Bring Your Own Device? Bring Your Own Privatization.

Education Colleges such as American College of Education are increasingly enamored with digitization schemes. One example is flippantly referred to as “Bring Your Own Device,” or BYOD, the increasingly common practice of allowing, or expecting, students to use their own phones, tablets, or laptops for schoolwork. It is presented as modern, flexible, student-centered, and cost-effective. Students already have devices, the argument goes, so why not use them?  

BYOD is not a pedagogical technique. It is fundamentally an ownership and provisioning arrangement. The educational question is whether students need access to digital technology. The political question is who is responsible for providing it. Conflating the two allows a retreat from public provision to masquerade as instructional innovation. 

My students should not need to bring personal equipment to participate fully in public education. If a camera, simulation, spreadsheet, or other digital resource is necessary for the intellectual work of a lesson, the school must provide it. Period. The appropriate response to inadequate access is not to inventory which families possess acceptable consumer electronics or devise accommodations for those who do not. It is to ensure adequate publicly controlled equipment for everyone. Anything less transforms an institutional obligation into an individual family responsibility. Calling this “choice,” “flexibility,” or “personalization” does not alter the material relation. It is cost shifting. 

This is what makes the American College of Education's uncritical presentation of BYOD so objectionable. Generations of struggle expanded public education precisely by making access to the means of learning progressively less dependent upon family wealth, private charity, or individual sponsorship. BYOD is an attempt to reverse that movement. We would immediately recognize the absurdity of telling chemistry students to bring their own balances, physics students to furnish their own multimeters, or children to arrive with whatever textbooks their families could afford. Yet because smartphones and laptops have become consumer commodities, educational technology is somehow exempted from the principle of universal provision. We have rediscovered Pip’s educational benefactor, except now every child is expected to locate one at home. 

Smartphones certainly possess technically interesting capabilities. Their cameras can document motion; accelerometers and gyroscopes can collect physical data; students can photograph evidence, create media, access information, on and on. None of those capabilities, however, constitutes an argument for personal smartphones in the classroom. School-owned tablets, laptops, cameras, sensors, and other equipment accomplish the same educational purposes without importing students’ private social networks, commercial notifications, entertainment environments, unequal hardware, personal data, and family purchasing power into the instructional space. The fact that a privately owned device can perform a task does not establish that private ownership adds educational value. 

“Digital storytelling” deserves the same scrutiny. It can be useful when representation itself performs legitimate intellectual work. That is why I can use it meaningfully in a physics lesson on torque. Students first encounter a real door, lever, force, measurement, contradiction, discussion, and teacher-guided development of the concept. The digital story can subsequently represent that learning. It cannot reproduce it. The actual classroom contains material objects resisting students’ expectations, spontaneous questions, disagreement, gesture, humor, confusion, collaboration, and a knowledgeable teacher responding in real time. No edited slideshow or two-minute video is an improvement on that social experience simply because it is digital. 

Indeed, the growing tendency to assume that digitization itself constitutes pedagogical progress deserves far more criticism than this blog post permits. Education is a social human activity. Technologies are mediating tools within it. They can extend perception, calculation, representation, and communication. They can also fragment attention, conceal reasoning, standardize activity, intensify surveillance, and substitute individualized screen interactions for collective intellectual life. A serious technology course teaches educators to examine those contradictions. It does not begin from an ideological presumption that more device use, more BYOD, or more digital production is inherently desirable and then ask us to decorate that presumption with instructional justifications. 

I will use digital storytelling where it performs intellectual work that could not be accomplished as effectively otherwise (rare). I will use smartphones where their technical capabilities uniquely justify their presence (very rare). But I reject categorically the notion that students are expected to furnish their own educational infrastructure. If technology is necessary for learning, then a genuinely modern public education must guarantee it universally, govern it democratically, and deploy it deliberately. The human experience of learning comes first. The technology serves it. Not the other way around.