Petar Jandrić

The dubious promise of educational technologies: Historical patterns and future challenges

In this article, Larry Cuban discusses his ideas about the topic of this Special Issue of E-learning and Digital Media ‘Networked Realms and Hoped-For Futures: A trans-generational dialogue’ with one of its co-editors, Petar Jandrić. The conversation explores the historical relationships between education and information and communication technologies and draws lessons for present and future. The first part of the conversation explores methodological issues pertaining to historical thinking about schools and computers in the network society. It identifies a continued need to recognize historical patterns, including those in thought experiments, and shows that Rogers’ theory of diffusion of innovations should be supplemented by more nuanced approaches to the historical relationships between schools and computers. The second part of the conversation presents an attempt to explain historical patterns using the ancient notion of magical thinking. It explores why teachers use computers in their private lives much more than in their professional lives, and ‘school anarchy’ caused by student usage of personally owned devices in classrooms. It creates a baseline for comparison between desktop / laptop computers and various hand-held devices, and dismantles the quest for deschooling as another example of magical thinking. The third part of the conversation examines the ideological role of information and communication technologies in contemporary school reform and explores their potential for democracy. It analyses the contemporary transformations of traditional publishing formats such as books, journals and newspapers, and their reflections in the world of academia. It examines the changing role of teachers as public intellectuals, and the role of information and communication technologies in their public exposure. The last part of the conversation analyses the process of ‘educationalizing’ various social and economic problems, and links it to contemporary technologies. It revisits Larry Cuban’s predictions from Teachers and Machines: Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (1986), and reminds us that accurate predictions are rare, while inaccurate ones are not only common but often memorable. Finally, it examines why it is so hard to balance education with information and communication technologies.

Critical Revolutionary Pedagogy Is Made by Walking: In a World Where Many Worlds Coexist.

This conversation is the first systemic attempt to capture Peter McLarens ideas about the relationships between critical revolutionary pedagogy and virtuality. It introduces the main problems with educational postmodernism, explains Peters return towards the Marxist-humanist trajectory, and addresses contemporary challenges to Marxs dialectical thought. It analyses global changes in the structure of production, and juxtaposes the mass society shaped by one-way media such as television with the network society shaped by bi-directional communication powered by the Internet. The conversation reveals critical potentials of ecopedagogy at the intersections between education and information and communication technologies and analyses the main messages from Ivan Illich. It explores the main features of the emerging digital cultures, identifies underlying values and ideologies, and links them to the divisions between the global South and the global North. It analyses distinct features of contemporary youth movements and revisits the emerging transformations of the concept of the state. It looks into the relationships between information and power, explores algorithmic regulation through technological innovation, and analyses various challenges pertaining to ‘big data’. Finally, it provides a brief insight into Peter McLarens modus operandi and his personal thoughts and feelings about information and communication technologies.

Who is Really in Charge of Contemporary Education? People and technologies in, against and beyond the neoliberal university

Abstract This article reflects on the position of people in, against and beyond information and communication technologies. Firstly, using Jandrić and Kuzmanić’s work on digital postcolonialism, Raymond Williamss work on residual and emergent cultures, and Deleuze and Guattaris insights into the dynamics between territorialization, de-territorialization and re-territorialization, it develops a theoretical framework for inquiry into the hybrid identity of the contemporary university. Then, through critical discourse analysis (CDA), the article moves on to analyse the ways in which technology discourse resides in the dominating ideology of technological determinism and co-opts with neoliberal agendas by omitting humans from explicit mention in UK policy documents. It shows that true counter-hegemonic practice against dominating social practices is possible only through reinvigorating the central position of human beings in regards to information and communication technologies. Within the developed theoretical framework, it seeks openings to intervene subversively into current relationships between technologies, people, and (higher) education, and to identify opportunities for building a non-determinist identity of the contemporary university that reaches beyond the single-minded logic of techno-scientific development. In the process, it situates Paulo Freires insights into critical pedagogy in the context of the network society, and places the relationships between human beings, language and information and communication technologies amongst central questions of todays (higher) education and society at large.

Postdigital science and education

We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media is separate, virtual, ‘other’ to a ‘natural’ human and social life. This has inspired the emergence of a new concept—‘the postdigital’— which is slowly but surely gaining traction in a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to the arts (Bishop, Gansing, Parikka, & Wilk, 2017 ; Monoskop, 2018), music (Cascone, 2000), architecture (Spiller, 2009), humanities (Hall, 2013 ; Tabbi, in press), (social) sciences (Taffel, 2016), and in many inter-, trans-, and post-disciplines between them (Berry & Dieter, 2015). Through this research, the term postdigital is slowly entering academic discourse. The University of Edinburgh’s Center for Research in Digital Education is seriously considering rebranding toward the postdigital (Bayne & Jandric, 2017, p. 204, see also Jandric, 2017, p. 201) ; Coventry University recently established the Center for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University, 2018) ; authors of this editorial are editors for the forthcoming journal Postdigital Science and Education

