Ipseity

The Myth: It is often said or implied that technology or technological change impact education. They are seen as acting as a kind of “disruptive force,” requiring the adaptation, transformation or sometimes even the elimination of educators and educational institutions alike. The assumptions behind such understandings are that technology drives educational change, and that there is generally a direct and one-way relationship between technical innovation and educational transition. In its most extreme form, this myth is encapsulated in so-called “laws” of progress and change: Moore’s law (the annual doubling of computer processor speeds), Kurzweil’s “law of accelerating returns,” or Gladwell’s epidemiologically-derived “tipping point.” Although none of these are laws in the strict scientific or physical sense, their consequences for education, schools, the university, etc. are often seen as having the self-evident truth and certainty of natural edicts. “I don’t question if e-learning will reach a tipping point,” one author confesses, “but what I [find] myself pondering is when e-learning will reach a tipping point and become a social epidemic.” (Neal e-learn 2004, emphases added; see also Bull, Bull, Garofalo & Harris, 2002; Gandel, Katz, & Metros, 2004; Educause, 2002). Here, the effects of technical change are inevitable and are not questioned; only the precise time of its full impact on education is open to debate.

A similarly unquestioning but less explicit understanding of technology as a kind of “unmoved mover,” decisively influencing education from the outside, is expressed in a range of research into the impact of technology in education. One example is research which understands technological innovations as being “disseminated” throughout a population (often the faculty at a university, as it happens; e.g. Mahony & Wozniak, 2005; Bull et al, 2002; Garofoli & Woodell, 2003; PT3 2002). This way of framing the research question has the effect of casting a technology as an externally determined “artifact,” being absorbed by a passive population. This allows only for responses of “adoption” or “resistance” of varying intensity, and it has the further effect of labeling parts of the population according to their imputed willingness to adopt –as “early adopters” “mainstream” or (rather tendentiously or controversially) as “laggards.”

Another example of research that also reinforces this technological fallacy –and that also tends to produce controversial results– is presented in quasi-experimental designs that define technology as a treatment or control, and measure its educational effects or outcomes. This general type of research, utilized in hundreds of investigations measuring the impact of a new technology or medium on educational performance, generally produces results deemed either controversial, inconclusive or as “fatally flaw[ed]” (Bernard et. al. 2004; Russell, 1997).

The Reality: To continue, see the complete piece.