A paper written in 2001 for the ALT LT Theory SIG

1. Learning Technology Theory
George Roberts, 2001
(This is a version of the Positional Paper included on the ALT-SIG Learning Technology
Theory site)
The territory represented by learning technology is contested but the contest is complicated
and multi-faceted. Herman and Mandell (2000) take constructivism to its extreme:
By transcending the limits of space, time and situation, technology makes it more
likely that any person, of any status, in any place, can learn anything, at any time. ...
But an epistemological change also occurs. In virtual reality, because all words,
images and sounds can be easily altered, everything that is "given" ... can be taken
as tentative or "made." ... The medium that gives us so much power to present
ourselves as we choose and to access such presentations of others, leaves us
helpless to distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic. The state of nature
in virtual reality, a nature so entirely comprised of information, forces us to be
uncertain about the truth.
This epistemological dilemma lies at the heart of - and necessitates - learning-technology
theory. Learning technology practice is so mediated by policy, distance and technologies that
truth is called into question. Noble (1998) puts forward a simple good vs. evil proposition:
the trend towards automation of higher education as implemented in North American
universities today is a battle between students and professors on one side, and
university administrations and companies with "educational products" to sell on the
other. It is not a progressive trend towards a new era at all, but a regressive trend,
towards the rather old era of mass-production, standardization and purely commercial
interests.
While technology continues to permeate education, the political agenda continues to reinforce
links between education and employment on the one hand and individual responsibility for
attaining these goods on the other (see, e.g. Hodgson & Spours 1999, Avis et al 1996, and
DfEE 1999, 64-68). According to Bates (1995, p. 15), "Society is faced with a struggle for
economic survival, where the future of the developed countries depends on large numbers of
people being educated to a high level... throughout their lives."
Discourses on globalization are typically oriented in one of two ways. One posits globalization
as an inevitable part of the historical process over which we have no control but to which we

2. must adapt or be swept aside, while the other asserts that globalization is the aim or result of
consciously implemented policies promoted by those who most benefit from globalization. It is
a characteristic of the education and employment debate that globalization is presented as
inevitable. According to Esland (1996 a&b) If globalization is accepted as an inevitable part of
the historical process then there is little that a nation can do to plan its internal economics. As
Carnoy (1997) suggests, all the state can do is best prepare individuals to operate within the
paradigm.
However, any benefit of positing the individual to be the agent of his or her own learning and
development (Freire 1970, pp. 53ff) is undermined by a rhetoric, which, while professing
freedom from external control, simply substitutes the authority of those who manage capital
and the larger markets for the authority of those who manage the state (cf. Ball 1990). This
agenda prefers the employer over the employee, the centre over the periphery, and is
concerned with validating authority. Where the political agenda is concerned with transferring
responsibility (blame) to the individual, the managerial agenda is concerned with transferring
rights (power) away from the individual.
Educational policy has encouraged the adoption of an instrumentalist, competency-based
curriculum intended to be closely aligned to the needs of industry. This has been presented
as a solution to relative economic decline in the face of "inevitable" globalisation (Field 1995).
The positivist rigour of competency frameworks makes them uniquely suited as components
of technology-assisted learning programmes, which in turn lend themselves readily to a
managerial agenda. Technology-assisted learning also supports the move to an administered
market in education (cf. Ranson 1994). By increasing the granularity of "education
consumables" learners are able to buy ever-smaller "chunks" (DfEE, 1999, 66). But how are
we to understand, to read, what we buy?
In his essay "Oppressive literacy: a new definition" Taylor (1993) addresses key issues of
critical theory. "Society," says Taylor, requires literacy (which is literacy rather than a literate
person) because in the power-knowledge relationship of the modern world, literacy defines
who controls the means of production, that is the means to produce wealth (industry) and the
means to reproduce knowledge (education)" (p.139). Education policies adopted by
successive British governments in response to globalization have been focused in two
conflicting directions: the desire to stimulate the growth of autonomous, entrepreneurial, IT-
literate, multi-skilled individuals capable of creating and taking advantage of the opportunities
inherent in a post fordist economy; and the desire to create a compliant low-expectation
labour force inured to the demands of flexibilisation in order to attract inward investment not
on the basis of high skills available but on the basis of low costs.

