Use of ICT to Assist Students with Learning Difficulties:

An Actor-Network Analysis
Tas Adam, Arthur Tatnall

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 Use of ICT to Assist Students with Learning Difficulties:
An Actor-Network Analysis

Tas Adam and Arthur Tatnall

School of Management and Information Systems, Victoria University, Australia

([email protected], [email protected])

Abstract. This paper reports on an investigation of the use of Information and

Communications Technologies (ICT) to aid in the teaching of students with
learning disabilities. The term ‘learning difficulties’ is used in reference to a
heterogeneous group of students who are seen to have significant difficulties in
the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills. Other terms sometimes used in
this context are ‘learning disabilities’ and ‘special needs’. The study involved
participant observation of the use of ICT in two outer suburban Melbourne
Special Schools, and an investigation of the role and impact of Education
Department policies on these school environments. Research at the two Special
Schools revealed that use of ICT can have a very beneficial impact on these
students by improving their self esteem and facilitating their acquisition of
useful life skills. The study was framed by the use of actor-network theory.

Keywords: Information and Communications Technologies, Actor-Network

Theory, Learning Difficulties, Special Schools, Students with Special Needs.

1 Students with Learning Difficulties

A significant number of students with learning disabilities, or special needs, require

assistance and support in their learning. The introduction of Information and
Communications Technologies (ICT) and use of the Internet have played a major part
in shaping the knowledge and skills of these students. Assistive technology has
introduced awareness for both educators and students and for the past decade there
has been a growing effort in the design and development of ICT-based platforms to
enhance the learning outcomes of these students [1, 2].
The study described in this paper involved participant observation in two outer
suburban special schools in Melbourne, and in addition examined the role and impact
of Education Department policies on these school environments [3]. The study also
identified different categories of students with special needs, ranging from physical
disabilities to mainstream students who have the need to maintain some continuity
with their studies while temporarily placed in a hospital.
One of the problems in working in this area is terminology, with the terms:
Learning Difficulties, Children at Risk, Special Needs and Learning Disabilities all
being used in different countries and different contexts to describe these children. In
Tas Adam and Arthur Tatnall

this paper the term Learning Difficulties (LD) will be used to cover all of these other
terms [4]. The definition for the term Learning Difficulties that is used in Australia is
similar to that used in the USA:
A generic term that refers to a heterogeneous group of students who have
significant difficulties in the acquisition of literacy and numeracy and who
are not covered in the Commonwealth’s definition of a student/child with a
disability… Learning disability is believed to be a difficulty that is intrinsic to
the individual and not a direct result of other conditions or influences [5].
Given the complexity of the definition of learning difficulties, one way to represent
the differences is with the following Venn diagram where the term Learning
Difficulties is used to refer to a large group of children who need extra assistance with
schooling and Learning Disabilities refers to students who constitute a small sub-
group that exhibit severe and unexplained problems.

Learning
Difficulties

Learning
Disabilities

Fig. 1. Learning Difficulties and Learning Disabilities

Although policies have existed for some time in many countries to integrate
students with learning difficulties into the mainstream classroom, this has not always
provided the best learning environment for these students [6]; hence the need for
some Special Schools. Bulgren [7] and Agran [8], support the view that some students
with LD required an alternative approach to their learning and numerous ‘integration’
or ‘remedial’ programs have proved inefficient towards the total learning of this
group of students. The literature also shows that in some selected fields, for example
in mathematics and social studies, specialist instruction has been applied to this group
of individuals with little success.

2 A Case Studies of Two Melbourne Special Schools

2.1 Special School-A

School-A is a purpose built ‘Specialist School’ providing a range of educational

programs for students with special learning needs including global development
delay, autism spectrum disorder, physical, social and emotional disabilities. It is
 Use of ICT to Assist Students with Learning Difficulties: An Actor-Network Analysis

