DR RICHY COOK
Voice Technology Research
You can reference this page (Harvard style), select and copy (Ctrl+C) below:Cook, R. (2022). Digital More Knowledgeable Others and Performance-oriented Talk. Available at: http://www.r-cook.co.uk/alexa.html (Accessed: Day, Month, Year)
Dr R. Cook. October, 2023
Digital More Knowledgeable Others and Performance-oriented Talk
Novel research I carried out (in 2018 with students in school classrooms using voice technology devices with a digital voice assistant) established that voice technology had some positive educational use cases for students. Firstly, in terms of affordance, they found the devices engaging and were keen users. Secondly, they talked more with the voice assistant and with each other and this was about learning. Thirdly, they asked more questions some of which were evidence of epistemic activity. For example, 87 questions (not requests for music, jokes etc) were asked by students over a period of 90 minutes. A lack of student questions is a something many educators will be aware of. I posited that the voice assistant performed the role of digital more knowledgeable other but also considered that the voice assistant may however, have been simply a digital more informative other. After all these off-the-shelf assistants have a role to play in facilitating data production and harvesting and promoting consumerist behaviours rather than providing education, teaching and learning to support knowledge creation. In terms of less positive use cases, the devices themselves could be problematic and unreliable. For example, students were often not heard, misheard and misinterpreted or information relayed back to them was content from web pages read verbatim. Despite this, and other anomalies, students displayed resilience and persevered, continually asking and making requests seemingly unbothered by the voice assistant’s failings and shortcomings. What was gained by ease of use appeared to outweigh students’ perceived effort and time investments. It was said by students that asking the voice assistant was easier than searching through a book.
Classroom observations of work students were set by the teacher and digital data from their talk with the voice assistant (snippets of which were pushed to and stored in the Corporate cloud by the voice technology devices) showed that much of what was sought by students were ‘answers’ to worksheet questions, tasks and bookwork they had been set to complete by teachers. Surprisingly two other very interesting features emerged from the analysis of the data, namely ‘performance-oriented talk’ a potential for ‘epistemicide’. I will discuss these below.
Performance-oriented talk
Despite hypothesising that the voice assistant would develop students’ agency, promote curiosity and increase question asking (thus altering teaching and learning) the majority of talk between students and teachers that occurred in the classrooms (not the material and subject content being disseminated via didactic methods) centered around grades, levels, marks and exams and so on. The lexicon of language strongly suggested that there was an orientation of talk around performance and measurements of performance both in the present (as perhaps assessment of learning and as learning) and in the future (e.g. forthcoming mock exams, end of term tests and ‘summer exams’ and GCSEs, summative assessment and ‘high stakes’ testings). Interactions of talk between teachers and students were often short (few words, single sentences) and functional with question asking by students being either a confirmation or clarification type: how long is left, what do we do here, how many marks is this and so on. This is not to say that teachers knowingly or consciously, as part of a pedagogical approach, actively engaged in performance-oriented talk (although methods such as AfL, AaL and AoL might engender it) the overarching aim and goals of the school, frame ‘teaching and learning’ in performative ways so that this type of focus and resultant pedagogy is ultimately inescapable. Schools, teachers, students and parents ‘buy-in’ to objective, quantifiable measurements of ‘learning’ and measurement and judgement making about school effectiveness. Progress, the target or goal for teachers and trainee teachers, is evidenced by metrics and data becomes central to processes and procedures both administrative and educational. It could be argued that the ‘tail then begins to wag the dog’ as appetites for data generation, collation and processing increase and pedagogies adapt accordingly, often it seemed unconsciously and unknowingly. In this way educational policy (and perhaps economic imperatives) at structural level permeate schools at orgnisational level which in turn seep into practices at classroom level. It should therefore perhaps not be a surprise to hear talk in classrooms that has a necessary performance-orientation given what ‘education’ and schools are conceptualised as being set to achieve.
