraction, students described occasionally closing the lids of their laptops.
Jesper: Why can’t you just refrain from looking at it?
Carol: Well it’s standing right in front of me, and then you might look down for a second and you’re just caught by Facebook. Then you sort of forget the other thing you’re supposed to focus on.
Jesper: So unless you physically shut down the screen, it's simply too tempting?
Carol: Yes, it is for me. Maybe not for everybody.
Although relational strategies spring from purpose- and meaningful activity, prolonged sedimentation thus seem to make them manifest with a degree of automaticity and stubbornness that challenges our conventional, humanist conceptions of agency and intentionality: Sometimes our habitual use of technologies inclines us do things
we do not intend to do. Discussing distracted driving, Rosenberger (
2014b) similarly notes that: “Like the way those who habitually bite their nails will be on occasion surprised to look down and find they are once again biting their nails, drivers may slide inadvertently and unconsciously into the distracting habits of the phone” (p. 43). The phenomenon of distraction obviously predates the advent of laptops in the classroom, but the idea of magnetic affordances or ‘invitations’ suggests that digital distraction may differ from existing forms of unmediated distraction like staring blankly into space, since laptops actively shape the relation between students and their classrooms: “When a lesson is experienced as boring, this may to a certain extent be
because technological alternatives are constantly available and ready to be utilized at a whim” (Aagaard,
2015a, p. 95). This point raises important questions about the role of technology in the classroom (for an in-depth discussion of this issue, see Aagaard,
2017b).