Ed Tech Taught Us Technology Solves All Our Problems: But Perhaps Technology Causes More Problems and It's Time to Think Critically

I got to thinking that when I earned my masters degree in Educational Technology back in the mid-1990s, there was extreme excitement about the potential of the Web and computers in the classroom. There was reason to be: the web was wild and free and not the commericial, paywalled, dungeon that it is today. There also weren't fifty gazillion companies burying the truth in marketing malarkey. 

I was actually the first teacher in my building to use the internet during class as part of instruction. God bless that dialup connection! I even had to explain to students what that buzzing and chirping was while it connected. 

It was the CIA Worldfactbook site, that I think has now been dismantled under the Trump administration. It was an excellent source of information in those days, but it was free and loaded with information.

In reflection though, I notice that the EdTech degree program taught one underlying and implicit notion: Technological solutionism, or the idea that technology is an answer to every problem. It was doctrinal and implied in every course.

This notion is wrong, and it has taken me years to unlearn it through experience. Now, with the anti-screen movement as an example, we see the backlash against the idea that technology always has an answer.

What is a shame though, is that my Ed Tech masters program failed to teach any critical thought about technology. It was one big Tech-Promotion program. There were no courses in critical thought about tech, just teaching of the tenets of technological solutionism.

There should have been a strong critical, philosphical base to the learning; but instead, it indoctrinated us as "technology evangelists" to go forth into the world and spread the gospel of technological promise.

The question I have now is just how much of what was worthwhile in the classroom has been sacrificed, not because technology was better; but because we were carrying out the evangelical task of "spreading technological solutionism"?

Is it any wonder that we now have people thinking critically about technology's role in teaching and learning, and are finding that perhaps in our EdTech enthusiasm, that we might have caused the loss of something valuable?

My early education in EdTech was mindless indoctrination, as I fear all EdTech has become. 

EdTech education in the 1990s and today seems foster mindless and unconscious evangelists going forth into the world, still spreading the promise of technological solutionism. It is time to question the dogma and dig into the past and see just what we have done to ourselves as educators and to all the countless students who we subjected to our technological dogma. 

We might just find a more sober vision of technology's classroom promise.