This short but excellent article is about the need for a ‘critical’ approach to technology in education research.
Selwyn contends that most of the research in the field of technology in education shares the same basic flaws in approach. It tends to focus only on what is possible with new educational technology. It tends to examine technological possibilities divorced from the context on the ground. When it does try to diagnose why technology is not being taken up as planned, it takes the view that it is the fault of educators who are lacking in aptitudes or competencies for full technological uptake. The literature tends to take a Utopian view of technology and to view the latter in a fashion which disembeds it from the larger political, social, economic framework which gave rise to it and which also ignores the larger consequences at this same level of analysis. The result is a field of study which is rife with technological determinism – the propensity to see technology as this disembodied, outside force which cannot be resisted or negotiated but which can only be adapted to – and technological boosterism.
The solution to this situation, according to Selwyn, is the development of a ‘critical’ approach to technology in education research. What this implies is re-embedding technology in the social, political, economic context which gave birth to it, and examining the social, political, and economic consequences of its implementation. Technology is never neutral. Because it was created in the context of a class society, riven with relations of exploitation and oppressions, it is imprinted with these features at the very moment of its birth. Technology has the tendency therefore to act in ways which perpetuates and intensify these relations. It serves certain vested interests, while harming the interests of others. A critical approach to technology of education research would therefore take note of who is served by new technologies in education and how. Are large tech companies the beneficiaries of pushing for technology in the classroom? What are the stakes for ministries of education and individual schools? A critical approach to technology in education research would also examine the larger social, political and economic consequences of technology implementation in the classroom. I have discussed some of these issues in another reflection. They include the need to investigate such impacts as what the training of students in technology does to the labour market in high tech occupations, or the way in which technology in education serves the Neoliberal policy agenda. But, Selwyn points out, technology also has emancipatory potential. A critical approach to technology in education research would start from a view of society which includes class analysis and which is motivated by the desire to push forward a social justice agenda. The possibility for new technologies to further social justice and reduce inequality would therefore also be analysed within the critical technology of education framework.
I think this is a brilliant article. It amounts to call for a reorientation of the field of technology of education research towards undertaking a larger sociology of technology in education. Really, it advocates for embedding technology of education thinking inside of a more dialectical, historical-materialist view of society, technology and social change. Technology is not some autonomous force, disconnected from social and economic relations. This is the type of thinking which leads naïve techno-Utopians to the view that the progressive automation of labour processes will lead to a leisure society within a few short decades. John Maynard Keynes himself fell for such a chimera. The problem with this analysis, of course, is that it forgets the social framework in which technology is created and implemented, which is a class framework. Automation does not lead to a leisure society because the relations of distribution are private and unequal. Automation therefore leads to unemployment and immiseration for many, and the intensification of work for others.
This same type of historical-material analysis needs to be undertaken for educational technologies. Selwyn’s article, however, is nothing more than an introduction to this approach. It leaves it to others to begin to do the more empirical, on the ground type of work that is prescribed. How would this research agenda be operationalized in concrete-complex fashion? Some of the questions that I have provided in the previous paragraph could act as starting points for more grounded research. What are the vested interests in the application of new technologies of education? How do large technology companies like Google benefit from it? What purpose does it serve for educational institutions? What are the larger societal impacts of new technologies? Do they facilitate the implementation of a Neoliberal policy agenda? How? These are some of the questions which I believe it would be germane to explore.
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