The Right Relationship Between Teaching and Educational Technology: How Ursula Franklin’s Technology as Practice Can Guide SoTL

Abstract

This article employs Franklin’s technology as practice to reflect on what educational technology means and offer an alternative narrative for how ed tech has changed the structure of teaching and learning in the 30 years since SoTL’s inception. SoTL practitioners have largely embraced educational technology and its promise to provide a healthy disruption to postsecondary teaching, but Franklin’s observations on technology and teaching cause those who care about teaching to pause, think beyond technology, and deconstruct educational technology’s ideology of disruption and its discourse of scale. Educational technology has enabled the transformation of teaching from a holistic, or artisanal technology, to a prescriptive activity through a process now called unbundling. The ability to break teaching down into discretely executable steps, transforms the nature of teaching and concomitantly shifts the locus of control from the teacher to the manager. Franklin’s technology as practice also shines a light on how SoTL can build a right relationship with educational technology by serving as a redemptive technology. Redemptive technologies recognize that technology defines the nature of the activity, meaning that teaching with technology fundamentally changes what it means to be a teacher. Franklin’s conception of redemptive technology also asks SoTL practitioners to reject thinking of educational technology as a set of value-neutral tools, and to study educational technology in small, localized settings. According to Franklin, the potential for social change resides in the strength of community, and the community of SoTL practitioners can best bring about the right relationship between ed tech and teaching by focusing on its core principles, especially the principle of reciprocity.