ABSTRACT
The fields of instructional design and educational technology have long been agnostic with regard to both culture and theory. Globalization has also meant that throughout the world, governments are embarking on projects to broadly implement technology in schools and institutions of higher education. The use of technologies in schools and other learning contexts is a story of unintended consequences. The purpose of this chapter is to call for a collective initiative to work toward a critical theory of educational technology that will explain, predict, and inform the design, development, and implementation of technology-rich innovations in educational contexts. The technological sublime is the idea that there are no problems for which technology has no answer. The technological sublime is underpinned by progressivism, futurist optimism, tool fetish, modernism, and humanist rationalism. Neoliberalism provides a concentration of discourses that animate a preoccupation with freedom, shrinking governmental roles, disempowering regulatory structures, and back grounding moralistic constraints on action.
