Considerable effort has been made to making sense of what we mean by “learning.” This is an important and serious issue, and one that is obviously worthy of considerable attention (see, e.g, Mayes & de Freitas, 2004). However, it is not the whole story. An account of educational technology that can only explain “education” and not “technology” runs the risk of dealing naively with an important part of its field of study. The consequence of this is a failure to provide convincing accounts of the link between technology use and learning. It is this gap in current educational technology research that is addressed here.
This lack of profile does not mean that the topic has been entirely neglected. Lively debates about technology continue in fields such as the Philosophy of Technology (eg, Feenberg, 2000). Such debates are possible; they are simply not happening here. This was not always the case, however; for example, Saettler’s (1990) historical account explores technology in relation to the Greek concept, “techné”. Techné can be understood as the rational, craft-based approach to producing or achieving something; it is often discussed in terms of the application of science (or scientific knowledge) to nature (cf. Pinch & Bijker, 1987).Within educational research, such accounts can be traced back to Dewey (1916), who drew on Plato’s discussion of the knowledge and skills of artists and craftsmen to inform his discussion of the formation of a democratic curriculum. This definition results in a tradition of work that has focused on the design of hardware and software to support education, but which also includes the development of processes through scientific studies. This is strongly reminiscent of work in systems theory, which is concerned with social as well as material “technologies” (see, eg, Banathy, 1991).
However, this kind of definition is no longer visible in educational technology research. Notable work has built on systems theory and cybernetics, such as Laurillard’s conversational framework (Laurillard, 1993, and later revisions), but techné is not discussed nor is systems thinking visible as a theoretical framework. Indeed, it has been argued (Czerniewicz, 2010) that nothing provides a systematic theoretical basis for the field at all, although some propose that Instructional Design should. Instead, the field might best be characterized by a multiplicity of languages and perspectives that coexist in complex, fragmented but interacting ways.
Yet in spite of this diversity, it has been argued that educational technology’s concerns are fairly homogeneous. Friesen (2009) argues that educational technology primarily addresses instrumental concerns, being concerned with technical interests associated with work or production; it does not address what he classifies as practical concerns (to do with interpretation or meaning) or emancipatory concerns (focusing on overcoming structures of power and repression).While it is possible to develop practical or emancipatory critiques of technology, the default position has been to rely on common-sense understandings of what technology is and how it can be used, rather than to theorize it.
Demonstrating this important gap is challenging, however. In order to show, convincingly, that a topic is absent from discussions in the field requires a systematic approach to reviewing work. In this case, a systematic review was attempted, although this proved problematic: while an Education Resources Information Center search for the period 2001–2011 using the key works “technology” and “theory” returned 7152 results, these were almost exclusively what could be described as “false positives”, in that they contained the terms but were not actually about a theory of technology. The “theory” involved in these cases concerned topics such as learning, affect, technology integration, organisational change and so on; it did not concern technology per se. Moreover, this review proved impractical to refine: the diversity of theories made narrowing results through exclusion of specific terms impractical.
Instead, to ensure the rigor of this review, a different approach had to be adopted. A manual search was conducted, covering the last decade’s worth of articles from educational technology journals that were ranked in the top 35 by impact factor, as of December 2009. (Specifically, these were: the British Journal of Educational Technology; Computers and Education; Journal of Computer Assisted Learning; Journal of the Learning Sciences; Language Learning and Technology; in addition, Research in Learning Technology was included.) This review confirmed the gap suggested by the search of citations databases. There are many articles in the field that seek to theorize aspects of learning, teaching, context, learning design and materials design. However, only 10 were identified from this decade’s worth of journals in which the focus could be interpreted as being technology itself. Even this sample contained borderline cases. For example, some theoretical work on design-based research (eg, Barab & Squire, 2004) considered technology as a way of instantiating, developing and contributing to theory. In other cases, technology was treated as part of a system of distributed cognition (e.g, Kim & Reeves, 2007) or learning (eg, Lim, 2002; Säljö, 2009) rather than as a self-contained artifact. While the role of technology was theorized in these cases, it was still treated as being of secondary importance, contributing to an understanding of learning or the influence of society rather than being important in its own right.
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