A Point of View

The Digital Panopticon

OR

Teacher really is watching you.

Predicting the future when you only have the past as your blueprint makes it difficult to imagine what might be. I doubt if anyone would have guessed that the 21st century school would be a place of restricted access, with perimeter fences, security doors, CCTV and a police presence. Somehow this has crept up on us with little or any concern being voiced and its logical next extension is a digital one. Every junior and secondary school in England now has its own learning platform or VLE , with the optimists predicting that this will herald a more personalised, creative, relevant, independent, anytime-anywhere learning experience for the net-genners. There is a darker side. The technology may simply be used to extend a culture of tracking, monitoring, checking, controlling and assessing who is learning what, when, where and how. Without knowing it we have created our very own digital panopticon.

PS a little history lesson: Jeremy Bentham, the 19th century philosopher, created designs for the panopticon, a prison building made up of many cells arranged around a central observation platform, from which one warden could supervise numerous prisoners at the same time. The inmates did not know when the wardens were present. The system relied upon the former regulating their behaviour in the belief that the watchers were always present.

"I am not a number ... I am a free man" THE PRISONER