located in Melbourne’s north-west and is one of over 80 Government funded

Specialist School Facilities in Victoria.
In addition to delivering the key learning areas as part of the curriculum the school
provides a broad range of programs that are designed to further enhance the
independence of its students. Some of the programs include Augmentative
Communication, Work Education, Outdoor Education, Bike and Road Safety
Education, Music Therapy, Swimming and Hydrotherapy Programs, Riding for the
Disabled, Home crafts, Recreation and Leisure and Health and Human Relations
Programs. The school has around 90 students, 8 full-time and 3 part-time teaching
staff, 15 part-time school support officers and 2 part-time administration staff. The
students are quite diverse in their special needs, both physical and intellectual. In the
early 2000s the school had limited ICT resources for their learning with several Acorn
machines, but very few PCs. The majority of the software was based on the DOS
operating system platform where graphics and sound quality were limited. The library
had a PC that was used to allow the students’ access to the Internet, and PCs were
used predominantly to reinforce language and numeracy skills. By 2010 the Acorn
computers had been replaced by PCs.
The list of computer skills as was evidenced by a student survey indicated some
key programs were used to assist the students in their learning. The teaching staff
were quite happy with these programs as they felt these were adequate for their
students’ needs. An examination of the school’s technology policy and curriculum
showed that the use of ICT was an integral part of the classroom teaching and
learning. The school heavily relied on ICT policies and support from the Department
of Education, both for network access and software supplies. The administration
systems were also provided and supported by the Department.
A research project over several years investigated the infrastructure to set up links
between different classes at the local level. Given the limited support and availability
for video-conferencing by the Education Department’s resources, the attempt was
welcomed by relevant school staff. The students showed a tremendous level of
enthusiasm and immediate engagement when they began to communicate via the
webcams. The main issue was, as expected, the limited bandwidth from the Local
Area Network. Another significant issue was the security constraints and filters that
are imposed on the Education Department’s VicOne Network. This matter was further
investigated in the following year of the research, and it was discovered that the
Education Department had found that video-conferencing was not very much in
demand for Victorian schools, and hence its support was downgraded considerably.

2.2 Special School-B

The vision of this school community encompasses a commitment to achieving

excellence in education for students with additional learning needs through a
curriculum which integrates learning technologies with best practice in teaching and
learning. The values embraced by the school community are: Respect, Personal Best,
Happiness, Cooperation, and Honesty. These values are imbedded in the Student
Code of Conduct and the Staff, Principal and School Council Codes of Practice.
Tas Adam and Arthur Tatnall

Located on two campuses in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, School-B is a day

specialist school which caters for students with mild to moderate intellectual disability
between the ages of 5 and 18 years. Students come from a wide geographical area and
diverse socio-economic backgrounds. The school’s junior annexe (on another site)
provides three classrooms for students aged between 5 and 9 years of age. The school
itself is situated in attractive, well maintained grounds with excellent facilities which
include: a Technology Centre, fully equipped gymnasium, Healthy Living Centre, Art
and Craft room, well-resourced library, modern playground equipment, four school
excursion buses, computer networking across the school, multi-purpose room and
shaded outdoor playing areas.
The school, with 71 teaching and ancillary staff, has an enrolment of
approximately 250 students. Enrolment is dependent on eligibility criteria as
determined by the Department of Education and Training. A significant number of
teachers at the school have post-graduate qualifications in special education. School-B
supports integration into and from mainstream schools. Support services available to
parent/carers and students include social workers, guidance officers, speech therapists
and visiting teacher services.
The implementation of the Early Years Literacy and Numeracy Program at Junior
and Middle school levels has increased opportunities for improved student skills in
literacy and numeracy. The Secondary School has a focus on the enhancement of
student engagement through Middle Years strategies based on improved Literacy and
Numeracy, and the introduction of a ‘Thinking Curriculum’. The Transition Centre
caters for students sixteen to eighteen years of age with the focus on the development
of dual pathways to cater for the diverse needs of the students. The school has a high
level of commitment to a curriculum which integrates learning technologies with best
practice in teaching and learning in order to enhance educational outcomes for its
students. The Technology Centre has facilitated important opportunities for the
school’s students, its staff and for staff from neighbouring schools [9].
In 2006 School-B introduced a number of social and networked learning activities
and practices, with software such as Lumil, WordPressMU, ccHost, Urdit, Gregarius
and Scuttle. This paper reports on some of the activities undertaken, technologies
used and the progress made during this period. For the purposes of this research the
individual items of social software used at School-B have been appraised separately,
yet in practice these tools and technologies are complimentary and have been used
concurrently. In fact, much of the power of social software is its interoperability. By
using these tools the school expects its students to create and publish content and
respond to the content creation of others. Created content can be aggregated to show
progress and richness and depth of learning. Students can respond to the work of
others, provide feedback and learn through their interactions with others online. Not
only are the students learning, but they are also learning how to be independent
learners [1].
Collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and practices strongly support effective
knowledge management practices. By using open web-based standards, such as RSS
and XML and open API web services, complimentary software can share data in rich
and unique ways. In future years, interoperability may well be the key criteria for
 Use of ICT to Assist Students with Learning Difficulties: An Actor-Network Analysis

