ABSTRACT

Technologies are important for imagination, perception and nearness. However, various dominant perspectives in educational practice and in educational discourse appear to equivocally assume that technologies are neutral means with no effect on learning and the essential means for procuring and enhancing learning. These assumptions perceive technology and education to be distinct and isolated realms. In contrast, the metaphoricity-position, I propose here, takes into consideration the constitutive role of technology in society in general and education in particular and thus does not refer to strictly separated domains that come together at some specific point in time but to rather always already enmeshed domains. Metaphoricity itself refers to a process of relatedness to the world, a process of emergence, and thinking that attempts to simultaneously think the nature of technology and the human being’s existence in their various and multifaceted instantiations. It thus refers to a type of synthesis that is embodied, conceptual, material and linguistic and can be completely dominated neither by technology nor by the human being. This perspective is able to show how technology and education are modes of formation of the human being and at times competitive modes of Bildung.