Why do so many educational technologies not work as imagined or intended? Why do they continue to reproduce or exacerbate entrenched inequalities, rather than reduce them?
The articles in the most recent issue of Learning, Media and Technology all focus, in various ways, on how digital technologies are enacted in context-specific ways within formal institutions of education – whether schools, colleges or universities – and their mismatch with imaginaries of digital transformation. They collectively draw attention to the complex and unpredictable institutionalization of digital technologies and edtech. When digital technologies connect with institutional contexts, things rarely play out as their advocates and supporters would wish.
In the editorial, we wonder:
Given the empirically documented history showing that educational technologies rarely work as intended or expected, why do the visionary promises of inventors, investors, and industry figures continue to persist and gain traction?
And we suggest:
The problem, to a significant extent, is that the actual contexts of educational institutions are still rarely considered when new digital technologies are promoted for use in schools, colleges or universities. The contextlessness of glossy imaginaries and optimistic promises comes up against mundane realities. Educational institutions are deeply complex, highly diverse, and bound to encounter digital media and technologies in ways that are shaped by matters as everyday as budgetary restrictions, procurement practices, staff competence, student mood, policy mandates, and myriad other contextual factors. Contextlessness is a strategy for technological failure in educational institutions rather than disruption or revolution, as the history of edtech research has documented
Indeed, exploring contexts – institutional, cultural, political, historic, social, economic, technical, linguistic – is one of the key things that RED aims to do.
To explore who else is working on this puzzle, it is worth checking out issue 48(3) of Learning, Media and Technology, where we brought a few papers together.
Header image by Danielle-Claude Bélanger on Unsplash