The Politics of Technology in Curriculum and Instruction

Reading Response 4:
Carroll, David. “Mobile Learning Tools: A Teachable Moment in the Age of the App.” In Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.

As you may have read in my post on how/who I understand my students to be, I recognize myself as a teacher who is not technologically proficient in digital environments. It is because of this that I found David Carrol’s piece to be especially helpful for understanding how scholars who DO experiment pedagogically with common, new technologies think about instruction.

The greatest strength in Carroll’s article can be found in the way he coordinates a review of the scholarly conversations surrounding mobile technologies with macro-level, societal concerns. For example, Carroll emphasizes a strong need for balancing private technological development with public access and use. Comparing institutional desires with the legal constraints in corporate development, Carroll argues that we need to move toward a disentangling of private and public interests in the realm of systemic educational development. In other words, the “ad hoc” manner in which schools locate funding for technologies may in fact be to the detriment of the students in the long run as a result of capitalist drives.

For me this piece is useful for the questions it raises about seeking and adopting new technologies into classrooms and curricula. The lines between private profit and public education are so blurred at this point it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine who is really profiting: students or the owners of the corporate firms developing and selling the technologies. I, like David Carroll, favor the development of educational technologies in so far as access and enhancing learning remain higher priorities than profit and scale.