Learning, Technology, and Schooling in LCD Book

We have been disucssing what to do about the idea of summarizing the history of educational technologies. We have been grappling with a rapidly-increasing scope as we try to talk about the history of educational technology. Especially when we want to not be US-centric.

Why are we trying to talk about the history of educational technologies in schooling? Our rhetorical goal is to identify a “standard model” of educational technology which we can critique. (As noted last week, there are many possible critiques, which don’t necessarily fit nicely together. For example, sociocultural critiques of standard schooling argue for inclusion, participation, and identity support, but are not necessarily critical of mainstream structural power relations. This is intersectional in a very similar way to the way feminism has sometimes centered gender at the expense of race, and thereby excluded potential allies in the civil rights movement. Intersectionality.)

I agree that it will be useful to identify a Standard Model, but propose that we approach it from a different angle. Rather than looking to the history of schooling, let’s look at critiques of technology. I have in mind the tradition following Heidegger’s essay on technology, up through Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which identifies legibility as a primary mechanism of state power. Then, rather than making a historical argument about how technologies have been used in schools (which is too broad), we can identify a consistent ideological understanding of technology, and use historical examples to illustrate how it contributed to historical phenomena such as Taylorism, Behaviorism, Fascism.

Whereas a focus on schooling suffers from a rapid slip in scope, focusing on the intersection of learning and technology lets us focus. Technology renders learning and knowledge in certain ways. Whenever you are in a context of using technology (always), you are framing the task and the goals in certain ways. Centering technology can be a critically-productive strategy for linking practices to broader patterns, goals, and outcomes, and potentially for transforming them. As Engin just said, technology can make “hidden intentions and unanticipated outcomes more visible, and more malleable.”

The ideological/interpretive/framing role of technology is why the learner needs to be included in the design process. You don’t have the right to impose these on students, and a primary goal of some framings of learning is that becoming aware of the framing and learning to manipoulate it is a primary goal of learning.

Introducing examples of educational technology

Personalizing learning. Does personalizaition mean ruthlessly applying constructs to individuals? Or does it mean positioning

Later in the book, we need a principled way of discussing examples of educational technologies. Concretely, we need to explain why we anaylze technologies in terms of their affordances and how they are taken up in practice. Not the claims made by their creators or the product categories according to which they are marketed.

Centering the ideological role of technology creates a dialogic relationship between the existing school practices (a la Cuban) which will be prepared to recognize and utilize the technology in certain ways, and the technology, which potentially transforms those practices.

Unprocessed notes

If you’re not aware of the way technologies embody ideologies, the ideas with which you design are not coming from you. They are coming from the cultural history.

Maybe the declaration of principles is not a manifesto but axes of dimensions that need to be considered.

Is it “learning-centered design” or is it design oriented at design?

The dialogic role of technology adds importance to the praxis-focus of the third section.

Resources

The tyranny of metrics Artifacts have politics

People to look into

• Ben Williamson
• Neil Selwyn