The study focuses on the implications of affordances identified in Google Apps for Education (GAFE), by strategic staff within a Swedish school organisation, with responsibility for schools in around 30 municipalities. A complex picture emerged, where GAFE was perceived both as a neutral, well-functioning tool and as a means of educating in partly new ways. Furthermore, the study shows that GAFE, despite its characteristic of being a non-generative appliance, still can be used in creative ways. The implementation of cloud technology, such as GAFE, endorses a tunnel-vision affordance that downgrades more nuanced perceptions of the different technological, economical, and ethical aspects of the technology. Studying GAFE, different tensions of power emerge: Google vs. the school, IT professionals vs. teachers, management vs. teachers, teachers vs. pupils, Google vs. pupils.
Contents1. Introduction 2. Cloud computing as non-generative appliances 3. Method 4. Considerations before implementation 5. Implementation of GAFE 6. The affordances of GAFE 7. Discussion 8. Conclusion
IntroductionWild technology tends to be domesticated relatively quickly, and tamed into everyday objects (Haddon, 2006). Domestication leads to technology being taken for granted. Indeed, information technology (IT) usually evolves into unexciting artefacts for routine everyday usage. In modern society, IT has become crucial at home, at work and in schools. Through the introduction of cloud computing the taken for grantedness of, and dependence on, IT seems even greater than ever before. Google Apps for Education (GAFE) is currently being introduced in Swedish schools (the national context of this study) and is successively becoming an accepted generic information technology -a tamed everyday object. This paper investigates how one particular school organisation implements this standard cloud software in their educational settings.Building on constructivist studies of technology and organisation, this article is concerned with GAFE as a generic bundle of IT tools in schools. Constructivist studies tend to draw complex, messy sketches of how technology is developed, negotiated and used within different settings. Technology is seen as co-constructed, rather than following a predestined trajectory. Technologies are not viewed as independent phenomena; rather, they are embedded in their social contexts (Williams and Edge, 1996).Furthermore, this paper is concerned with the issue of power, which has also been addressed within constructivist studies. Four clusters of power studies are possible to detect: 1) political power, 2) corporate power -often with a Marxist perspective, 3) code is law -i.e., power as encoded in the artefacts -and 4) power/knowledge -i.e., power encoded in organisational structures -in line with ideas developed by Foucault (1980). Recently we have seen an increasing number of studies on IT implementation and use within organisations, but this study addresses understandings of why the technology is implemented and how it is used -...