introducing new technologies and systems as teachers and administrators become

more familiar with working in networked environments. In introducing the social
software it was attempted to integrate with existing practices, using web-based tools
and technologies to construct richer tasks for the students. For example, using web-
based photo sharing, students and teachers tagged photos which were then used in
student digital portfolios. By using this approach not only did they introduce the
required skills and practices but the school also reduced the workload for teachers
who had previously organised the resources for use in the previous student digital
portfolios [1, 9].
By looking at their existing curriculum they identified opportunities to use web
collaboration. For example, they found that they could use the social media sharing
website ccHost within their loop-based music creation topic. Having traditionally
used the audio samples that came with the software, they discovered they could easily
integrate online networked learning to increase learning outcomes. Now students can
find audio samples based on tags, use these samples in their composition and then
share their composition online, highlighting the samples that they used. Other students
could then make derivative works by taking samples from the composition of others.
The school has attempted to provide all of the social networking web services on their
Intranet to ensure that the students’ privacy and security can be carefully monitored.

3 Actors and Networks: Actor-Network Theory

Special Schools are complex socio-technical entities and research into their
curriculum needs to take account of this complexity. A significant difficulty arises in
framing research in a situation like this that involves both technological and human
actors. When dealing with the related contributions of both human and non-human
actors, actor-network theory [10-12] provides a useful framework. Actor-network
theory (ANT) reacts against the idea that characteristics of humans and social
organisations exist which distinguish actions from the inanimate behaviour of
technological and natural objects, instead offering a socio-technical approach in
which neither social nor technical positions are privileged.
The actors involved in the adoption of this technology to assist students with
special needs include: students, parents, teachers, school principals, school ICT
specialist teachers, the School Council, the Web, computers, Education Department
policies, learning technology policy, the school environment, classroom
environments, learning approaches and paradigms, delivery methods of instruction,
engagement methods, thinking processes, technology infrastructure-bandwidth,
curriculum, Internet resources, digital libraries and other schools.
In an ANT framework, actors are seen to contest and negotiate with each other in
an attempt to influence the final outcome in a direction to their own liking. The
Education Department, for example, might want ensure that all schools offer a similar
level of service to students and to ensure their accountability. The parents of a student
with LD, on the other hand, would want the best for their own child regardless of
Tas Adam and Arthur Tatnall

what was going on in other schools. The technology (both hardware and software)
itself acts in the way it was designed, both intentionally and unintentionally, to act.

Fig. 2. Identification of the Actors

A major challenge to schools of this type is to get all these actors to form a
common problematisation [10] of their task – to all see the problem in the same way.
If this can be achieved then all the actors can work together to achieve a common
goal, and ANT offers some ideas on how this might be achieved. ANT considers
associations and interactions between human and non-human actors but its proponents
make no claim that this approach can do any more than shed a little light on how a
given approach is taken or technology is adopted. Despite this, we believe that if a
researcher understands how the factors involved in the adoption of a new technology
interact then it is possible to affect the outcome by assisting favourable interactions
and doing one’s best to reduce unfavourable interactions.
The concept of an actor underlies ANT, where an actor is the term used to
represent any physical entity that has an effect on the phenomenon under
investigation [10, 13]. An actor is considered as any entity able to associate texts,
 Use of ICT to Assist Students with Learning Difficulties: An Actor-Network Analysis

humans, non-humans and money [14]: “Accordingly, it is any entity which more or
less successfully defines and builds a world filled by other entities with histories,
identities, and interrelationships of their own” [14]. An actor is an abstraction which
enables the analysis of situations where heterogeneous entities are encountered [13].
The purely social or technological approaches are essentialist and deterministic in
nature, whereas ANT is designed to be anti-essentialist and non-deterministic. The
concept of an actor allows sociologists to write about the situatedness of innovation
and technology without the need to use demarcations separating the social from the
natural; or sociological conventions from technological ones. The abstraction frees the
analysis from the boundaries of disciplines, thereby allowing the observer to resist the
need to reduce complex phenomena to a few well-defined political, social or
technological categories [15].

