#1. Who I am

#2. What is critical?

#3. Origins of a critical approach to #edtech – traditions/school(s) of thought

#4. Evolution over time (questions/issues being asked/ kinds of research/visibility in general #edtech)

#5. Current situation of critical studies of #edtech

where it sits within #edtech; relations with/distinctions to other ‘tribes’/approaches of #edtech;

what role does it play?;

methodological considerations;

current research objects;

main scholars;

challenges & limitations

#6. Future

How will the critical approach evolve?

How should it evolve?

#7. Hints/tips/observations

#1. Who I am

#2. What is critical?

TWO APPROACHES TO BEING CRITICAL

[1] BEING CRITICAL WITH A LITTLE ‘C’ – i.e. A GENERALLY CRITICAL DISPOSITION

Adopting a ‘critical’ approach towards educational technology does not entail a dogmatic adherence to any particular theoretical stance, school-of-thought or ‘-ism’.

The ‘dictionary definition’

Being objective

Analysis of the pros AND cons

Detailed scholarly analysis

Asking ‘why?’ rather than ‘how to?’ or ‘what if?’

Need to start asking difficult questions of any DT in Education …

KEY CONCERNS ABOUT DT & Education are not the usual anodyne ones of ‘what works?’ and ‘why?’

But concerns of …

What is education for?

What should education be like?

[Sonia Livingstone] ... what's really going on, how can this be explained, how could things be otherwise?

Asking awkward questions …

key questions that are always worth asking of education & technology …

  • What is actually new here?
  • What are the un-intended consequences or second-order effects?
  • What are the potential gains … what are the potential losses?
  • What underlying values and agendas are implicit?
  • In whose interests is this working? Who benefits in what ways?
  • What are the social problems that digital technology is being presented as a solution to?
  • How responsive to a ‘technical fix’ are these problems likely to be?

Neil Postman -

  • What is the problem to which a technology claims to be a solution?
  • Whose problem is it?
  • What new problems will created by solving the old one?
  • Which people and what institutions will be most harmed by this new technology?
  • What changes in language are being promoted by these new technologies?
  • What shifts in economic and political power are likely to result from this new technology?
  • What alternative uses might be made of a technology?
  • What are the ideological dimensions of educational technology? What meanings and understandings of education are being conveyed through digital technologies? How do these technologies disseminate ideas about political and economic structures? What is the language that is being associated with education and digital technology?
  • What forms of educational engagement are being promoted through digital technology use, and what forms are being obscured and silenced? In whose interests does the common consensus about educational technology work? How persuasive does this manipulation of understandings and meanings appear to be?
  • What freedoms and unfreedoms are associated with digital technology use in education? How are these being experienced by different individuals and social groups? To what extent are educational technologies situated in dominant structures of production and power? To what extent do educational technologies disrupt dominant structures of production and power?
  • How is technology-based education altering the relationship between the individual and the commons, as well as the public and private? Are new technologies fostering a sense of obligation and communal sense of education? Are all individuals self-responsiblized and empowered by educational technology?
  • What are the emotional, ‘human’ outcomes of increased technology use in education? In what ways are digital technologies enhancing or diminishing a sense of pleasure, engagement and enchantment with education?
  • What are the continuities and discontinuities between ‘new’ forms of digital education and the forms of education that preceded? In what ways are existing practices and processes altered? In what ways are existing structures and relations superseded altogether?

Michael Apple (2013) - role of all academics working in the area of education should be to act as ‘criticalsecretaries’ of “the voices and struggles of those who on a daily basis face the realities of life in societies so deeply characterized by severe inequalities”.

Popkewitz (1987) - ‘critical intellectual work’ – i.e. attempting to move “outside the assumptions and practices of the existing order and struggling to make categories, assumptions and practices of everyday life problematic”.

Selwyn (2012) – ‘pessimism’

… but sceptical not cynical

[2] BEING CRITICAL WITH A BIG ‘C’ – i.e. PROPER CRITICAL THEORY!!!

Politics!

Starting with Marx - critique and analysis of domination in general.

Critical Theory = theories that are critical of capitalism and domination.

