Critical Perspectives on Technology and Education

Scott Bulfin, Nicola F. Johnson, Chris Bigum

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137385444
• eBook ISBN: 9781137385451
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers critical readings of issues in education and technology and demonstrates how researchers can use critical perspectives from sociology, digital media, cultural studies, and other fields to broaden the "ed-tech" research imagination, open up new topics, ask new questions, develop theory, and articulate an agenda for informed action.

CHAPTER 1

Critical Is Something Others (Don’t) Do: Mapping the Imaginative of Educational Technology

Chris Bigum, Scott Bulfin, and Nicola F. Johnson

Mapping the Imaginative of Educational Technology

This book is an outcome of a provocation paper¹ prepared by Neil Selwyn (2012) for a conference concerned with critical perspectives on learning with new media. In his paper, Selwyn argued that

Education and technology could be classed as an area of scholarship whose time is yet to come . . . As an area of academic study, education and technology is populated by a transient ragbag of individuals hailing from the learning sciences, social psychology, computer science, teacher education, media studies, sociology and beyond. As such, this is a “mongrel” area of scholarship that suffers from the absence of any long-term collective obligation amongst its participants to develop their “(non)field” of study into anything more than the sum of its parts. (p. 6)

He made a case that the (non)field of education and technology (used in this instance to refer to computing and related technologies) is largely instrumental in its approach and detailed limitations of topics, questioning theory and method. Selwyn made a strong plea to broaden and sharpen what he called the “ed-tech imagination,” in terms of the limitations he identified. As is the case with any good provocation, space is created to explore and examine the ed-tech imagination of those who write and research in the (non)field. It’s fair to say that the provocation worked. This book is one product of it. In what follows we will use the shorthand “ed-tech” to label the field in which computing and related technologies are used for various educational purposes. So, in the spirit of sharpening and broadening the ed-tech imagination, this book is organized around three aims:

• To make an argument about the need for critical perspectives in research on ed-tech more generally and in several specific areas: theory, key concepts, and “getting serious” about how the field develops, integrates, and handles critique of accumulated knowledge and perspectives.

• To illustrate the use of critical perspectives (i.e., it doesn’t just make the argument that these are needed) in a range of areas by reexamining key educational ideas and concepts often used in the area of education and technology research and doing this via “critical perspectives” drawn from social, cultural, and critical theory. This is partly about being “more critical” in terms of asking more critical questions about technologies, but also about rethinking the relationship between “technology” and the “educational” or the “social.”

• To point forward and identify and evaluate some of the larger questions, tensions, problems, and conflicts that arise when critical perspectives are employed to look at ed-tech, and to imagine how the field can be taken forward.

This book is a modest contribution to what is an ambitious agenda to rethink, rework and reimagine scholarly and research work concerning ed-tech. To gesture to the size and difficulty of the task, we are reminded of the observation made by French philosopher Michel de Certeau, who pointed out that we learn as much about a field of study by looking at what it excludes as we do by focusing on what it includes. He wrote: “finally, beyond the question of methods and contents, beyond what it says, the measure of a work is what it keeps silent” (de Certeau, 1986, p. 131). He went on to describe the vast “expanses of silence” which are found within dominant cultural discourses as a “geography of the forgotten” (p. 131). The contributors to this edited collection draw attention to the many elements of the geography of ed-tech that are sometimes ignored, often forgotten, or completely disregarded as part of the terrain. Collectively, they remind us that the practices of education necessarily undergo an interrogation whenever these practices are altered or tinkered with as occurs when new or different ways of doing things are explored. We use the phrase new or different ways of doing things to shift the focus from the objects of ed-tech, the stuff, the hardware, software, and netware, to the new or different practices that emerge when new stuff is deployed in an educational setting. Practices, ways of doing things, are necessarily entanglements of people and things (Pickering, 1995). Most of the chapters in this volume describe the multiple practices of various groups of people in a range of contexts, and are somewhat unique as they tend to avoid focusing exclusively on objects or stuff. For example, the contribution from David Shutkin describes the complex sociotechnical and relational work that both constructs and constitutes a one-to-one laptop initiative across a US school district. Employing actor-network theory, rather than a focus on laptops per se, Shutkin illustrates the complex negotiations that bring the initiative into being and sustain it.

Maps and Map Making

To speak of a geography of ed-tech is to invoke metaphors of mapping and of map making. Mark Monmonier (1991) reminds us of the problems of making any map: “a single map is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data” (p. 2). His argument, that every map must necessarily contain lies, distortions, and omissions, is also one that applies generally to any representation² of reality. He goes on to say

A good map tells a multitude of little white lies; it suppresses truth to help the user see what needs to be seen. Reality is three-dimensional, rich in detail, and far too factual to allow a complete yet uncluttered two-dimensional graphic scale model. Indeed, a map that did not generalize would be useless. But the value of a map depends on how well its generalized geometry and generalized content reflect a chosen aspect of reality. (p. 25)

In the field of ed-tech it is fair to say that there has been one map that has come to be the dominant way to make sense of the terrain. It is a map that reflects a reality that can be traced back to at least the 1860s. Halcyon Skinner’s patent for a device for teaching spelling (Benjamin, 1988, 703) was the first of a number of explorations of the notion of automating some teaching practices. The involvement of machines in one way or another in teaching was prompted by an interest in, at first, improving efficiency. Fast forward to the early days of computing in education and the improvement rationale has broadened to improving more than efficiency. It now is concerned with improving, among other things, learning. It is a familiar association—computers and improving things. Computers have been deployed to improve productivity across numerous fields of human endeavor. In this sense, as the logic goes, why should education be any different from banking, the military, business, or medicine?

