6.8 CONCLUSION: EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY IS ABOUT WORK IN SCHOOLS

Contrary to the images and assumptions in most of the educational technology literature, educational technology's primary impact on schools may not be about improvements in learning or more efficient processing of students. What educational technology may be about is the work done in schools: how it is defined, who does it, to what purpose, and how that work connects with the surrounding community. Educational technology's direct effects on instruction, while important, are probably less significant in the long run than the ways in which teachers change their assumptions about what a classroom looks like, feels like, and how students in it interact when technology is added to the mix. Students' learning of thinking skills or of factual material through multimedia programs may ultimately be less significant than whether the new technologies encourage them to be active or passive participants in the civic life of a democratic society. If technology changes the ways in which information is shared within a school, it may thus change the distribution of power in that school and thereby alter fundamentally how the school does its work. And finally, technology may change the relationships between schools and communities, bringing them closer together.

These processes have already started. Their outcome is not certain, and other developments may eventually come to be seen as more significant than some of those discussed here. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the social impacts of both device and process technologies are in many cases more important than the purely technical problems that technologies are ostensibly developed to solve. As many critics note, these developments are not always benign and may have profound moral and ethical consequences that are rarely examined. What we need is a new, critical sociology of educational technology (see 9.6), one that considers how technology affects the organization of schools, classrooms, and districts; how it provides opportunities for social groups to change their status; and how it interacts with other social and political movements that also focus on the schools. There are a few indications that such a perspective is emerging. Boyd (1991) and Webb (1991) offered a picture of educational technology as embedded in a cultural surround. And Hlynka and Belland (1991) provided a collection rich in new, critical approaches.

Much more is needed. Our view of how to use technologies is often too narrow, We tend to see the future, as Marshall McLuhan noted, through the rear-view mirror of familiar approaches and ideas from the past. In order to allow the potential inherent in educational technology to flourish, we need to shift our gaze and try to discern what lies ahead, as well as behind. As we do so, however, we must not underestimate the strength of the social milieu within which educational technology exists, or the plans that it has for how we may bring it to bear on the problems of education. A better-developed sociology of educational technology may help us refine that vision.