Neil Selwyn will be one of the keynote speakers at the Second International Conference on Education – hosted the University of Quebec and to be held in Montreal on April 30 and May 1. Neil’s talk will be titled: ‘Making sense of school and digital technology – a messy business’. The full abstract is as follows …
“Don’t believe the hype! … schools and classrooms clearly are not being ‘transformed’, ‘revolutionized’ or ‘revitalized’ by TIC. Instead, education technology use tends to be complicated, compromised and constrained by the contexts of schools and schooling. As such, much more attention needs to be paid to the ‘state of the actual’ rather than the ‘state of the art’ of educational technology. This is a talk for anyone looking to make better sense of TIC in schools – be they educators or researchers, policy-makers or parents. The talk will outline some of the main issues, questions and methods of inquiry that a suitably critical approach to TIC in education might entail. It will also consider what might need to change before the many promises of education technology might stand a chance of being realized. Above all, the case is made for future discussions and decision-making about educational technology that are realistic rather than idealistic”.