The critical challenge of networked learning: using information technologies in the service of humanity

This chapter places one of the most prominent contemporary critical educators, Peter McLaren, in conversation with a wide spectrum of questions concerning networked learning. Starting from assessment of the current representation of information and communication technologies in the contemporary discourse of critical education, the conversation explores the relationships between the global marketplace, personal information, and the state. It places networked learning in relation to some major themes in Marxist theory such as the dichotomy between capital and labor and the structure of production. It explores potentials of information and communication technologies for contemporary social struggles, anticipates future development of revolutionary critical pedagogy, analyzes the main features of contemporary social movements, and situates the ancient dichotomy between education and schooling into the context of virtual reality. Analyzing digital cultures and some mainstream questions about networked learning such as literacy, morality, and self-realization, it finally arrives at the necessity to develop a new revolutionary consciousness that seeks to use information and communication technology in the service of humanity.

From anthropocentric humanism to critical posthumanism in digital education

Siân Bayne is Professor of Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, based in the Moray House School of Education, where she directs the Centre for Research in Digital Education. In 2004, Siân and colleagues launched the world renowned MSc in E-Learning, now the MSc in Digital Education. Siân’s background includes English literature, digitization, museum heritage, and open education.

The curious promise of educationalising technological unemployment: What can places of learning really do about the future of work?

Abstract University education is full of promise. Indeed universities have the capacity to create and shape, through staff and students, all kinds of enthralling ‘worlds’ and ‘new possibilities of life’. Yet students are encouraged increasingly to view universities as simply a means to an end, where neoliberal education delivers flexible skills to directly serve a certain type of capitalism. Additionally, the universal challenge of technological unemployment, alongside numerous other social issues, has become educationalised and portrayed in HE policy, as an issue to be solved by universities. The idea that more education can resolve the problem of technological unemployment is a political construction which has largely failed to deliver its promise. In this article, we look at educationalisation in hand with technologisation and we draw on a Critical Discourse Analysis of HE policies, to demonstrate the problems arising from taken for granted visions of neoliberal social development related to education, technology, and employment. To disrupt the tired visions of ‘techno-fixes’ and ‘edu-fixes’ we identify in these texts, we call for a radical re-imagining of HE policy. Instead of attributing responsibility for social change to abstract notions of education, market and technology, a new shared vision is needed where more agency is explicitly attributed to the researchers, teachers, and students who are the genuine human future of work.

From Liberation to Salvation: Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Meets Liberation Theology

This conversation between Peter McLaren and Petar Jandrić brings about some of the most recent and deepest of McLaren’s insights into the relationship between revolutionary critical pedagogy and liberation theology, and outlines the main directions of development of McLaren’s thought during and after Pedagogy of Insurrection. In the conversation, McLaren reveals his personal and theoretical path to liberation theology. He argues for the relevance of liberation theology for contemporary social struggles, links it with social sciences, and addresses some recent critiques of Pedagogy of Insurrection. McLaren identifies the idolatry of money as the central point of convergence between liberation theology and Marxism. Developing this thought further, he asserts that Jesus was a communist. McLaren analyses the revolutionary praxis of liberation theology in Latin America, and concludes that the struggle needs to avoid violence and endure without losing tenderness. He analyzes the international politics of liberation theology and shows that liberation theology was demonized by the US administration because it works for the poor. McLaren then expands experiences from Latin America towards a global ethics of solidarity, criticizes Church positions on various matters, and insists on a critical approach to Church dogmas. He explores theoretical and practical dissonances between Marxism and Christianity, and expands them towards a more general dichotomy between the material and the spiritual. He explores the Christian eschaton – the arrival of the Kingdom of God – and links it to Marx’s prophecy of the future socialist society. Finally, he explores ecumenical opportunities of liberation theology and firmly links it with the arrival of the socialist society.

Precariat, education and technologies: Towards a global class identity

In this interview Guy Standing outlines the main links between the precariat and the universal basic income. He briefly comments on the relationships of his work to traditional Marxism, and expands his critique of the precariat towards information and communication technologies. He identifies common features of the global precariat, and links them to creation of a common global class identity. Moving on to transformative potentials of the universal basic income, he dismisses ancient labels and frameworks as unnecessary and potentially misleading, and calls for reinvention of the contemporary language of progress. Finally, he seeks critical emancipation of the precariat in urgent decommodification of all aspects of education and information.

Learning in the Age of Mind Amplification

Howard Rheingold is the true pioneer of digital technologies and the chronicler of the advent of the network society. Howard’s name is usually associated with the concept of virtual communities that he is credited for inventing. During his rich career, however, he has left deep traces in various fields from journalism through social and cultural critique to teaching and learning, and his interests have included a wide range of topics including but not limited to history of digital technologies, artificial and collective intelligence, mind amplifiers, media literacy, and learning innovation.