Technology as Tool: Critical Perspectives

Purpose: To raise awareness of critique in relation to the adoption technologies in education.

References: 11, 12, 13

Are computers and graphics calculators in mathematics education portrayed as value-neutral tools, to aid the autonomous, rational learner in developing higher-order thinking skills which enable the processing and interpretation of data in problem-solving exercises, and ultimately the accumulation of cultural capital? [technicist/modernist viewpoint]
Does the use of computers and graphics calculators in mathematics education portray:
1. increased control over access to and manipulation of information?
2. abstract rationality as the most effective form of human thinking?
3. individualism and entrepreneurship as constituting the most effective models for human commerce?
What consideration is given to social, cultural, and historical antecedents of mathematical knowledge or statistical data?
1. Is the human authorship of mathematical knowledge or data collection made evident or obscured?
2. Is digital thinking privileged over metaphorical thinking?
3. Is consideration given to historically and ethically informed decision-making?
What are the effects of technology in reconstructing the division of labour in mathematics classroom or online tasks and for restructuring power relations between participants in educational contexts?
How are individuals’ different experiences taken into account?
1. Is there a suppression of difference when the experiences of some are normalised as the experiences of all?
What are the effects of a possible restructuring of the hitherto stable boundaries between formal/informal education, teacher/student, classroom/home/work, print text/electronic text, etc?
Have new learning technologies [NLTs] in mathematics education been seen as a panacea, where they are expected to solve many educational problems? [Scarce financial resources are channeled into the ever-extending purchase of these new technologies.]
Have proponents of NLTs in mathematics education adopted the computer as tool perspective? [This approach places too much faith in people’s abilities, ignoring the possibilities of unintended consequences or the inherent limits of the means and purposes of using technology.]
Have proponents of NLTs in mathematics education adopted the computer as non-neutral tool perspective? [Users should be reflective and critical about unexpected consequences.]
Have proponents of NLTs in mathematics education adopted a level-headed approach? [which understands costs and benefits, tradeoffs, unintended consequences, and the limits of human rationality.]
Have proponents of NLTs in mathematics education adopted a more dialectical perspective? [which understands how technological artefacts “reshape people’s perceptions of themselves as agents, their relations to one another, their perceptions of time and speed, their expectations of predictability, and so forth.”]
Do proponents of NLTs in mathematics education understand that the calculus of costs and benefits as a way of evaluating change needs to take account of unintended consequences which cannot be anticipated and to acknowledge multiple, conflicting consequences which cannot be isolated from one another?
Do proponents of NLTs in mathematics education understand that there is a “problem of a web of contingencies, caught up in complex relations of interdeterminacy; it is the obstinacy of circumstance, refusing to give people what they want without also giving them what they do not want”?
In online learning communities, what attention is paid to the patterns of interaction with respect to degrees of freedom, task-orientation, equality, and intensity of relation among groups working together? [Adopting too homogeneous an understanding of the term community may exclude participants with different learning styles or appetites for affiliation.]