Toward an understanding of the symbolic and material realms of educational technology: A media ecological analysis of higher education

John Dowd, Purdue University

Abstract

Given digital technology's expansion of environments that teaching and learning take place, this dissertation seeks to elucidate how both discourses and technologies themselves reconfigure the material and symbolic environments within higher education. To do so I explore the reciprocal relationship between various educational technologies, and the discourses surrounding their rationale and implementation. Additionally, I argue that current educational movements centered primarily on new technologies, are situated within broader ideological relationships among teaching, learning, notions of progress, and ultimately, concepts of "the good life." To better understand the environments created by digital technology, I introduce a media ecological analysis of the discourses and practices within higher education. I then move, more specifically, to critique the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) educational movement. I argue that despite the opportunities for positively transforming higher education, the DIY movement ultimately falls short given many of its proponents' treatment of technology as either neutral or as overly determined, and the treatment of teaching and learning as merely information transfer. Furthermore, when operating within the ideological values of consumer capitalism, the DIY movement perpetuates unhealthy relationships between the personal and professional spheres. Chapter one situates this project within conversations surrounding the constitutive and material aspects of communication. Chapter two discusses concepts of neutrality and determinism, which ride throughout and fund many discourses surrounding education and technology. The former underestimates the power that technology has to reconfigure the symbolic and material realms, while the latter overestimates technologies ability to determine the course of human action. Chapter three introduces a media ecology approach to understanding discourse and technology. Here, I argue that media ecology provides a more versatile theoretical backdrop with which to highlight the reciprocal relationships between technology, discourse, and subsequent practices that emerge within the DIY movement. Finally, chapter four situates the previous chapters' findings within broader socio-cultural understandings of the relationship between education, work, and what is commonly articulated as "the good life." Here, I argue that against the backdrop of consumer capitalism, education becomes meaningful largely in conjunction with one's ability to secure a good job. However, notions of what constitutes a good job are invariably caught up in an individual's occupational productivity and subsequently, their economic capacity for consumption. Ultimately, this serves as a degenerate form of identity formation, which erodes more potentially ethical understandings of meaning and significance within the personal and professional spheres.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Connaughton, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication|Rhetoric|Educational technology|Education philosophy

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