A Framework and Imperative for "Insider-Outsider" Dialogue in Ed-Tech

• In Event: Rethinking Ed Tech and Tech Ed: Critical Perspectives on Technology and Education

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper we analyze the divergent discourses of “insiders” and “outsiders” to educational technology and synthesize their theoretical underpinnings into a combined “insider–outsider” perspective to inform collective action and open dialog that goes beyond “talking past each other” (McMillan Cottom, 2017).

Perspectives
Our main perspective is a framing of the “discourses” which are our objects of study: we conceptualize “insiders” to educational technology as developers, designers, quality assurance engineers, project managers, and beta testers who are directly responsible for making educational technology, and “outsiders” as educators, parents, students, scholars, and activists who are concerned with what agendas drive the creation and promotion of such technology. We use the “insider/outsider” construct primarily to signal ideological and political positions in relation to educational technology and are aware that individual actors may inhabit and transgress these lines.

In addition to being our objects of study, these discourses also supply two more of our perspectives:

Our “insider” perspective comes from theorists like David Deutsch (2011), Karl Popper (1999), and Seymour Papert (1980), whose work on “powerful ideas” (Papert, 1980) and the potential for progress (Deutsch, 2011; Popper, 1999) informs the visioning of educational technology.

Our “outsider” perspective comes from theorists like Jean Anyon (2014, 2009), Tom Liam Lynch (2015), and Neil Selwyn (2017, 2016, 2014, 2011), whose work in software studies (Lynch, 2015), political economy (Anyon, 2014), and digital sociologies (Selwyn et al., 2017) informs critical analyses of educational technology.

Methods
In this study we apply a form of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003), where we understand discourses as fluid systems of language, thought, ideologies and action. We “map” contours, assumptions and theoretical underpinnings of the two discourses by reviewing literature from each, and identifying their most prominent assumptions and first principles.

Data sources
The “insider” and “outsider” discourses are our primary objects of study, consisting in the literature we have gathered from each (detailed under “Perspectives”). To better understand these diverging, but entangled, perspectives we also consider how “insiders” and “outsiders” might respond to a video of science fiction author Isaac Asimov speaking about the role of technology in the future of education. The Asimov film enables a concrete demonstration of each discourse, as well as our synthesized “insider–outsider” perspective, in action.

Results
Our synthesis of these two discourses will yield a set of first principles which together constitute an “insider–outsider” perspective on educational technology to inform action and dialog across these lines.

Significance of the work
At the heart of our argument lies the belief, informed by both discourses, that there are immense possibilities for real, material improvements to the human condition that we risk missing without the “insider” perspective, and similarly immense prospects of real, material human suffering that we risk missing without the “outsider” perspective. We therefore offer a combined “insider–outsider” view to help realize the radical possibilities (Anyon, 2014) that we argue educational technology, only when advanced from such a perspective, can create.

Authors

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College

• George Woodliff-Stanley, Swarthmore College