The chapter is an outcome of a careful literature survey and analysis conducted in 2016 specifically for the e-Book, having also the aim of creating a text we could use with students that need to produce literature reviews for projects, dissertations and theses.
This has been a particularly complex piece of writing to produce, not only because we’re three authors with reasonably different perspectives, experiences and styles but, mainly, because we didn’t want the result merely to denounce problems. Yes, there may problems with the literature in the area (and not only in Portuguese), but an important aspect of any approach that presents itself as ‘critical’ in any conception is to discuss alternatives, in addition to avoiding binaries and unfounded value judgments. I’m not sure we were completely successful in this, but we certainly – and bravely – tried!
So, here is Alexandre (audio in Portuguese, subtitles in English):
The chapter is relatively long (methodological details, in particular, take some space, but we allowed ourselves this freedom thinking of the possible uses that might be made of the text by/with researchers in training) and discusses several other issues, but Alexandre managed to raise some essential points.
So, we hope students and colleagues find the chapter useful not only as a ‘picture’, albeit limited, of our area, but also as an ‘example’, albeit imperfect, for surveys of related literature. We will be most grateful for feedback!
We invited Ralph originally to write a preface for the volume, but A double-edged sword does much more than a simple presentation of chapters, one by one (integrated into the organiser’s Hybrid Resistance). To our surprise – and benefit of the readers! – he presented us with a text that, albeit longer than expected (especially by yours truly, who was already drowning in translations and revisions of the other chapters…), sheds light on issues and concerns that underpin practically all the book chapters, giving us lots of food for thought.
In his presentation, Ralph explains the structure of his piece:
The author articulates ideas from different areas – Media Theory, Political Philosophy and Education – to present a complex, yet interesting and relevant argument, relevant to anyone who distrusts (a term masterfully explored by another of the e-Book authors – Neil Selwyn – in this book) Promethean (‘rose-tinted’) perspectives on digital technology.
Martin’s chapter, entitled ‘The development of new disciplines in education – the example of Open Education’, offers a view of the OER movement from the perspective of someone strongly engaged in the area since its origin. Watch Martin present the main ideas developed in his piece:
From the literature in Portuguese, I recommend Andréia Inamorato Santos‘ chapter ‘Educação Aberta: histórico, práticas e o contexto dos Recursos Educacionais Abertos’ (Open Education: history, practices and the context of OER), in Recursos Educacionais Abertos: práticas colaborativas e políticas públicas (unfortunately I’ve not managed to find the book online at this point – it’s been previously avaiable on the site of Projeto REA-Brasil, via this page).
If you want to venture in the field of ‘openness’, Martin has an interesting CC-by book: The Battle for Open – how openness won and it doesn’t feel like a victory(three different download formats, English only). In an area laterally related to OER, he’s published The Digital Scholar, another openly available book (in this case, as HTML for online reading). In this one he discusses the impact of digital technologies and Web 2.0 on academic and scholarly practice, analysing the changes that have occurred in other areas, including the music and movie industries.
Last but not least, I recommend Martin’s excellent blog.
Clarifying: I’m delighted to publish this post, as whilst I prepared the subtitles for the video, I was reminded of my arrival at the OU in 1998, when I ‘landed’ directly in the presentation of the university’s first online course (this article describes the basic ideas of a course that, like all the OU courses, was lovingly known by its code – T171). The course had been created by three ‘pioneers’ of online education (in addition to Martin, John Naughton – read his articles published on The Guardian – and Gary Alexander, who retired shortly after that), and provided a basis for Martin’s first book, Delivering learning on the net. In this course, I worked as a tutor and part of the presentation team, chaired by Martin – we were all ‘pioneers’ at that time, in a way, and I learned a great deal with his calm and unpretentious way of dealing with the many challenges facing the team (for example, to hire and train tutors to support 12k students in groups of 15, max!). I was also reminded of the motion, around the end of 1999, around the ideas of free software / open source and their possibilities for education (the widely known OpenLearn project was not the first OER initiative developed there – I told a bit of this ‘hidden history’ – to borrow some words from Audrey Watters‘ chapter in the eBook – in this article I wrote with Alexandra Okada – English only).
Avoiding further nostalgic digressions, I wish everyone good readings, taking the opportunity to highlight we’ve got also video presentations of the e-Book chapters by Lesley Gourlay, Jeremy Knox, Richard Hall and Audrey Watters!
We are pleased to continue the series of video presentations by authors who contributed chapters to our 2017 e-Book Education and Technology: critical approaches, bringing you, today, Lesley Gourlay, Reader at the Institute of Education, UCL, London. The author talks about her chapter “Re-embodying the digital university”:
The chapter offers pertinent and profound questions; in particular, the author challenges the binary ‘digital’ vs. ‘material’, an idea that supports a great deal of discussion on the presence of digital technologies in education. This is worth a reading!
Continuing the series of video teasers of the chapters in the e-Book Education and Technology: critical approaches, we now give the floor to Jeremy Knox, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The main theme of ‘How goes the revolution: three themes in the shifting MOOC landscape’ ” is, obviously, the Massive Open Online Course:
Jeremy also talks about Learning Analytics and raises important questions concerning the increasing use of automation in education. We recommend a back-to-back reading of Ralph Ings Bannell‘s preface, ‘A double-edged sword’, which, amongst other issues, tackles the question of automation enabled by the latest developments in AI. Giota Alevizou‘s piece ‘From mediation to datafication: theorising evolving trends in media, technology and learning’ also tackles related issues within the broader context of Open Education, which is treated from a historical perspective by Martin Weller in his chapter ‘The development of new disciplines in education – the example of Open Education’.
