Part I All about Technology

A Summary of What You Are about to Read in This Section

If we wish to understand education as a technological system, then we should first have a clear idea of the character and form of technological systems. In this section, I will therefore explore the nature of technology, examining many of its complex meanings as well as uncovering some of its universal regularities. Along the way, I will reveal some interesting and occasionally surprising implications for learning, teaching, and educational research, but my main purpose is to provide the necessary foundations for the next section of the book, in which those implications turn out to be considerable and profoundly important.

Chapter 3 delves deep into the complex and diverse meanings of the word technology, what it includes, and what it excludes. Drawing heavily from Brian Arthur’s insights into its nature and evolution, I present a case that technology is best understood as both the process and the product of organizing stuff to do stuff. Importantly, again drawing from Arthur’s work, the stuff that is organized nearly always includes other stuff that has been organized. Thus, technologies are seen to be assemblies of technologies and other phenomena, forming a hugely complex, recursively intertwined technological web.

Chapter 4 discusses some of the most significant structural dynamics of technologies, viewed as complex entangled assemblies. Among other things, recognizing this complexity, it draws attention to the importance of the boundaries that we choose to consider when discussing technologies, observing that it is too easy to focus on one part of this entangled assembly—a computer, say, or a pedagogical method—and to treat it as a synecdoche for the whole, leading us to many unwarranted and counterproductive conclusions and actions. The technology of greatest interest is usually the complete assembly as it is enacted, not the parts of the assembly. The chapter goes on to discuss how technologies develop, and how they can guide but (beyond limited local contexts) almost never determine behaviour, and it explains some of the evolutionary dynamics and structural patterns that affect their development, use, and enactment, including ways that they can narrow and ways that they can expand our horizons as we explore the adjacent possible empty niches that they create.

Chapter 5 builds upon the understanding of technology that emerges from the two previous chapters to describe how we participate in rather than simply use technologies. We are not just users but also parts of our technologies, and some of them (e.g., language, arithmetical procedures, theories, and principles) are parts of us. Sometimes the parts that we play in their enactment are predetermined and fixed, such as when we flick a switch, follow a prescribed procedure, or spell a word correctly. I label such technologies “hard,” by which I mean that our roles as parts of them are inflexible: if they work, then what we must do to make them work is entirely determined in advance. Sometimes our roles are far less precisely determined, such as when we draw with a pencil or write with a word processor. I label such technologies “soft.” Hardness or softness is a characteristic of our roles in assembling and orchestrating the technology, not of the parts that it contains. Nearly every technology is an assembly of soft and hard technologies. Softness to hardness is a fuzzy continuum, not a binary distinction. Softness or hardness is a measure of the extent to which we must or may add our own orchestrations to the mix. The larger the gaps that may or must be filled, the softer the technology.

There is already a common English word for this human role in technologies: technique. A technique is the way that we become parts of our technologies, and for any technique there will be at least some hardness in how it is done, some pattern, perhaps some archetype or ideal that it aims for, and usually some softness, something idiosyncratic, something personal, something creative.

Combined with the observations and principles from the preceding chapters, the soft/hard distinction provides the basis for the theory of learning and teaching that I will develop in the subsequent section of the book, in which teaching is seen to be a vastly complex, distributed technology assembled from countless technologies, engaging and enacted by countless co-participants (especially learners); where method plays second fiddle to technique (and it is the technique of many, not of one); where every situation and every learning event is unique and unrepeatable; and where learning is never just an individual behaviour but also a collective act in which we are, ultimately, all complicit.