Educational Technology is NOT Neutral

May 18th, 2006

I am making a presentation at the Social Skills through Social Software workshop in Salzburg next week. My presentation has the rather trendy tile of ‘Educational Technology is NOT Neutral - Chancen und Risiken von ePortfolio Design’.
Here is the abstract for the presentation. You can also download a PDF version of my slides here: salzburg.pdf

Background and context of the presentation

E-learning is a young technology and the study of e-learning is equally in its infancy. Despite this there is by now an extensive literature on the subject and learning technology is increasingly recognised as a discipline in itself. However the overwhelming majority of these studies, from both proponents and sceptics, have been technologically determinist, based on the potentials and effects of technologies on education and learning, rather than looking at the influence of learning and teaching on technology.

The forms and uses of technologies are shaped by political and social processes. If learning is a social process, then any consideration of the development and impact of e-learning and e-learning technologies needs to examine the wider social, economic and cultural processes and discourses involved in the development and implementation of new technologies in education.

Three dominant policy discourses in education have shaped the development and implementation of e-learning: commodification, privatization and a restricted discourse of lifelong learning, which in turn are based on broader discourses around globalization and the privatization of knowledge (Attwell, forthcoming).
Such dominant discourses have tended towards limiting the impact of ICT within the mainstream education and training systems and of holding back the development of new didactic and pedagogic approaches within formal learning.

Even the development of individual learning portfolios has been inhibited by the desire to control and commodify learning. Rather than learners being encouraged to develop an account of all their learning experiences, many systems constrain the recording and reflection on learning to the learning outcomes prescribed by the curriculum and by the desire to present the results of the portfolio in a standard way.

However, the changing ways in which young people are using computers for learning and the increasing use of ICt for informal learning is leading to new pedagogic possibilities and opportunities for new didactic approaches to education and training. Ubiquitous computing and social software have the potential to support such a new approach to learning and an expanded pedagogical idea of e-portfolios.

Objectives

The objectives of the presentation are:
• To explain the links between political and social processes and the development of use of e-learning technologies
• To examine how young people are using computers for learning
• To examine how computers are being used for informal learning
• To consider the implications of these changes for pedagogic and didactic approaches to formal education and training
• To consider how social software can be used to support new pedagogic and didactic approaches to education and training.
Conclusions

To utilise the opportunities for new forms of didactics will require profound reform in education and training systems and practice and new responsibilities and roles for teachers and trainers.

Two requirements stand out. The first is the need for wider and more flexible occupational profiles capable of being shaped both by the learners and by the requirements of changing technologies and work processes. It is striking that through informal learning in SMEs learners were able to develop new and emergent occupational practice, building on previous learning and shaping the use of new technologies in the work process.

The second involves the structure and form of the curriculum. Present formal e-learning is largely context free, is usually subject based, and is sequenced by teachers and trainers. Above all e-learning is driven by the demands of the education process, rather than by the demands of the work process. A new didactical approach requires curricula based on a holistic understanding of work processes, allowing learners to create and make as they learn and to engage in a community of practice through their activities and understanding of those activities. In this way the subject of learning and the process of learning can be brought together developing new and dynamic forms of ‘applied knowledge’ or ‘work process knowledge’ as both the subject and object of learning.

Further reading
Jeremny Hiebert’s blog - Headspace
Graham Attwell’s blog - The Wales-Wide Web
John Seely Brown’s web site
The Personal Learning Environments Blog.

Technorati Tags: e-learning, e-portfolios

Entry Filed under: Personal Learning Environments (PLE)