Model 2.0

Burbules and Callister's "Risky Promises and Promising Risks" as well as the Nardi and O'Day's technology as ecosystem book greatly helped set the scene for all the different views, perspectives, and prejudices that are commonly brought to bear on utopia. It was useful not just to hear of the utopian and dystopian genres, but also about the neutral tool and nonnetural tool perspective. I have heard these views voiced before, in Lorenzo Simpson's Technology, Time, and Conversations of Modernity, but it was helpful to hear them again in an overview form - at the very least I feel like I have a stronger grasp on Tufte, Postman, Latour, Ellules, and Winner, and a more nuanced differentiation of their specific views of technology. I now see how their underlying 'metaphors' (i.e. technology as tool, as text, as system, etc) helps explain their research scholarship and methodological commitments.

I would love to see a treatment of Kenneth Burke's views of technology, for in my own research (and in my evolving model) I employ his 'active categories' approach to understanding human relations to technologies such as videogames. This approach is guided by the metaphor of technology as text, but Burke held no limited views of what a text was or could be. He was famous for challenging our notions of what a text is and how to go about studying it, moving beyond asking questions about the meaning of the text, to investigating the activities the text invites us to make if we are to become adequate to its meaning. These are activities that range from the banal such as skimming, memorizing, regurgitating, to activities that are far from mundane such as challenging our conception of the world, sharing the text with our friends, meditating on a passage, contemplating the significance of the text for our life, and in the case of this class, inviting our evolving models to be transformed by the texts we read.

Needless to say, I find Nardi and O'Day's organization scheme - grouping scholars together by the metaphors of technology they hold - to be useful for making sense of the diverse and heterogenous field of technology studies. Unfortunately, my updated model does not proportionately reflect the impact Nardi and O'Day has had on my thinking proper. This is because I am not modeling my changing conception of the scholarship on technology, but rather modeling my developing conception of what a person considering the relationship between technology and education should keep in mind. To this latter model I have added metaphors as something a person should keep in mind. What metaphors are the designers, implementors, users, etc, of technology bringing to these technologies.

I have a feeling that metaphors might also be one of the aspects of the ecosystem itself, such that different people, different designs, different views of success and so forth are guided by metaphors as well, but I am leaving it an open question in my mind for now. And I feel comfortable leaving the question open for now, due to a lesson Burbules and Callister reinforced for me - there is no perfect functional technology (or model) and we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking we will find it (or develop the perfect model), instead we should admit our limits and keep our current progress open and in question. This attitude would fit their posttechnocratic thinking, I believe, which they claim is a "mode of thinking [that] would stress the limits to human foresight and planning, the interdependency of multiple consequences, and the problematic attempt to sort out good from bad outcomes." This mode of thinking promotes what John Dewey calls fallibilism, the belief that our beliefs and designs are fallible and up for revision. Such a philosophy suits our technologies and our models, not least because Dewey himself conceptualized models as technological tools, but also because technologies and models tend to benefit from revision.

Perhaps this point will be added to my model, that a person considering technology and education should keep in mind appropriate ways to modify and refine the technologies at hand. And on this same point they should keep in mind that technologies will never become purely certain, purely simple (with no side effects), or purely disambiguated. I would almost want to call these beliefs and promises a puristic metaphor, or what Dewey called "the quest for certainty" and what others might call the yearning for complete control or transparency or efficiency or autonomy.