TY - JOUR
T1 - Educational technology
T2 - what it is and how it works
AU - Dron, Jon
N1 - Funding Information:
I give thanks to Terry Anderson and Gerald Ardito for their insightful feedback and suggestions to improve this work.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Crown.
PY - 2022/3
Y1 - 2022/3
N2 - This theoretical paper elucidates the nature of educational technology and, in the process, sheds light on a number of phenomena in educational systems, from the no-significant-difference phenomenon to the singular lack of replication in studies of educational technologies. Its central thesis is that we are not just users of technologies but coparticipants in them. Our participant roles may range from pressing power switches to designing digital learning systems to performing calculations in our heads. Some technologies may demand our participation only to enact fixed, predesigned orchestrations correctly. Other technologies leave gaps that we can or must fill with novel orchestrations, which we may perform more or less well. Most are a mix of the two, and the mix varies according to context, participant, and use. This participative orchestration is highly distributed: in educational systems, coparticipants include the learner, the teacher, and many others, from textbook authors to LMS programmers, as well as the tools and methods they use and create. From this perspective, all learners and teachers are educational technologists. The technologies of education are seen to be deeply, fundamentally, and irreducibly human, complex, situated and social in their constitution, their form, and their purpose, and as ungeneralizable in their effects as the choice of paintbrush is to the production of great art.
AB - This theoretical paper elucidates the nature of educational technology and, in the process, sheds light on a number of phenomena in educational systems, from the no-significant-difference phenomenon to the singular lack of replication in studies of educational technologies. Its central thesis is that we are not just users of technologies but coparticipants in them. Our participant roles may range from pressing power switches to designing digital learning systems to performing calculations in our heads. Some technologies may demand our participation only to enact fixed, predesigned orchestrations correctly. Other technologies leave gaps that we can or must fill with novel orchestrations, which we may perform more or less well. Most are a mix of the two, and the mix varies according to context, participant, and use. This participative orchestration is highly distributed: in educational systems, coparticipants include the learner, the teacher, and many others, from textbook authors to LMS programmers, as well as the tools and methods they use and create. From this perspective, all learners and teachers are educational technologists. The technologies of education are seen to be deeply, fundamentally, and irreducibly human, complex, situated and social in their constitution, their form, and their purpose, and as ungeneralizable in their effects as the choice of paintbrush is to the production of great art.
KW - Coparticipation
KW - Design
KW - Distributed cognition
KW - Educational technology
KW - Participation
KW - Technology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85103647570&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s00146-021-01195-z
DO - 10.1007/s00146-021-01195-z
M3 - Journal Article
AN - SCOPUS:85103647570
SN - 0951-5666
VL - 37
SP - 155
EP - 166
JO - AI and Society
JF - AI and Society
IS - 1
ER -