Prof. Dr. Felicitas Macgilchrist
Language of the lecture: German
Contemporary and historical discourses on technology as a radical and revolutionary rupture with the past are tied to the idea that technological progress changes the future of education. But what normative visions of the future are being constructed in this process, and what does that mean for educational research on digital education? This lecture explores three supposed ruptures and their respective future imaginaries.
The first rupture, often described within the EdTech industry, concerns the modernization of educational processes, institutions, and organizations through the use of appropriate technologies. Research in this area investigates, among other things, the optimization of learning outcomes, support for school development processes, and the inclusion of students with special needs. In this lecture, however, this perspective (“Rupture I”) is critically examined, while two additional moments at the intersection of digital culture and schooling are highlighted.
A second rupture (“Rupture II”) is currently widely diagnosed due to the influence of cyber-libertarian (anti-democratic, neo-right, and eugenicist) visions of the future shaping the field of technology development. Although this is often described as a rupture with the democratic and egalitarian promise of networked technologies, the lecture explores the thesis that cyber-libertarian tendencies represent more of a continuity than a break with the past.
A third rupture becomes visible in radical-democratic attempts to foster sociotechnical practices that aim to develop alternative futures in response to the polycrises of the present. Several initiatives related to “Rupture III” from the fields of political media education, radical democratic education, and “speculative” research will be discussed. These initiatives seek to imagine a different (just, pluralistic, future-oriented) world.
Whether these democratic goals can actually be achieved through digital media, given their cyber-libertarian technogenesis, remains an empirical question — or perhaps the very tension between these goals and their technological context marks the real rupture in the field of digital education. Ethnographic research points to a complex relationship between cyber-libertarianism and democratic aspirations within schools and classrooms.
The lecture concludes with questions regarding the role of educational science in light of these “ruptures” in a digitally networked world.
Prof. Dr. Felicitas Macgilchrist
Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg