Short Cuts and Extended Techniques: Rethinking relations between technology and educational theory

Abstract

Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas traditional theories of educational technology tend to focus on the harmonization of new technologies with extant curricular goals and educational practices, an educational theory of technology looks to novel forms of technologically-mediated learning experience—from production pedagogies to role play in the virtual—to make visible the surprising relations, techniques, and opportunities that emerging media, and their attendant social contexts, may offer educational research.

Keywords:

• actor-network theory
• education
• new media
• production pedagogy
• role play

Notes

1. In the 1930s, Benjamin (1968) presciently describes ‘mediators’ and anti-environments in terms of (then) novel ‘optical’ and ‘acoustical’ media: mechanical technologies and aesthetic techniques that instigated a ‘deepening of apperception’ in everyday experience that, heretofore, ‘floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception’ (p. 235). This critical effect, for Benjamin, was an upshot of the material and symbolic innovations that arrived with ‘the historical avant-gardes’, and still more so with the proliferation of new broadcast media: film, photography, and radio; new image-editing techniques; new ways of inter-linking sound, visual, and diegetic elements; as well as new ways of deconstructing and reconstructing artistic conventions, narrative codes, and genre formulas.

2. For example, see Galloway’s (2006) notion of ‘countergaming’, which examines recent ‘avant-garde’ digital game design, that is, modes of video-game art that aesthetically de-familiarize or explicitly disrupt the conventions and intuitive flow of digital game play (e.g., by designing media that, at the level of user experience, antagonize or disruptively conflict with mainstream expectations for how video games should be played).

3. Iwai, T. (2006). Tenori-on (Hardware); Tenori-on/TNR-I (for Ipad, iPhone, iPod Touch). (2006). Hamamatsu, Japan: Yamaha, Inc.