ABSTRACT
A clear distinction has emerged between Chapter 1’s discussion of the high-powered rhetoric concerning what schooling in the digital age could look like and Chapter 2’s discussion of the rather more varied realities of what schooling in the digital age does look like. The contrast between these two discussions highlights a longstanding and deep-rooted weakness in academic thinking about digital technology and education. As a forward-looking and fast-changing field of study, many educational technology commentators, writers and researchers tend understandably to focus on ‘state-of-theart’ issues. As the last two chapters suggest, much effort is directed towards exploring the learning potential of emerging technologies and much time is also devoted to debating and developing forms of teaching and learning ‘fit’ for the digital age. Other concerns and preoccupations include issues of pedagogically sound design, implementing digital technologies to increase educational opportunities and, perhaps most contentiously, striving to ‘prove’ that technology leads to ‘effective’ learning outcomes. As outlined in Chapter 1, the field of educational technology is concerned primarily with questions of what could happen, and what should happen once new technologies and digital media are placed into educational settings. Yet it can be argued that the predominance of these concerns has shaped current academic understandings of schools and schooling in the digital age along rather uniform and decidedly a-critical lines – dominated by constructivist views of learning, and a pronounced tendency to focus primarily on the positive aspects of educational technology use. As David Buckingham (2007) has observed, the educational technology literature is overpopulated by in-depth investigations of ‘model’ schools and classrooms with enthusiastic teachers and well-resourced students basking in the glow of the ‘Hawthorne effect’ of the attention of researchers. With these thoughts in mind, this chapter considers alternative perspectives that could be used to frame a more socially and politically orientated understanding of schools technology.