Overview of the adoption Preliminary identification of actors

'Interview’ actors to gather data

New actors or alliances identified

Analyse networks and alliances

New actors or alliances identified

Look for translations

Begin analysis Look for missing links

Identify ‘key moments’ for ANT

treatment

Build up whole picture

Final analysis and write up

Fig. 3. The ANT Research Process [16]

The main method advice offered by Latour in conducting an ANT research project
is to “Follow the Actors” [11], but this is just a beginning. When using ANT the
research process that is followed is far from linear and not just simply a matter of
collecting data, analysing the data then writing it up. The process could better be seen
as an iterative one, something more like that shown in Fig 3 above [16, 17]. After the
actors have been identified and ‘interviewed’ and networks of interactions between
actors have been examined, the process continues to look for new actors and for how
Tas Adam and Arthur Tatnall

the technology may have been translated in the process of adoption. This figure
attempts to illustrate something of the complexity and iterative nature of this process.
A good deal has been written on how ANT can be employed for socio-technical
analysis. For example, Bigum [18] provides one interesting application of ANT, while
Gilding [19] and Tatnall [20] also provide studies applying ANT to Education and
Technology. Other examples include the studies of Hull [21], Law [22] and Walsham
and Sahay [23]. More recently, the Queensland education department used ANT to
investigate the impact of ICT in education [24, 25]. There are also recent examples of
how ANT was used to analyse ICT infrastructure [26], financial institutions [27], call-
centres [28] and on-line communities [29].

4 Data Collection and Analysis

For this research data was collected by attending and observing specific classes at
these two schools on a regular basis. The first school was visited in 2003 and 2004
while the second was approached in 2005 and 2006. At School-B a specific project
was set up by the school community, and the researcher was asked to take part in this
through the assistance and co-operation of the Principal, as well as several key staff
members. He became a team member and worked very closely with a class of senior
students who were referred to as the Transition Group which showed varied ability
and special needs or handicap. The project was called the 1-2-1 project and it was a
significant step to providing the state of the art ‘hands-on’ resources to the group. For
example, each student was provided with a Laptop to use and carry in class or to take
home. The research was conducted in a very supportive manner. It should be noted
that funding was also provided by the school of Information Systems at Victoria
University and this allowed an analysis of the ICT infrastructure and provided several
PDAs along with Dragon digital voice recording equipment. The school gave access
to all available data at the time. The students were assessed in the main domains of
knowledge and, in particular, data were provided to the research that showed an
analysis of the key indicators for each class in ICT for teaching and learning. The
1-2-1 project was later extended to include many other groups in the middle of the
school.
The original concept by now had gone beyond what anyone could have imagined
with the introduction of Social Networking programs. The main observations
highlighted the strong self-esteem and engagement by the groups of students. Other
data were collected by the ICT coordinator to determine the background of teachers in
ICT. In fact at this time, the Victorian Government introduced the ‘ICT Potential
Project’ with the aim to diagnose the various ICT skills of teachers in schools and
how these were applied in the curriculum. The researcher became an actor himself in
this process whilst endeavouring to discover the impact and existence of other actors
and actor-networks or ensembles. Using participant observation the researcher
became an observer and participant at school meetings and regular class sessions that
involved technology and computer programs through the Web. In addition to
 Use of ICT to Assist Students with Learning Difficulties: An Actor-Network Analysis

observations he interviewed these actors and collected relevant documents in order to

identify further actors and their networks.
The research found that there are several actors whose work is particularly
important to the achievement of a good outcome in the school. Firstly, the ICT
system, social software and networked learning activities must be appropriate and
also they must be induced to co-operate with the students and teachers. This co-
operation can be facilitated by another important actor: the ICT specialist teacher who
should have both a good idea of what is required educationally, and also of the
capabilities of students and teachers to understand and use the software and hardware.
It does not take much observation to see that the students are readily willing to work
with ICT and enjoy using it: they do not need much convincing. Hopefully the other
teachers can also see the benefits of using ICT, even if they do not use it themselves,
but this is not always the case and this is where another important actor comes in. The
School Principal is crucial to the success of this program as without the Principal’s
support, many things will not be possible. One area where the Principal can be of
considerable use is in influencing, or perhaps coercing other teachers to support the
program. Another is with the provision on funds for hardware and software purchases
and the provision of time for the ICT coordinator to find out about new products and
services. One thing to come out very clearly from our research is the importance of
the school Principal and without an actively supportive Principal, there is little chance
that the project of using ICT with these children will succeed.

5 Conclusion

Our research shows that there is no doubt that the use of ICT can have a beneficial
impact on the education of children with learning difficulties. It can do this both by
improving their self esteem by providing the means by which they can achieve
something they consider worthwhile and also by facilitating the acquisition of useful
life skills. To achieve this result however, the actors involved, both human and non-
human must be induced to work together to produce the desired result. In this, the role
of one particular actor is crucial: the School Principal. This actor has the power to
provide appropriate funds when required, to coerce his colleagues into working
towards a common goal, to encourage the school ICT specialist to make good use of
the software and make it easy to use and to reassure the parents that the school is
doing its job well. The use of actor-network theory as a research framework facilitates
the holistic analysis of schools such as these and how they operate.

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