This article makes the case that much of the research in the field of educational technology is tinged by certain common, underlying assumptions about the nature of technology and its role in learning and social change. Many of these assumptions could be placed under the rubric of âTechnological Determinism.â In the article, Oliver explains this concept of Technological Determinism, before attempting to find some approaches in educational technology research which fall under distinct paradigms.
Technological Determinism could be described as a view of technology that sees the latter as an autonomous force, arising on its own, outside of social processes, but which itself shapes social change in a rather direct and causal way. Educational research taking this view as a starting point tends to see technological change in the classroom as a given, inexorable process, that must lead to certain direct adaptations by teachers and learners. It tends to view the technologies themselves as largely neutral and holding no signature of societal structure and power. Technological determinism comes in two varieties. Technological optimists see technology as a prime, autonomous driver of social change, but consider this process to be largely good: negative outcomes from the adoption of technology fall under the category of âunintended consequences.â Technological pessimists, on the other hand, are, as the name implies, more skeptical about the possible benefit of the adoption of new technologies, but still do not go so far as to question the underlying assumption that technological change is inevitable and is the prime mover in determining social change. Technological determinists, of both kinds, tend to assess the benefits or drawbacks of technological change on the basis of only the immediate outcomes in terms of efficiency gains and impacts on learners, but do not consider the larger social processes which give birth to technological change and the way in which the latter impinges on certain pre-existing social structures.
As an antidote to this view, we could do worse that referring back to the view of social change advanced by Marx, and the role of technology therein. This passage comes from a footnote in Volume 1 of Capital, in a chapter called âMachinery and Large-Scale Industry.â The footnote contains the following sentence, which is of great importance:
Technology reveals the active relation of man [sic] to nature, the direct process of production of his life and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.
(p. 493)
We have various elements at play in the process of social change, therefore: individuals, their mental conceptions, their social relations, and technology. All of these processes are related and yet there is little direct causal relationship between them. Technology arises out of social relations, but it is not reduced to them (it only ârevealsâ them). Mental conceptions are also at play, and there is always room for individual agency and actions against the backdrop of social structures. As Marx says elsewhere, in the 18Th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: âman makes his own history, but not under the conditions of his choosingâ [my paraphrase].
This view of the dynamics of social change reminds us that technology is never an autonomous, natural force, which exists outside of social relations and which is neutral as far as class and power relations are concerned. Social relations themselves give rise to technology and help determine the shape it takes. Because we live in a class society, defined by inequality and exploitation, we ought to be initially skeptical of new technologies and to assume that they will have a tendency to exacerbate and intensify exploitative social relations. With respect to educational technology, we can see this tendency at work in the way in which the implementation of new classroom technology serves to expand the profits of the tech sector, increase societal dependence on these products, and advance the Neoliberal agenda by providing cover for the reduction of social spending in education. But nor does such a view foreclose the possibility that technology can be used to emancipatory ends. Indeed, Marxâs view of social change also delineates the way in which, in dialectical fashion, the seeds of the future society are present (albeit sometimes hard to make out) in present society. Technology, therefore, does contain the potential of being used to emancipatory ends, and there are countless empirical examples of this. The point is that if social relations give birth to technology, they also retain the power to shape its application. This, while human agency can also be used to decide how much technology will be adopted and how it will be used.
While I have just presented my own rebuttal to technological determinism, Oliver, in the article, scours the field of education and technology to try to find some alternative paradigms. Drawing from the work of Vygotsky, Activity Theory states that learning is a function of the deliberate interaction between individuals and their social environments, mediated by tools. The Communities of Practice approach defines learning as the development of identity and competency within a social group. Finally, Actor-Network Theory examines how people work in groups, aided by tools, to sustain (or fail to sustain) social processes.
In my view, none of these paradigms are really equipped to answer the questions posed by, or address the shortfalls of, technological determinism. They all see learning an outcome of interaction with, and integration into, a larger social group. Clearly, in this case, if this larger group is using technology to communicate and socialize, then what educators need to do is to give access to these technologies to students, and improve their abilities to use them. But this view never calls into question how these technologies come to be, what their political content is, and the larger social outcomes they produce. Nor do these approaches see technology as anything but an autonomous, natural, historical development. It does not account for the fact that human societies have agency about whether and how to use technologies. This is especially the case when it comes to the classroom setting, where educators have considerable power to shape the social environment. These approaches never ask whether and which technologies to integrate there and what their other effects will be.
The only other approach suggested by Oliver which seems to offer at least a partial remedy to technological determinism, in my view, is the Social Construction of Technology approach. The latter does indeed begin to look at the larger social forces behind technological development, as well as the social, moral and ethical consequences of adopting certain technologies. This approach, however, is, according to Oliver, underdeveloped in the educational technology research literature. Â
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