Technology and Pedagogy: Autonomist and Instrumentalist Configurations in the Scholarship of Online Education (original) (raw)
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Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology La Revue Canadienne De L Apprentissage Et De La Technologie, 2013
This paper argues that research into the pedagogical value and potential of new technologies is limited by the implicit philosophical perspectives on technology that such research adopts. These perspectives either imbue technologies with inalienable qualities (essentialism) or posit technology as a neutral means for realizing goals defined by their users (instrumentalism). Such approaches reflect the reigning common sense around the relation of technology and social practice, but they have also been resoundingly critiqued from within the philosophy, history and sociology of technology. It is our argument that the development of more nuanced philosophical perspectives on technology derived from contemporary technology studies can provide fruitful new directions for online education research. After briefly outlining how essentialist and instrumentalist perspectives operate in such research, we overview the key contributions developed in technology studies, suggesting how the latter might enhance research into online education. Résumé Cet article soutient que la recherche sur la valeur et le potentiel pédagogiques des nouvelles technologies est limitée par les positions philosophiques qui y sont implicites. Ces positions conduisent soit à attribuer des qualités inaliénables aux technologies (essentialisme), soit à appréhender la technologie comme un moyen neutre pour la réalisation d'objectifs définis par les utilisateurs (instrumentalisme). De telles approches reflètent le sens commun qui prévaut quant à la relation entre la technologie et la pratique sociale. Elles ont cependant aussi été vivement critiquées dans les milieux de la philosophie, de l'histoire et de la sociologie de la technologie. Nous défendons l'idée que l'élaboration de positions philosophiques plus nuancées sur la technologie, issues des études contemporaines de technologie, peut offrir de nouvelles orientations fécondes pour la recherche consacrée à l'éducation en ligne. Après une brève description des positions essentialistes et instrumentistes telles qu'elles se présentent dans ce champ de recherche, nous passerons en revue les principales contributions des études en CJLT/RCAT Vol. 39(2) Online Education: A Science and Technology Studies Perspective 2 technologie et suggérons comment ces dernières pourraient rehausser la recherche consacrée à l'éducation en ligne.
Technology and Education: A Deterministic and Instrumentalist Philosophical Approach
Proceedings of the Business Innovation and Engineering Conference 2020 (BIEC 2020), 2021
Over the past few decades, enormous studies examining the significant contribution of technology adoption and usage in the education industry have emerged. Albeit, miniatures of this literature tend to focus on the outcome of massive (total) dependence of these technologies. To achieve the study objective, the authors engage instrumentalism, and determinism, philosophical approaches to investigate the potential outcome of full dependence of education technology in the pedagogical process in the education industry. Exhuming works of literature on technology adoption and usage in the education industry, and how the two philosophical approaches are being used in the field of philosophy, the conceptual findings reveal that using the instrumentalism approach to identify the potential outcome of educational technologies for the pedagogical process, there are bigger chances of producing a high level of effective and efficient students over traditional education. However, complete technology usage can be a complete disaster for the education industry if education is commercialized to the extent that students view education as a determining substance with lesser value. With this, the authors remark that education management should envision and present education technological adoption and usage as a mediating substance that the students needed to reach greater heights.
Philosophy of technology and education: An invitation to inquiry
Illinois State University: Available WWW:[http:// …, 1994
My aim in this brief discussion is to make explicit the ontologies undergirding the various ways in which technology is discussed in a representative sampling of the contemporary critical literature in education, and by doing so to offer an idiom for discussing a set of issues both pressing yet beset by confusion. When I say "critical" I mean to include those discussions with some reflective component, that is, those at least on some level addressing what technology is in its essence and how, in an ethical sense, educators ought to approach it. By doing this I mean to exclude from explicit consideration the vast majority of published work on educational technology, namely, narrow technical discussions of how to use particular devices, as well as those restricted to studying the effects of an educational tool or technique in some setting or other. These technical discussions, by and large, contain no account of technology as such, nor do they offer anything of significant prescriptive import. Like a manufacturer's guide on how to install and troubleshoot a washing machine, such discussions -quite sensibly, given their purpose -assume as unproblematic the end to which the tool is put while also bracketing the most basic questions about what constitutes a machine for washing (let alone what constitutes a machine), whether or not we ought to engage in washing at all, and what, in the end, is washing itself.
