Page 48 - Education in a Digital World

Theoretical Approaches 35

to work with a post-colonial framework means to understand the ‘nation’ as a
heterogeneous space, one with uneven development, always under construction,
and never complete. Rather than merely addressing the interconnectedness of
north-south and centre-periphery dichotomies, a critical post-colonial posi-
tion is engaged with the underlying problem of opening up critical spaces for
new narratives of becoming and emancipation.

In addition to these insights, a further valuable addition that the post-colonialist
perspective brings to our analysis of education, technology and globalisation is an
emphasis on the pursuit of agendas for resistance, intervention and change. Indeed,
the post-colonial rejection of the assumed superiority of Western cultures and
agendas of progress and modernity is built around an implicitly radical agenda of
seeking equality and well-being across the world. The post-colonial position is
therefore useful in its interest in the formation of alternative forms of educational
technology that could be considered more ‘appropriate’– for example, technological
arrangements that are based around the increased valuing of indigenous culture and
language, or conceptions of learning that are privileged in other countries. Again,
we shall return to all these themes as the book progresses.

Thinking about Technology and Education

Together, the approaches covered so far in this chapter already imply a complex
account of education and society – enough to fill an entire library, let alone the
remaining six chapters of this book. Yet, at this point we have covered only half of
our stated brief of considering alternative theoretical perspectives on education and
technology. Indeed, if we are to work with these sophisticated understandings of
education, then we also need to work with an equally sophisticated understanding
of technology. Here, it is worth also considering the critical theories of technology
that have developed within the social sciences over the past thirty years. In parti-
cular it is worth reflecting briefly on the strengths of socio-technical approaches
towards understanding the nature and form of technology.
Despite continued calls for improvement (e.g. Bromley 1997, Oliver 2011), it
would be fair to conclude that most writing and thinking about educational technology
takes a noticeably unsophisticated approach when thinking about the relationship
between technology and the social. Many of the most popular – but also the most
misleading – claims about education and technology (such as those considered in
the opening sections of Chapter 1) tend to be based around deterministic assump-
tions that technologies possess inherent qualities, and are therefore capable of having
predictable ‘impacts’ or ‘effects’ on whole countries, educational institutions, class-
rooms, teachers or learners if used in a correct manner. In its simplest form, then,
such ‘technological determinism’ can be seen as a way of thinking about technology
that assumes that technology determines social change. In its most extreme form,
‘hard’ technological determinism assumes that technology is the only factor in social