Stemming from the work of the Frankfurt School - Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, Horkheimer

This critical perspective is rooted in a broader recognition of ed-tech as a set of profoundly political processes and practices that are best described in terms of …

  • Power, control,
  • Domination, subjugation
  • Inequality, injustice
  • Conflict, resistance

A desire to foster and support issues of empowerment, equality, social justice and participatory democracy

There is much that we can take from this tradition ….

  • Ed-tech as a field of political engagement
  • Showing and exploring the difference between potentiality and actuality.
  • Understanding ed-tech within a dialectic of potentially democratizing AND totalizing technical power.

Amin and Thrift (2005) - four-point agenda for critical scholarship, i.e.:

  • First - a powerful sense of engagement with politics and the political.
  • Second - a consistent belief that there must be better ways of doing things than are currently found in the world.
  • Third - a necessary orientation to a critique of power and exploitation that both blight people’s current lives and stop better ways of doing things from coming into existence.
  • Fourth - a constant and unremitting critical reflexivity towards our own practices: no one is allowed to claim that they have the one and only answer or the one and only privileged vantage point. Indeed, to make such a claim is to become a part of the problem.

… the analysis and questioning of how digital technology is entwined with domination, inequality, societal problems, exploitation

… in order to advance social struggles and the liberation from domination so that a dominationless, co-operative, participatory society can emerge.

Immanent critique–

  • locating contradictions in the rules and systems necessary to the production of dominant forms of power and control
  • a critique against the principles a dominant value proposes.
  • highlighting the inner contradictions between what something stands for and what is being done in actual terms.
  • Finding contradictions and indirectly providing alternatives, without constructing an entirely new theory.

#3. Origins of a critical approach to #edtech – traditions/school(s) of thought

Political economy

Policy sociology

CDA

SCOT / Social Shaping

Domestication

Foucault

Lefebvre / de Certeau / everyday life

Marxian/ neo-marxist/post-marxist/ Autonomist

STS (Angelinos – LOGO)

Socio-material theory … ANT

Bourdieu

Deluze

Derrida

#4. Evolution over time (questions/issues being asked/ kinds of research/visibility in general #edtech)

David Noble

Douglas Kellner

Kevin Robins and Frank Webster

Langdon Winner

Michael Apple

Neil Postman

Theodore Roszak

Chris Bigum /Bill Green / Jane Kenway

Daniel Chandler

Gary Natriello

Hank Bromley

Janet Ward Schofield

John Beynon & Hughie Mackay

Larry Cuban

Robert Muffoletto

Steven Kerr

Susan De Castell

Monty Neill

Parlo Singh

Stephen Hodas

History; Neo-luddite; labor/work; deskilling; markets; knowledge/ economy; micro politics; feminism/gender

#5. Current situation of critical studies of #edtech

where it sits within #edtech; relations with/distinctions to other ‘tribes’/approaches of #edtech;

Ed-Tech tribes

  • Learning sciences – TEL / science & maths
  • Instructional design / design sciences
  • E-learning
  • M-learning
  • ITT / teacher-ed / pedagogy
  • Psychology

Ed-Tech conferences

SITES, Ed-Media, CAL, ALT-C, NLC, ASCILITE

Ed-Tech Journals

C&E, JCAL, BJET

Allied tribes

New literacies

Scando / North America – Gee, Lankshear, Leander, Luke / Multimodal, New London Group

Media Education

Buckingham

DML/ Connected Learning

Networked learning – ANT / NLC

Marxists - Hall/Winn

Philosophy of education

Games and digital culture

Post/trans humanist / socio-material - Fenwick, Edwards, Burnett

Feminist / Critical race theory

HE - Liz Losh,

Community education/ critical pedagogy / activist education

Virginia Eubanks

Open Education Resources

what role does it play?

  • Nothing?
  • A corrective? Taming the excesses of learnification / happy-clappy participation/games etc.
  • Altering the conversation?

… but only if you get involved with the mainstreamed-tech, mainstream education and mainstream social studies of media/tech

methodological considerations;

Lack of funding/ agenda driven and/or theory driven [less on evidence/warrant]

Micro-studies (auto ethnography, non-ethnographic case studies)

The non-political nature of ANT accounts!

Dead methods!

