ABSTRACT

In the UK, government interest in technology has commonly focused on skills acquisition in preference to the more critical dimensions of learner development and the potential of education technology to empower the learner within digital domains. K. Facer argues that a technological future requires a rethinking of educational interactions to enable young people to have appropriate, rather than alienated, voice and for education, broadly conceived as part of social functioning, to make the most of technology. For proponents of technological affordances, new learning models such as online collaborative learning and connectivism offer contemporary responses to ways in which learning, education and technology may be configured. The need for theoretical tools, such as those used to explain social reproduction and stratification, are likely to prove as necessary in problematising technological realities in education as much as the deployment of technologies themselves.