Learning Technology: theorising the tools we study
This paper identifies a significant gap in existing work within the field of educational technology—the failure to explain technology theoretically—and proposes an agenda for addressing this. While there are discussions of theory within educational technology research, these typically focus on learning. Technology itself is seldom considered, being treated instead as “natural” or given. This is in marked contrast to other fields of study, in which robust theories of technology have been developed. The consequence of this is that technology is treated as if it will cause learning—and when it does not, there is no clear explanation of why. To advance this discussion, two traditions of work theorising technology are introduced—one positivistic, including work on affordance, and the other (largely unrepresented in educational technology) that provides a social account. An example of each is used to analyse a case study, so as to contrast the kind of claims that currently get made about technology with those that we could make. It is argued that adopting a social account of technology would enable richer, better-integrated claims to be made about technology use.
THE BURSTING BOILER OF DIGITAL EDUCATION: CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY
This conversation explores the relationships between information technologies and education from the perspective of a Frankfurt School philosopher. The first part of the conversation provides a brief insight into distinct features of Andrew Feenberg's philosophy of technology. It looks into lessons from "stabilized" technologies, explores the role of historical examples in contemporary technology studies, and shows that science fiction can be used as a suggestive inspiration for scientific inquiry. Looking at the current state of the art of philosophy of technology, it argues for the need for interdisciplinarity, and places Feenberg's work in the wider context of Science and Technology Studies (STS). In the second part, the conversation moves on to explore the relationships between technology and democracy. Understood in terms of public participation, Feenberg's view of democracy is much wider than standard electoral procedures, and reaches all the way to novel forms of socialism. Based on experiences with Herbert Marcuse in the 1968 May Events in Paris, Feenberg assesses the significance of information and communication technologies in the so-called "Internet revolutions" such as the Arab Spring, and, more generally, the epistemological position of the philosophy of technology. The last part of the conversation looks into the urgent question of the regulation of the Internet. It analyses the false dichotomy between online and offline revolutionary activities. It links Feenberg's philosophy of technology with his engagement in online learning, and assesses its dominant technical codes. It questions what it means to be a radical educator in the age of the Internet, and asks whether illegal activities on the Internet such as downloading can be justified as a form of civil disobedience. Finally, the conversation identifies automating ideology as a constant threat to humanistic education, and calls for a sophisticated evaluation of the relationships between education and digital technologies.
THINKING OF (THE THEORY OF) EDUCATION FROM THE TECHNOLOGY OF OUR TIME
Pensar la (teoría de la) educación, desde la tecnología de nuestro tiempo, 2021
ABSTRACT In (theory of) education we must address one question as soon as possible: how to create and think of education in keeping with the characteristics, demands and opportunities of this digital age? In this regard, after referring to the paths pedagogical research and educational practice have been following in this field, three questions are raised in the body of the article—ways of being, of experiencing the world and of creating knowledge of a subject whose relationship with the environment is medi-ated by a technology whose defining feature comes from a digital screen—which are demanding a new way of looking at education. In other words, three issues directly affected by the new scenario created by these technologies and which a (theory of) education of our times cannot ignore as that would amount to not (wanting) to see the transition occurring in ways of thinking and putting education into practice; the (theory of) education in our digital time somehow rests on or revolves around them. The article ends with a range of diverse, closely intertwined questions: epistemological, ontological, methodological, but also ethical and political, which give us a glimpse of the advisability or need to redirect thought in this field while forming a research programme; questions with sufficient potential to redirect (theory of) education research, including the very concept and meaning of educating and being educated
Philosophical Questions About Learning Technologies: A Ground-Map
The SAGE Handbook of Philosophy …, 2010
First two paragraphs: In Experience and Nature, John Dewey (1925) described philosophy as creating a ‘ground-map of the province of criticism’ (Dewey, 1925, LW1:308−309), thus providing a useful metaphor for our task in this chapter, which is to discuss the questions that philosophy of education might raise about technology in education. If we want to think critically about such questions, a ground-map can help define the territory of interest; its boundaries, regions, and topography; its climate, resources, and scarcities; and any particular points of interest that should attract our attention. Our chapter consists of six parts. In the first, we discuss some (1) definitional issues that will help us to know which regions are part of our territory. The next four sections discuss these particular regions: (2) epistemological, questions of knowing; (3) psychological, questions of earning; (4) pedagogical, questions of teaching; and (5) social, questions of associated living. While such categorizations are arbitrary, and the boundaries between them are hazy, they help us to simplify the topography. In a final section (6), we pay particular attention to a transcendent issue: whether new technologies