He also has an excellent book on MOOC: Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course, published by Routledge in 2016 – compulsory reading to anyone thinking about MOOC who may want a more substantiated reading that goes much beyond the usual exaggerated claims about their ‘disruptive’ powers.
A separate Portuguese version of the chapter is available here – and the translation to Portuguese of Five Critiques of the OER Movement can be downloaded here.
… ‘Performance information and data-driven academic anxiety’, by Richard Hall, Professor of Education and Technology at De Montfort University, England.
Without further ado, here is the author’s presentation (with subtitles in Portuguese):
Although Richard’s discussion addresses Higher Education in the ‘global North’, in particular, in the UK, readers should be able to notice – reading also Raquel Goulart Barreto‘s ‘Objects as subject: the radical displacement’, that there are several points of contact between Richard’s concerns and questions confronting us in Brazil (and, assumedly, in many other places). In particular: questions concerning teaching associated with market logics and technocractic views of Education and Technology) represented in the types of instructionist Educational Technology that predominate in the “market”). There is a great deal to think about here, a lot of work to be done.
The author keeps the blog Richard Hall’s Space, recommended to anyone interested in questions related to the presence of technology in Higher Education, specifically.
A Portuguese version of Richard’s chapter can be download here.
Launching our YouTube channel, in the next few weeks we’ll be publishing various posts on our latest e-Book, Education and Technology: critical approaches. Each post will focus on a book chapter, which will be presented by the author(s) in videos exclusively produced for us as teasers (or tasters) for the volume.
We start today with Audrey Watters, author of ‘The History of the Future of Ed-Tech’ and ‘Un-fathomable: the hidden history of Ed-Tech’ , included in Part III of the e-Book, Historicity. In the video, Audrey talks about her contribution, presenting ideas that underpin her work as an independent scholar and writer, and showing that her nickname – Cassandra of Ed-Tech – is quite appropriate.
Watch the video (subtitles in Portuguese by Giselle Ferreira):
Following months of hard work, we are finally ready to publish our 2017 e-book, Education and Technology: critical approaches. This bilingual collection brings together 12 chapters written by researchers based in Brazil, Australia, Scotland, England and USA. The work has been edited by Giselle Ferreira, Alexandre Rosado e Jaciara Carvalho, members of the ICT in Educational Processes Research Group, who maintain this blog (mostly in Portuguese – at least so far!).
From the editors’ Introduction:
This volume offers a measure of sobriety in reaction to the excesses and hyperboles found in the mainstream literature on Education and Technology. The pieces (…) tackle questions of power and consider contextual and historical specificities, escaping the usual euphoria that surrounds digital technology and adopting different perspectives on our current historical moment.
Organised in three parts – Scenarios, Specifities e Historicity – the book includes 24 suggestive imagens (here, as a gif) created by the Polish artist Pawel Kuczynski, who kindly agreed to our using them in this project. All of our publications include artwork that speaks to us in different ways, and Pawel’s images are particularly suitable for the issues dealt with in the latest volume.
Following the editors’ Introduction, the e-book includes a Preface by Ralph Bannell (PUC-Rio, Brazil), which, ‘inspired on recent developments in Phenomenology’, highlights questions of power and ‘outlines new possibilities co conceive the processes of cognition and learning’.
This excerpt from the Introduction explains the structure of the volume:
Parte I, Scenarios, includes four chapters that, as a whole, suggest ways to uncover and critically analyse continuities and discontinuities in Education and Technology.Neil Selwyn (Monash University, Australia) recovers Neil Postman’s seven critical questions as the basis for specific, clear and direct reflection on the area. Raquel Barreto (UERJ, Brazil) e Richard Hall(De Montfort University, England) discuss, with many commonalities, implications to Compulsory Education in Brazil and Higher Education in the North, respectively, of the current trend towards the mechanisation of relationships, processes and actions implicated in education. Completing the part, the organisers present preliminary findings of a review of academic literature in Portuguese, suggesting much work remains to be done before the area establishes itself in academic terms.
Subsequently, Part II, Specificities, discusses specific current themes. Giota Alevizou (UK Open University) analyses the relationship between Education and Media, discussing, in particular, the implications of the current ‘datafication’ of educational processes. Jeremy Knox (University of Edinburgh, Scotland) critically examines MOOC, which have been growing significantly in the USA and Europe and gradually arrive in Brazil, echoing their international expansion as large initiatives involving Higher Education Institutions (e.g. USP) and startups supported by venture capital (e.g. Veduca). Closing the part, Lesley Gourlay (Institute of Education, University College London, England) proposes a critique of the binary ‘digital’ vs. ‘analogue’ and argues for the relevance of sociomaterial approaches.
The four chapters that compose Part III, Historicity, illustrate the importance of historical knowledge in contextualising and understanding the current status of technologies in education. Historicity is, for us, a key idea that needs to be more widely integrated in research into Education and Technology. Martin Weller (UK Open University) describes the development of the Open Educational Resources / Open Education movement from the perspective of an actor involved in this development since its inception, at the end of the 1990s. The subsequent chapters are texts we consider essential reading for anyone interested in Education and Technology. By Audrey Watters(California, USA), the ‘Cassandra of EdTech’, two chapters are included that were taken from her first collection of essays and talks, The Monsters of Educational Technology. (…) The part concludes with a ‘classic’ essay by Richard Barbrook e Andy Cameron (in memoriam), University of Westminster (England), which analyses ideological aspects that underlie the current digital technology industry, also on a historical-critical basis.
Educational and Technology: critical approaches will be launched locally in a small event at UNESA, in Rio de Janeiro, on the 4 May, with guest lectures by Ralph Bannell and Raquel Barreto.
Diálogos sobre TIC & Educação 