Education and our conversations about, with and through technology

Reynold Redekopp
in Feller, Sebastian and Ilker Yengin (eds.), Educating in Dialog: Constructing meaning and building knowledge with dialogic technology. 2014. xviii, 250 pp. (pp. 3–32)

Technology:

• became invisible as it became ubiquitous.
• became just a list of things.
• essence got lost from the discussion.

Technology Dialogue:
1. About - talking with students about the essence of technology.

Technology Dialogue:
2. With - taming the technology to achieve OUR goals?

Technology Dialogue:
3. Through - how it mediates and influences the message?

Conversation ABOUT technology

Technology is not neutral: “We need to understand it as an influence. It doesn’t just do what we ask. It tells us what we can do.”

PLPNetwork (2013), “Dropbox is more of a mega-utility than a simple tool. It begs you to think up new ways to use it, in and out of the classroom.”

Technology influences what we value (and not)

Jacques Ellul (1964, xxv) defines technique as “... the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”

Technique is a way of thinking, of organizing, of observing.

Technique sees the earth as merely raw materials.

Technique gives control of education to data/test managers.

Linear vs cyclical

Individual vs communal

Reductionist vs wholistic

Data vs context

Attitudes to adopt

• Be skeptical of claims
• Assume guilty
• Negatives appear much later
• Is control local or away?
• Recognize tech worship

Technique influences

• Authority
• Language
• Literacy
• Problem definition
• Process
• Tools and Models

People solve problems

Questions:
Who benefits?
Who does not?
Who thinks they do?

With

Technology promises, but never quite delivers

Most technologies were not built for us - they devolved to our level.

We compensate for the limitations - eg. emoticons

Technology places a premium on facts, not opinions or emotions.

Postman (1998): “the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom.”

Do we get stuck in an echo chamber that makes us feel good?

Small devices are redefining our social world. Do we want them to?

We need to have these discussions with our students.

Through

Distance and time seem to be irrelevant now.

We have potentially huge audiences (or small, important ones)

So why are teens lonelier?

Technology mediates, influences and occasionally defines our conversations and relationships by the tools we create.

These are issues that we can deal with K-12 students in appropriate ways.