Page 175 - Education in a Digital World

162 So Where Now?

from the earlier ‘technical’ phases. As Collins and Evans (2002) describe, while the
technical phases of any debate around technology are value-driven and certainly require
the involvement of a full range of experts, it is the subsequent democratic phases that
benefit most from the full range of non-expert citizens. These are debates that are

concerned with the development of the policies and regulatory frameworks
within which technical debates are permitted to take place and through
which they are held accountable. [Their] outcome is thus a strategy for action
that sets out what should be done.
(Evans and Plows 2007, p.833)

Of course, as these authors acknowledge, “the challenge for the democratic/
political phase is to find some way of assessing the response of non-expert citizens to
expert debates about which they will, almost by definition, be largely unaware”
(Evans and Plows 2007, p.842). There are a number of mechanisms that could
allow for non-expert inclusion in democratic debates over educational technology.
For instance, other areas of the public engagement in science (such as debates over
GM food) have seen growing use of mechanisms such as ‘public debates’ selected to
include a range of social and demographic groups – i.e. series of local and national
public meetings, feedback forms, websites, and ‘citizen juries’. While by no means
completely inclusive, the application of these ideas to the area of educational tech-
nology would seem a useful first step to the re-constitution of the field and of
its practices along more democratic and participatory lines – especially during the
formation of new and emerging educational technology policies.

Altering the Nature of Academic Involvement in
Educational Technology
This latter set of suggestions raises the question of who assumes the role of coordi-
nator and arbiter of such democratising activities. While there is no reason why
state, community and private actors could not assume such roles, the case can cer-
tainly be made for these participative and democratic activities to be also pursued
through the work of academic researchers and writers. It could be argued that the
(supposedly) expert, unattached and disinterested position of the academic educa-
tional technologist is an ideal position from which to support and sustain the critical
scrutiny of educational technology in society. This would certainly bring educa-
tional technology scholarship in line with wider trends within the academic social
sciences, not least recent calls for forms of ‘public sociology’ that respond to “the
necessity and possibility of moving from interpretation to engagement, from theory
to practice, from the academy to its publics” (Burawoy 2005, p.324). This also
introduces the possibility for educational technology scholars to cultivate stronger
roots in their communities and to work to maintain links with local issues and
struggles that connect to people and their experiences.