Image: Flickr (Avalon Media Lab)
Reflecting on What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’? (Bayne 2004) brought me to this image from Flickr declaring quite confidently that ‘technology enhances learning’ backed up with some pie charts.
Yet, what does it mean by ‘enhance’, and even ‘learning’? What does it mean to ‘engage’ students, or for them to gain ‘academic achievement’ (and who decided that)? Why should we view ‘technology’ as a discrete entity that has come to ‘enhance learning’? As Bayne (2004: 18) puts it:
‘As researchers and practitioners of digital education, we need to move away from our over-emphasis on how technology acts on education, or how education can best act on technology. Let us rather acknowledge that the two are co-constitutive of each other, entangled in cultural, material, political and economic assemblages of great complexity.’