Epistemicide
As mentioned earlier, students liked using the voice assistant preferring it to say a book or subject text book. They also talked more with the voice assistant than they did with the teachers. However, there are concerns that need to be considered when information that is delivered directly to students by a voice assistant comes from a business (‘corporate’ knowledge) and which also bypasses the teacher (teacher out-of-the-loop). Herein then lies the potential problem if one considers the following thought experiment. As a corporation I have a canon of knowledge derived from my corporate aim (profitability) that I wish to disseminate. My knowledge, I consider, to be in need of being the canon that people learn and absorb. It just so happens that my ideology is based around profit making. So, by disseminating my knowledge, I can make more profit. What it means is, if I can assist consumers to know more about my products or services in a way that promotes consumerism then purchases will follow and so will profits. I therefore only need a way to share my knowledge that is both easy and accessible. Here is where a digital technology that is cheap and easy to use but can push and pull data (perhaps via IoT) can become the vehicle to achieve this. The kick-back is that data on behaviours and shopping patterns and resultant profiling of customers can feed back into my system to inform successful strategies and perhaps also become a commercial entity itself. If my method of dissemination is ubiquitous and I have reach into millions of homes and engagement from millions of consumers then my canon of knowledge may become the de facto standard. What I say is what is believed and other canons of knowledge are usurped or squeezed out.
So, for a something like the voice assistant in terms of the teacher being out-of-the-loop when information is relayed directly to students from a corporation where does this leave students? It means that students who have come to school for shared social learning experiences that aim to enable them to build their own knowledge through engagement with a trained pedagogue, in fact may only interact with a corporate agent. What does this say about what we value within the walls of a school and ultimately what does the word ‘learning’ mean in this context? Really, we are saying that methods that produce data are valid, and learning is progress measurements derived from data. Alongside this, data, that which schools now require is placed (saved or stored) into corporate hands and brands and products are built in and placed in classrooms and a corporate canon of knowledge (as per profit-based goals) is directly connected to young and emerging consumers. It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to then suggest that tweaking or altering the canon of knowledge in favour of a product, point of view, political perspective or to subdue, block or remove another may be perfectly legal and legitimate at a corporate level. Disseminators of a canon of knowledge do not have to confirm or adhere to professional educational standards if used in education.
Summary
When I placed a voice assistant into classrooms with students what I hoped to explore became secondary to issues that surfaced around performance-oriented talk and epistemicide. Some of the issues I had to deal with were also moral, I was left feeling that despite the research being ethically approved, morally certain aspects had become questionable. I had hoped that voice technology would give students agency to engage with rich and varied knowledge sources representative of or from worldwide cultures and develop a more critical perspective about the world they inhabit and function in. Naively I started from the point of knowledge is power. I had hoped that alongside the teachers they worked with students would co-construct knowledge using instant on-demand information that would enrich and augment their educational experiences and make them informed consumers of knowledge to contest, contend and hypothesise: to be more curious about our world and societies. Instead I had to confront the notion that that corporate devices select, curate and disseminate knowledge they deem to be relevant and important with no accountability for their degree of openness and diversity. It is currently not possible to identify the source of knowledge that is used by voice technologies. I have to take responsibility for having placed devices with students (opting them in by proxy) who then unquestioningly worked with Corporate knowledge as ‘the truth’ and in doing so produced data (as a product) for Corporate to use free of charge for profit.
You can read more about my research here in this repository
You can read and cite my PhD Thesis as below:
Cook, R. (2021) 'Connecting the Echo Dots: An Exploratory Ethnographic Study of ‘Alexa’ in the Classroom'. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Gloucestershire. doi:10.46289/AX58RE21
Dr Richy Cook (PhD, MEd, PGCAP, PGCE, BSC)
How I like to allocate my time
Research Methodologies
75%
Creative Research Methods
50%
Ethnography & Ethnomethodology
50%
Doctoral & Master's Supervision
25%
Education and/or Technology
100%
Teaching & Scholarly
75%