Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through Information Technology

Preface

Educators propound reforms, but schools remain the same. Without material agency, new methods fail. A scheme captures the educational imagination -- spokespeople think it out, the daring to try it, researchers document its effects, and the committed demand its adoption. Thus, the idea diffuses from various centers -- but then, sporadically, resistance builds, enthusiasm falters, influence weakens; ineluctably, distinctive practices gravitate back to the norm. Pedagogical weathering soon makes the new shingles indistinguishable from the old.

Without political vision, technological innovation leaves the quality of life unimproved. Anticipations of future technologies depict wondrous tools for living, but then culminate with "a day in the life," usually a banal office routine with little at stake that was different from what would be at stake in the corporate office anywhere today. Such visions do not inspire people to solve human problems old and new, to join together with shared hopes and historic aspirations, enabled now to act on issues hitherto in- accessible to the common weal.

We need to join pedagogy and power. Educators inspired by visions of human potentiality need instruments of action, substantial agents of change, with which to work. Technologists creating new means for bringing intelligence to bear upon the work of the world need a civic agenda, a vision of historic possibility, consciously espoused and responsibly defended. Without power, educators will continue cloaking their delivery of lame services in high-minded impotence. Without pedagogy, technologists, bleating complacent corporate compromise, will recreate the injus- tices of the contemporary world with the new-forged tools that might otherwise transcend it. Educators need power, not purity; technologists need vision, not predictability. Together educators and technologists have the historic opportunity to improve the civic prospect -- that is the message of Power and Pedagogy.

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