The now familiar map of ed-tech is one that clearly highlights those features of the terrain that are associated with improvements in learning and the associated and necessary change of practices and policies to support such improvement. If we persist with our mapping metaphor a little further, we notice that the edge of the map, the known frontier, is one that develops very quickly. As each new digital technology appears, it has to be mapped (and often measured) in one way or another. It has to be judged to be of educational interest or significance, or not. Each new landform is not obviously educational; work has to be done to mark it as of little significance or of educational value. A good deal of effort goes into finding educational problems for which each new landform is a solution (Bigum, 1998). In a broader account of technology, Ursula Franklin (1999, p. 106) describes this work as that done by unpaid product development engineers.

Larry Cuban (1986, p. 8) offers a glimpse of this work, albeit not associated with computers, when he included a 1927 photo of a teacher conducting a geography class in an aeroplane³ flying over Los Angeles. In the photo the teacher is standing and pointing to a globe. The children are seated in the conventional classroom desks of that era. The cabin has been remade into a classroom, complete with clock and blackboard. The photo is entitled, Today’s Aerial Geography Lesson.

This example taken from Cuban poses a number of questions useful for our purposes here and for the kind of critical effort we are arguing for:

• Is the map we are looking at a map of digital technologies or a map of educational practices?

• Who gets to add to the map?

• Are there other maps of the field of ed-tech, what alternatives are possible, and who might make them?

Borrowing an idea of David Turnbull’s (2000), we take the Fool’s Cap Map as a useful device to further develop our mapping metaphor, and our initial mapping of the ed-tech imaginative. The Fool’s Cap Map shows an image of a court jester with the face replaced by a map of the world.⁴ Similar to Monmonier, Turnbull suggests maps necessarily hide things. He suggests one way to read this image. That is

All seemingly universal truths, all apparently trustworthy knowledge or authoritative maps, are partial and untrustworthy in that they conceal a hidden social ordering. This may be seen in the analogous role of the jester who confirms the king’s power through mocking him. (p. 91)

While we don’t intend to play the jester for the remainder of this chapter, we nevertheless will draw on the idea and remain mindful that any new imagining of the field of ed-tech, any new mapping will be as susceptible to “taking our knowledge for truth” as those who are engaged in making the well-established map of ed-tech. In Turnbull’s words, “We who purport to be historians, sociologists, or cultural critics, are also tricksters” (p. 91). With this in mind, we return to the map of interest, the mapping of ed-tech and the improvement of learning.

Mapping Two Levels

The association of computing and related technologies with improving things is a kind of default logic. Why else would you deploy computing technologies if it was not to improve something, make a process more efficient, do things that otherwise could not be done? So too in education. The research literature associated with ed-tech is made up of an almost unending number of studies that look for improvements in learning. When these studies are combined with allied research that is directed at changes in policy and practice to support improved learning via ed-tech, the size of the corpus dwarfs other research and scholarship. For instance, there has been considerable attention paid to the integration of computers into classrooms, or indeed the use of computers and other online spaces as classrooms, the need for teachers to have so-called “technological and pedagogical content knowledge” (Harris, Mishra, & Koehler, 2009; Koehler & Mishra, 2009; Mishra & Koehler, 2006) and, more recently, for teachers to be proficient with social media (e.g., Callaghan & Bower, 2012).

Support for the focus on learning comes from the learning sciences, cognitive psychology and, more recently, social neuroscience. There is a vast literature concerned with cognition and it has necessarily played an important role in framing and shaping policy and practice in education. Its extension into and in support of ed-tech research is understandable (see Johnson, this volume). But, as will be evident in the chapters that follow, what is taken from the learning sciences is selective.

We have noted that the map of ed-tech that is commonly accepted to be the map has, as a consequence of ongoing developments in various digital technologies, an ever-expanding frontier. Indeed, doing work that is at the edge of the map is an important characteristic of a good deal of ed-tech research and scholarship. The patterns of research and enquiry that are underpinned by a rapidly de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1  Critical Is Something Others (Don’t) Do: Mapping the Imaginative of Educational Technology
• Chapter 2  Gorillas in Their Midst: Rethinking Educational Technology
• Chapter 3  The Work of Theory in Ed-Tech Research
• Chapter 4  Extending Understandings of Educational Technology: Teachers’ Critiques of Educational Technology as Important Intellectual Capital for Researchers
• Chapter 5  Digital Play: What Do Early Childhood Teachers See?
• Chapter 6  Youth Breaking New “Ground”: Iconicity and Meaning Making in Social Media
• Chapter 7  The Scripted Sandbox: Children’s Gameplay and Ludic Gendering
• Chapter 8  The (Mis)Use of Community of Practice: Delusion, Confusion, and Instrumentalism in Educational Technology Research
• Chapter 9  Researching with Heart in Ed-Tech: What Opportunities Does the Socially Indeterminate Character of Technological Artifacts Open up for Affirming Emergent and Marginalized Practices?
• Chapter 10  Teaching the “Other”: Curriculum “Outcomes” and Digital Technology in the Out-of-School Lives of Young People
• Chapter 11  Translocalization in Digital Writing, Orders of Literacy, and Schooled Literacy
• Chapter 12  The Lake Highlands One-to-One Laptop Initiative: NCLB, Drill and Practice and the Formation of a Relational Network
• Chapter 13  The Global and the Local: Taking Account of Context in the Push for Technologization of Education
• Chapter 14  Technology and Education—Why It’s Crucial to be Critical
• Notes on Contributors
• Index