Need to be multi-sensual, multi-modal, socio-material

Tech=black box! Digital methods, big-data, comp. sci

Design methods

ARC DP14

  • Ethnography – offline and online
  • Critical Participatory Design
  • Live methods

Current research objects;

(a lot of these are the dominant ideologies of contemporary ed-tech)

  • (Hyper)individualism– structure/agency … libertatianism
  • Neo-liberalisation
  • Institutions - Managerialism/ audit culture/ conservative modernisation (e.g. LMS)
  • Political economy (Silicon Valley & start-up / corporate reform / policy networks)
  • Open (after the MOOC moment)
  • Equity (see DML15)
  • Algorithmic/computational/data
  • Privacy/ surveillance/ post-panoptic age
  • Prosumption/ participation
  • Culture/identity
  • Student/young person – school/home mismatch
  • Changing role of the educator(?)
  • History/ media archaeology

main scholars;

Random people (one off papers … not sure they’ll ever do more!)

John Hannon

Jeffery Alan Johnson

TressieMcmillanCottom

Matt Finn

Thomas Philip & Antero Garcia

Joel Spring

Liz Losh

Sian Bayne / Jeremy Knox/ Edinburgh

Martin Oliver/ Lesley Gourlay … (Laura Czerniewicz?)

Ben Williamson/ Stirling

Notable Canadians

Jennifer Jenson

Suzanne de Castell

Megan Boler

Norm Friesen

Sara Grimes

Ted Hamilton

Leslie Regan Shade

Jason Nolan

Outside of education!

NMS / ICS

TTW15 / Dark Side of the Digital 2013 / Digital Sociology / IR16

Alexander Galloway

Lev Manovich

Mackenzie Wark

Geert Lovink

Christian Fuchs

David Berry

LSE/ Goldsmiths crew

Digital Ethnography

Digital Humanities

Digital Sociology

challenges & limitations

  • Unsexy - Geert Lovink (2011) - any critical study of digital media is grueling, unglamorous, ‘boring’ and ‘unsexy’.
  • Funding- what works / only good news
  • Going against the grain – a message no-one wants to hear/ people are not expecting
  • Best people move on!
  • Academia is collapsing around our ears – getting your message out there / still doing academic work (open access/ unconference/ twitter/ blogging / journals & monographs???) …. Getting into the ed-tech bubble / echo chamber?!

#6. Future

How will the critical approach evolve?

Mainstream critical education research will catch up

Platform studies – social research + computer science

How should it evolve?

POLITICAL ECONOMY / COMMERCIAL / BUSINESS

DATA

LABOR (digital labor, immaterial labor, cognitive capitalism)

POST-DIGITAL (bio-tech, neuro-bollocks)

ENVIRONMENT/ SUSTAINABILITY (batteries, e-waste)

ETHICS

#7. Hints/tips/observations

You are swimming against the tide

  • Ed-tech is a positive project
  • Contemporary HE is about innovation/creativity/knowledge production/engagement … not critical thinking

You have to be very careful how to spin/ present yourselves …

At best you will be

  • Mis-used
  • Ignored
  • Given token billing

You will be criticised for stating the obvious (NLC pushback … we do this anyway)

You will be criticised for having no solutions

You will be accused of being a Luddite

You will need to understand technology (as least an interactional expert)

You will need to keep up to speed

Persevere … but most good people move quickly on

People only really care about specific stuff!

  • Highly cited (bland ‘we should be critical’ papers; taking out sacred cows (DN); student experience)
  • Low cited (history, policy/political economy)

BUT

News media will be your friend

Some ed-tech people will be surprisingly friendly/ open

Some educators will be your friend

FINALLY … USE TWITTER

#FF

staying informed – institutions

@LNM_Monash

@dmlresearchhub

@usedgov

@officeofedtech

@hechingerreport

@NMCorg (Horizon Report people)

@UNESCOICTs

@pewinternet

staying informed – useful idiots

@oldaily [Downes]

@gsiemens

@Livingstone_S

@antoesp

@trucano

@gconole

@Czernie

@sbayne

@merlinjohn

@zephoria

@audreywatters

@markwarschauer

@Kerileef

@CubanLarry [blog!]

@BenPatrickWill

DML Central, Spigot, Hack Education,

Digital Culture & Education

E-learning & Digital Media

Learning, Media & Technology