The Right Relationship Between Teaching and Educational Technology: How Ursula Franklin’s Technology as Practice Can Guide SoTL
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article employs Franklin’s technology as practice to reflect on what educational technology means and offer an alternative narrative for how ed tech has changed the structure of teaching and learning in the 30 years since SoTL’s inception. SoTL practitioners have largely embraced educational technology and its promise to provide a healthy disruption to postsecondary teaching, but Franklin’s observations on technology and teaching cause those who care about teaching to pause, think beyond technology, and deconstruct educational technology’s ideology of disruption and its discourse of scale. Educational technology has enabled the transformation of teaching from a holistic, or artisanal technology, to a prescriptive activity through a process now called unbundling. The ability to break teaching down into discretely executable steps, transforms the nature of teaching and concomitantly shifts the locus of control from the teacher to the manager. Franklin’s technology as practice also shines a light on how SoTL can build a right relationship with educational technology by serving as a redemptive technology. Redemptive technologies recognize that technology defines the nature of the activity, meaning that teaching with technology fundamentally changes what it means to be a teacher. Franklin’s conception of redemptive technology also asks SoTL practitioners to reject thinking of educational technology as a set of value-neutral tools, and to study educational technology in small, localized settings. According to Franklin, the potential for social change resides in the strength of community, and the community of SoTL practitioners can best bring about the right relationship between ed tech and teaching by focusing on its core principles, especially the principle of reciprocity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.067 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".