Ipseity

An idea for a book to be co-written by yours truly and a number of colleagues at the School of Communication @ Simon Fraser University. It is to be based on a conference panel at the International Communicaiton Association (Dresden 06), outlined here in its entirety.

Contributors: Dr. Andrew Feenberg, Dr. Norm Friesen, Darryl Cressman, Edward Hamilton

Over the last half-century, understandings of the value of computer and network technologies for education have been shaped by two powerful ideas: First, that these technologies embody or exemplify pure technical rationality, whose progress is as inescapable in education as it is in capitalist society at large. Second, that these same technologies provide the paradigm for understanding the processes of thought, cognition and learning themselves. In essence, these two ideas are variations on a single theme – that new technologies are the ultimate determinants of educational organisation and practice in the so-called “knowledge society.” The first idea has tended to work on the institutions of education from the outside, acting as a prescriptive horizon within which the terms of their restructuring are imagined. The second idea has tended to work on the processes, practices, and relations of education from within, undergirding and guiding research in the field of education.

Together, these foundational ideas have operated powerfully to shape and direct specialized research, technical development and implementation, institutional and state policy, pedagogical practice, and even critical resistance to technology in education. Within this paradigm, new technologies appear to propose an “all-or-nothing” scenario for education – our choices are reduced either to unquestioning acceptance or stubborn resistance. The ideal for both institutional and cognitive functions is the maximization of their operational efficiency. However, ascriptions of monocausal predictability — of the kind made by both proponents and opponents of educational technology — do not match relevant, recent history in the field of educational technology, nor can they account for all dimensions of the learner experience of technology-mediated education.

The four presentations comprising this panel will outline the limitations of this deterministic paradigm through case studies of the history and lived-experience of educational technologies. Our goal is neither to critique educational culture or institutions, or to undermine all calls for their technical transformation. Ultimately we propose a radically different approach to understanding technology, its relationship to education, and understandings of the dynamics of educational change. Employing critical-theoretical and phenomenological frames of reference, we will show these dynamics to be historically variable, participatory and interpretive phenomena, in contrast to the discrete systems imagined by both cognitivists and the most ardent visionaries of technology-based educational transformation.

Program description

Understandings of the value of computer and network technologies for education have been shaped by two powerful ideas: First, that these technologies embody pure technical rationality, whose progress is inescapable. Second, that these same technologies provide the paradigmatic case for understanding the processes of thought and learning themselves. The four presentations comprising this panel will outline the limitations of these deterministic paradigms, and propose a radically different approach to technology and its relationship to education.

Individual abstracts

Andrew Feenberg “Critical theory of technology: The case of online education”
Dominant conceptions of educational technology have emphasised its independent power to transform educational organisation and practice. This is registered on the macro-level in terms of technology-driven administrative change, and on the micro-level in terms computationally-based models of teaching and learning. In contrast to these conceptions, critical theory of technology understands technology by taking into account the imbrication of technical, social, experiential and other factors. My paper will begin with a critique of the philosophical foundations of the dominant approach to educational technology, showing how this conception limits a nuanced view of how technical and social factors are “condensed” in specific rational, technical forms. I then introduce my own “instrumentalisation theory” to provide a grounding for an alternative approach to understandings of technology-based change at both the macro-level of institutions, and the micro-level of pedagogical practice.

Norm Friesen “The limitations of cognitivism and the place of experience in educational technology research”
As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the “cognitive revolution”, it is worth reflecting on its widespread impact on individual disciplines and areas of multidisciplinary endeavour. Of specific concern in this paper is the example of the influence of cognitivism’s equation of mind and computer in education. Within education, this paper focuses on a particular area of concern to which both mind and computer are simultaneously central: educational technology. It examines the profound and lasting effect of cognitive science on our understandings of the educational potential of information and communication technologies, and further argues that recent and multiple “signs of discontent,” “crises” and even “failures” in cognitive science and psychology should result in changes in these understandings. It concludes by suggesting new ways in which educational technology research might articulate the educational value of information technologies –otherwise so readily valourised in our knowledge society.

Edward Hamilton “Revisiting the politics of online education: An early experiment in educational computer conferencing.”
This paper offers a critique of an “evangelical discourse” of online education, a discourse rooted in deterministic claims about the inevitable transformation of educational institutions and systems through the independent agency of technology. The dominance of this discourse in understandings of technology and educational transformation has resulted in a stand-off between proponents and critics of online education, both of whom presuppose that intervention or re-definition of the nature of technology-based change is impossible. I argue that, far from capturing the “essence” of online education, the evangelical discourse is a historically articulated programme concretising an agenda for institutional change in rational forms and systems. I introduce a case study of an early experiment in educational computer conferencing, which I interpret through some key concepts of critical theory of technology, to indicate that online education could potentially be appropriated within quite a different programme for socio-technical change in education.

Darryl Cressman “The experiential dimension of online education: Phenomenological hermeneutics and educational technology.”
Phenomenological and hermeneutic research takes as its starting point the primacy of worlds of human experience (or the human “lifeworld”) over abstract, theoretical or scientific forms of explanation or understanding. From this emerges a unit of analysis in the form of the “anecdote” – brief mimetic accounts emphasizing variations in quotidian experience which are frequently marginalized or elided in technological and administrative models, documentation and function. Describing this method in contrast to those typical of cognitivist and effect studies, this paper also briefly presents a number of cases of its application to common experiences with educational technologies, including simulation and textual communication. These show a dialectic of “world disclosing” and “de-worlding” processes arising from engagement with technologies, where engagement with these technologies opens up simulated or mediated “lifeworlds” to the learner. These cases demonstrate that the value of technology arises not through the realization of mental or institutional operational efficiencies, but through the way world disclosing and de-worlding take place –through the synergies between formalisms encountered in the technology and those characteristic of the subject-matter.