FAQ's

Concerning Educational Technology

Dr Nesta Devine, University of Waikato, Hamilton

Presented to the University of Sydney/University of Waikato Research symposium, December 2002

Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question. (Heidegger, The Age of the W orld Picture, QCT, p 116)

The colonizing impulse and ICT

This question was triggered for me by a Department meeting we had a year or two back in which the proponents of ICT were enthusiastically, even evangelistically, expounding their cause...

Technology and advancement: the ‘saving power’

This paper is not really perhaps in line with the kind of Hegelian notion of perpetual advance signalled by the title of this research symposium...

Government and technology

In addition to all these potent reasons for continuing to think of education technology as apolitical there is a further reason, located in the neo-liberal notions of individualism and rationality...

Concealed violence

To look at education and technology thus is, in Heidegger’s words, to look into the danger, and see the potential growth of the saving power...

Marcuse and choice

Herbert Marcuse makes a very similar point when he says that, initially, society has a choice between...

Technology concealing power relations

Before the New Zealand civil war of the 1860s Wiremu Tamihana Tarapipi, the statesman-chief of Ngati Haua of the Hauraki Plains...

Constructing the problem

Technology after all does not come from nowhere: it is a tangible answer to a problem, but it is at the level...

Biopower

I open here, then, the possibility of thinking technology differently, of thinking it not as a result of the will to financial or political power but as a result...

Relief or enslavement?

Marx was optimistic about the possibilities of technology to relieve the position of the working classes. This was a possibility...

The challenge to change

If this objection to technological ‘development’ is sustained, then it constitutes a challenge to all change, including legal and political change...

Technicizing politics

Enthusiasm about technology does not come only from Marx, of course. Milton Friedman, the great apostle of the New Right...

The questions concerning ICT

If technology is then, political, and politics in endeavouring to become scientific, is also political, then both are inescapably...

Bibliography

Ellul, Jacques, (1964), The Technological Society, J. Wilkinson, trans., New York, Liberal Arts Press...