Networked and Global Learning

Promoting digital ownership is different than assigning work in publicly accessible spaces.

For instance, public assignments tap into fears of public embarrassment

ut the assignments must be framed by a conversation about audience and the way the ‘domain’ represents the author to that audience.

This marginal standing is reflected in the tendency for educational technology academics to be located often within ‘support’ units and divisions, such as cross-faculty ‘Teaching & Learning Divisions’ or departmental ‘E-Learning Units’. Physically as well as intellectually, then, the field of technology and education is often found to be operating on the peripheries of academe

In short, we need to accept that academic work in the area of technology and education is currently falling short of what should now be a significant and substantial area of contemporary education scholarship.

Instead, the academic study of technology and education should be developing as much along the lines of critical social science as it does in the guise of a cognitive learning science.

attempting to move “outside the assumptions and practices of the existing order and struggling to make categories, assumptions and practices of everyday life problematic”.

As Sonia Livingstone (2012) puts it, this problematizing of technology and education usually pursues three basic lines of inquiry: What is really going on? How can this be explained? How could things be otherwise? As these questions imply, a critical approach also involves speaking up for, and on behalf of, those voices usually marginalized in discussions of what technology and education ‘is’ and ‘sh

What to do about digital technology?’ remains a high-profile

As Alison Hearn has argued, contemporary higher education is now predicated around ambitions to produce human capital rather than critical thinkers; and to foster creativity, innovation and knowledge rather than critical thinking.

This stems, at least in part, from the fundamental desire amongst most educational technologists to improve education through the implementation of digital technology. For many academics, then, technology and education is approached as an inherently ‘positive project’. Indeed, I suspect that most people working in this area are driven to some degree by an underlying belief that digital technologies are capable of improving learning and/or education in some way

I would argue that any academic who is working in the area of technology and education should feel obliged to be critical, or at least justify why they have chosen not to be critical