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Feenberg and other critical theorists such as Ellul, Ihde and Irrgang maintain that technology is neither neutral nor autonomous but ambivalent. Ambivalent technology is distinguished from neutrality by the role it attributes to social values in the use and the development of technical systems.

technology is not a thing in itself but is inherently a process of social, historical and political cultures.

technology mediates experience, and through this mediation, it alters the experience of the phenomena.

“In developing this ‘personal cyberinfrastructure’ through the Domain of One’s Own initiative, UMW gives students agency and control; they are the subjects of their learning, not the objects of education technology software.

Gaining ownership over the data is vital—but until students see this domain as a space that rewards rigor and experimentation, it will not promote student agency

Traditional assignments don’t necessarily empower students when they have to post them in a public space

These ideologies permeate new digital learning technologies. They reward the “roaming autodidact” while always judging others as inferior. (A lack of "intrinsic motivation," for example.)

We can help students understand their learning history without knowing their identity.”

What happens to bodies – particularly bodies of marginalized people – when they're submittted to a new knowledge regime that claims to be identity-less, that privileges identity-less-ness?

David warns, we still tend to think of knowledge in the ways we did when books had to sit on a single place on the shelf, when knowledge had a single, possible, right form, rather than multiple forms.

This doesn’t mean there are no facts – but it does mean that people are going to insist on being wrong.”

David is actually quite concerned about difference, and just how much difference we can tolerate and still interact and function.

how much training should be required prior to taking a job, and whether the investment of time and money spent on training should be optimized around the company or the employee, knowing there will always be some in-house training required.

When we look at the bigger picture of retraining for this and many other professions, knowing that people will be rebooting their careers far more often in the future, with time being such a precious commodity, how do we create the leanest possible educational model for jobs in the future?

On the other side of the equation are people who go through all the work of getting bachelor and master degrees and still not having the skills necessary to gain employment. Traditional colleges, for the most part, do a great job, but they are all oriented around seat time. They also come with the overarching philosophy that nothing of value can be learned in less than four years, a timeframe woefully out of sync with someone needing to change career paths. So at what point is education “too lean,” and conversely, when is it “too fat?”

And one thing I’ve learned is that everything is interesting if looked at at the appropriate level of detail. Now, it used to be that you’d have to seek out places to plunge in over your head. But now, in the age of the Internets, all we have to do is stand still and the flood waters rise over our heads. We usually call this “information overload,” and we’re told to fear it. But I think that’s based on an old idea we need to get rid of. Here’s what I mean. So, you know Flickr, the photo sharing site? If you go there and search for photos tagged “vista,” you’ll get two million photos, more vistas than you could look at if you made it your full time job. If you go to Google and search for apple pie recipes, you’ll get over 1.3 million of them. Want to try them all out to find the best one. Not gonna happen. If you go to Google Images and search for “cute cats,” you’ll get over seven million photos of the most adorable kittens ever, as well as some ads and porn, of course, because Internet. So that’s two million vista photos. 1.3 million apple pie recipes. 7.6 million cute cat photos. We’re constantly warned about information overload, yet we never hear one word single word about the dangers of Vista Overload, Apple Pie Overload, or Cute Kitten overload. How have the media missed these overloads! It’s a scandal!

For example, in the old days if you watched the daily half hour broadcast news or spent twenty minutes with a newspaper, you had done your civic duty: you had kept up with The News. Now we can see before our eyes what an illusion that sense of mastery was. There’s too much happening on our diverse and too-interesting planet to master it, and we can see it all happening within our browsers

t Wikipedia, the articles are often relatively short, but they typically have dozens or even hundreds of links. So rather than trying to get everything about, say, Shakespeare into a couple of thousand words, Wikipedia lets you click on links to other articles about what it mention — to Stratford-on-Avon, or iambic pentameter, or about the history of women in the theater.

Learners construct new knowledge, upon their own existing knowledge.  This is very individualised, and based on each learner’s past experiences, and ways of thinking.

Learning designers have some tricks to help deal with such diversity, such as researching your cohort, conducting a needs analysis, and ultimately categorising learners and focusing on the majority.

three approaches

Yet school leaders and classroom teachers often fail to see a connection between educational theory and research conducted in universities and the real-world, complex and contextually rich teaching, learning and leading contexts in schools.

“Best practice, evidence-based practice, and reflective practice all refer to ways of making optimum use of know-how”[3]; however, while necessary, these are insufficient for creating new insights into practice, or “know-why” directed towards advancing practice

Design-based professional learning, which builds upon design-based research findings and theories, provides the bridge for teachers to advance practice in a principled, practical way.