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Understanding Adult Pedagogy and Technology Use  

Mary Dereshiwsky

Theories exist in number that concern how adults learn. Despite surface differences, these theories also contain common themes relevant to adult learning. They include self-direction, problem- or need-based motivation to learn, the ability to anchor past experiences to make meaning from current learning, and the skills to self-assess one’s learning experience. Given the prevalence of technology in virtually all areas of personal and professional life, a solid understanding of how to use technology effectively is essential for 21st-century adults. At the same time, these adults are often hampered by anxiety and past negative experiences related to technology use, especially in the learning process itself. How can instructors leverage the best practices of adult learning theory to create meaningful learning experiences for adult learners? In order to address this question, it is important to understand the unique characteristics of adult learners as a first step. Instructors should also self-reflect and consider how their own attitudes and experiences can shape how they use technology with adult learners. With learning theories in mind, designing meaningful learning experiences with technology for adult learners can optimize learning experiences.

Article

Gender Equitable Education and Technological Innovation  

Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell

The literature on gender equity, education, and technological innovation identifies three primary areas of concern: STEM (collective disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), computer science, and, interestingly enough, reading comprehension. These gendered divides are often framed in public discourse as problems of equality; however, most research and scholarly discussions focus on equity, on fairness. Considerable work by feminists in the social studies of science and technology, demonstrating how innovation and technology are already gendered, has lent strong support to an educational emphasis on how “fairness” might best be achieved. It remains the case that “gender” in most research studies refers to a binarized conception of sex: either male or female, girls or boys, men or women. However, critical intersectional understandings of gender that take into account age, socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and dis/abilities hold out promise for more nuanced understandings of inequities in education. For example, taking the widest perspective, it is socioeconomic class, not gender, that continues to create the greatest disparities in educational outcomes, whereas within any given socioeconomic context, gender is paramount. For girls and women, equity-focused educational interventions aim to develop better pathways to higher education and jobs in STEM subjects and fields. Female underrepresentation in STEM and computer science is often framed as a gender-specific skills deficit impeding access to and success in globally competitive, technologically innovative, and the most highly remunerated occupations, rather than as a barrier created by differences in expectations, norms, experience, and prior educational provision. Gender equity initiatives for school-aged boys are concentrated in the areas of reading and comprehension skills, with little connection made in the literature to either presumptions about or implications of this underachievement as a deficit that jeopardizes future educational or vocational skills. It may be that evolving conceptions and practices of gender that take better account of both gender diversity and intersectionality will enable educational interventions beyond these stereotypical and binarized educational analyses and initiatives, lending hope that we may yet see women and girls assuming not just an equitable but indeed a transformative role in technological innovation.

Article

Posthuman Curriculum Studies: The Twilight of Humanism  

John A. Weaver

Although humanism still prevails in much of Western thought, it is being challenged in numerous intellectual fields, political realms, economic policies, and cultural activities. Posthumanism is beginning to emerge within the area of curriculum studies. Posthumanism questions the binary mode of thought that human exceptionalism rationalizes. Posthumanism introduces new approaches to thinking about humans within the world that are emerging: these include postcolonial thought, new materialism, the non-human turn, critical animal studies, affect theory, disability studies, and to some extent environmental studies. The term “posthumanism” doesn’t cover just the intellectual movements listed above. To use “posthumanism” as a catch-all term would ignore the nuances of each of these new developments, and it would erase the limitations of posthumanism itself. Posthumanism intersects with other movements, but to fairly cover these other recent intellectual developments, they should be treated on their own terms and not within the confines of just posthumanism.

Article

Cyberculture and Education in Latin America  

Rocío Rueda Ortiz and Alejandro Uribe Zapata

Particularly since the turn of the new millennium, the field of cyberculture and education in Latin America has undergone significant development. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies have focused on the rise of a novel sociotechnical network, the product, on the one hand, of advances in information and communications technology, computing, and a broader reach of the internet, and, on the other hand, of the diverse appropriations of these advances by individuals and collectives. In general, the research questions addressed in this field analyze the continuities and transformations in areas such as the creation, circulation, and legitimization of information and knowledge inside and outside the educational institution; the forms of socialization, communication, and construction of individual and collective identities; and the modes of citizen participation, all of which have been catalyzed by the new technological ecosystem. In an initial stage, this field was marked by national and international policies of incorporating information and communications technology into education and, as a result, by the discussions on access to this technology, the digital divide, and the scope of technological infrastructure. This first stage was criticized for an instrumentalist and determinist emphasis on statistics regarding computer access and use in education that ignored the diverse and unequal processes of social and cultural appropriation of these factors. In a second stage of critical cybercultural studies, efforts were made to overcome technological determinisms, understanding information technologies not as something completed, closed, or definitive, but rather as part of the process of humanization—in other words, as devices that are transformed through interaction with individual and collective subjects, just as these latter reconfigure themselves to the extent that they interact with the former. What is highlighted here, on the one hand, is that the processes are heterogenic and sometimes contradictory in respect to what this sociotechnical interaction produces in the subjectivities; and, conversely, that imagination and invention are inherent to the technical objects. The human artifacts are thus not simple instruments mechanically joined to the social and cultural life of people. A third stage envisions challenges and new fields of research and creation in the production of knowledge arising from the peculiarity of Latin American educational, social, and cultural problematics. In particular, there is an emphasis on the need to include in an interrelated way intergenerational dimensions of race, gender, region, and social class in order to analyze the different and unequal forms of inclusion and appropriation of technologies. Similarly, studies begin to appear on “Commons” and “Commoning” as new ways of producing and sharing knowledge, as do grassroots educational proposals from the decolonial, situated feminist perspective calling for an intercultural dialogue on and recognition of indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant knowledge, worldviews and lifestyles that have appropriated technologies in diverse ways and for different purposes in the region.