3. Taylor goes on to say, "If this is true, then the very nature of literacy has changed and we are
forced to consider the possibility that literacy cannot combat Oppression, precisely because it
is literacy which gives Oppression its voice" (p. 139). What, then, can be a different literacy: a
literacy of liberation? Taylor distinguishes between the literacy of reading, which "... creates
the possibility of consensus or convergence... [that] educate[s] the citizen into orthodoxy, into
that governability, even that vulnerability to governance and to media and myth, which are the
signs of an ‘educated person’", and the literacy of writing that "...raises ... the possibility that
something can be ‘said against’ ... it is the creating of a response which is counter-hegemonic
... fundamentally iconoclastic ... that encourages heresy, even deviance..." (p. 146). But, he
only touches on the problem at the heart of writing. He says "The paradox of Writing, which is
one of the most refined symbolic systems created by humankind, is that it has the power to
be anti-symbolic..." He doesn’t explore this dilemma.
But, Julia Kristeva does. Kristeva (1989, pp. 23-30) introduces a discussion of the
characteristics of writing by stating that "...current science has not yet proposed a satisfactory
theory of writing." For Kristeva, "Writing is an act of differentiation and of participation with
respect to reality..." She illustrates the inadequate state of writing theory and observes, "The
science of writing seems therefore the prisoner of a conception that confuses language with
spoken language, which is articulated according to the rules of a certain grammar." She
concludes:
In our time, under the influence of philosophical research and the knowledge of the logic of
the unconscious, some researchers consider the various types of writings as languages that
don’t necessarily "need" "phonic expression" ... They thus represent particular signifying
practices that have disappeared or been transformed in the life of modern man. The science
of writing as a new realm ... of linguistic operation; of writing as language, but not as vocal
speech or grammatical chain; of writing as a specific signifying practice that enables us to
perceive unknown regions in the vast universe of language - this science of writing has yet to
be developed.
This is the science of writing we need in order to discover Taylor’s anti-symbolic, iconoclastic
writing-as-liberation, and, arguably, also to engage through learning technology with literacy
in its widest sense. Our condition with respect to digital literacy is analogous to the condition
of pre-literate peoples whose un-written beliefs descend through mythology and folk tales.
Like children to whom all things are new, it appears that we are only now learning to read
(and write) the Internet and hypermedia in as fundamental a way as we learned to read (and
write) writing, perspective or the movies. That is, the Internet is one of those watershed
technologies that has had the power to make children of us once again.

4. Bates (1995, p. 22) recognises the difficulty in positing ideological neutrality for any
educational use of technology: "... there is a direct link between the use of technology and
different ideologies of teaching and learning." The transformation of "student-centred
learning" into "client-centred learning" by corporate-focused training service providers, and
the appropriation of the forms and rhetoric of a leftist humanist pedagogy by a right-leaning
corporatism can be set against an equally inimical knowledged-based instructor- institution-
centred pedagogy as practised in, for example, the former Soviet Union (Roberts, Dingle &
Milovidov, 1996; Nove, 1990). In contrast, the 1976 inception of the current phase of
competency-based education and training systems owes as much to the left putting forward a
challenge to the elitism of the educational system then, as to any business-dominated
agenda. As Beetham (Beetham et all 2001) argues, the debate must move beyond simple
behaviourist-bad : constructivist-good positions. For Boyle (1997 p. 45), "A central challenge
for these approaches is to incorporate expert guidance without undermining the creative
initiative of the learner."
But, the very suitability of learning technology to managerialism is cause for at least
interested concern and suggests that theory might be useful for those striving within the
"tense new reality" of the "democratic academy" (Herman & Mandell 2000).
References
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