Against the "Relevance" of Educational Technology

catherine — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 13:19:26 -0500

One of the arguments for integrating technology into the curriculum is that it is “relevant”. I’d never deny that technology awareness (and skills) are useful. But can we please ditch this discourse of “relevance”?

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t favour, and have never favoured, the idea that an educational curriculum, of any flavour, ought to be based on “relevance”. For two reasons: democratic and historical. First, who gets to define what is relevant? The notion of “relevance” puts too much power into the hands of too few. It’s dangerous. Second, definitions of “relevance” are irrevocably tied to the social and technological present in which we find ourselves. And our social “present tense” rapidly becomes the past. Surely the purpose of education is to help prepare individuals for their future, not our present.

I am NOT arguing that ICT is “impossible” in the educational context because of the phenomenon of obsolescence. What I principally object to is the way that the language of “relevance” consistently reduces the philosophy of education to an instrumental point of view. Notions of educational “relevance” are invariably tied to a definition of education as an instrumental process, in which an individual is inculcated with specific competencies and/or skills. Skills are utterly situational. They are tied to specific technologies and work practices.

However, ICT “competence” or an ability to operate in the knowledge society is of course much more than a matter of tool use. And the more we think in terms of learning as an ongoing process, the more we approach an ideal of education as metacognition and “learning how to learn”, the more we may broaden and deepen our conception of ICT to encompass socio-cultural perspectives. That will help us to understand how, and why, our technological artifacts are bound up with human activity and sense-making in the broadest sense.

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Against the "Relevance" of Educational Technology