Article

Assistive Technology to Enhance Inclusive Education  

Dianne Chambers

Schools, teachers, and students are increasingly able to access and apply assistive technology to enhance inclusion within mainstream classrooms. To ensure that a classroom is truly inclusive, the teacher and other professionals involved in supporting children with disability using assistive technology require appropriate knowledge and skills to bring potential to reality. There are many successful examples of assistive technology successfully embedding into the practices of inclusive setting, but there is still some way to go to ensure this is a seamless approach. There are many benefits and difficulties associated with adopting assistive technology to support students with disability, particularly in developing countries. While the challenges may be great, the potential for assistive technology to impact significantly on the educational, social, and recreational outcomes for students with disability in inclusive classrooms is immense.

Article

A Critical Review and New Directions for Queering Computing and Computing Education  

Dylan Paré

Technological imaginaries underpinning computing and technoscientific practices and pedagogies are predominantly entrenched in cisheteropatriarchal, imperialist, and militaristic ideologies. A critical, intersectional queer and trans phenomenological analysis of computing education offers an epistemological and axiological reimagining by centering the analysis of gender and sexuality through the lens of marginalized people’s experiences (queer, trans, and intersecting marginalities). It analyzes how systems of domination and liberation occur through relationships between objects, people, and their environments and how these systems of power multiply in effect when people are situated at multiple axes of oppression (such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability). Complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity are at the core of queer and trans imaginaries and challenge the assumed naturalness of biological categories that underpin much of the cisheteronormative harm and violence in K-16 education, STEM (science, technological, engineering and medical) disciplinary practices, and technological innovations. Foregrounding complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity supports the critique, construction, and transformation of computational objects, worlds, and learning environments so that queer and trans perspectives, narratives, and experiences are centered and valued. In doing so, ambiguity, fluidity, and body becoming are centered in virtual spaces, thereby offering emancipatory possibilities for supporting critical literacies of gender and sexuality. Methodologically, approaches rooted in active solidarity with queer and trans people and a commitment to listening to intersectional experiences of gender and sexuality-based marginalization and resilience reorient computing learning environments towards liberatory, justice-oriented practices. Computing scholars and educators have identified data science (more broadly) and algorithmic bias (in particular) as an essential domain for furthering education research and practice. Histories of erasure, exclusion, and violence on queer and trans people, both by carceral technologies and algorithmic bias, and as part of the computing profession, are enacted on individual people and reflected in societal biases that inform and shape public experiences of computing and technologies. Overall, queering computing education and computing education research directs attention towards a multifaceted problem: the historical and ongoing hegemonic, cisheteropatriarchal control over programming; the limitations to representation by code that a computer can recognize; the possibilities to queer code and computer architectures; the technological regulation of identity and bodies; and the limits and affordances of technological representation of gender and sexual identity. A queer, trans, intersectional, justice-oriented approach to computing education attends to the structural, socio-historical context in teaching and learning computer science and coding, including the dominant cultures of the technology workforce and the everyday disciplining interactions with technology that shape who we can become.

Article

Education Research Beyond Cyborg Subjectivities  

Annette Gough and Noel Gough

The term “cyborg,” as a combination of “cybernetics” and “organism,” was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960 in a paper presented at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conference on space exploration as a representation of a particular challenge of space travel: physically adapting a human body to survive in a hostile environment rather than modifying the environment. Soon after, NASA commissioned “The Cyborg Study” to investigate the theoretical possibilities of incorporating life support–related technologies into future spacecraft design. From the beginning, cyborgs were seen as the realization of a transhumanist goal—liberating humans from the limitations of the body and its environment by means of mechanization. Outside of space exploration, the term “cyborg” has evolved to encompass an expansive mesh of the mythological, metaphorical, and technical. Initially mainly taken up by science fiction writers to create superhumans, the notion entered cultural studies in the 1980s, particularly through Donna Haraway’s feminist “cyborg manifesto,” which argues that we are all cyborgs. Since then, terminology has shifted, and cyborgs are more likely called “posthumans,” “more-than-humans,” “other-than-humans,” or “companion species.” Discussions of cyborg and posthuman subjectivities in educational research have taken two main directions. The first argues that with equipment like tablets, smartphones, and laptops, students and teachers are already cyborgs—hybrids of human and machine—accessing information, resources, networks, groups, personal relations, libraries, and mass media through the Internet. Other research has investigated how the construction of cyborg and posthuman subjectivities changes the relationships between humans and their surroundings, devising new social, ethical, and discursive ways of thinking and representation.

Article

Moral Education and Technology  

Paul Farber and Dini Metro-Roland

Moral education and technology seem to represent two fundamentally different kinds of concern and domains of inquiry. But these domains are fused in educational practice. Teaching as a fundamental human endeavor and form of activity has been a central component of human cultural evolution and regeneration from the earliest human social groupings. As a distinctive form of activity, teaching braids together ethical and instrumental norms and values. The modern, global institution of schooling has added layers of institutional support, constraint, and governance on the teaching it structures as well as increased scrutiny of the ethical and instrumental values in play; schooling is in effect a kind of moral technology for advancing certain norms and values in an efficient way. At present, technological developments with modern society make possible new forms of teaching and learning that likewise warrant scrutiny as they impact the ethical and instrumental ends of teaching and instructional practices today.