Abstract
Buber’s distinction between the ‘I-It’ mode and the ‘I-Thou’ mode is seminal for dialogic education. While Buber introduces the idea of dialogic space, an idea which has proved useful for the analysis of dialogic education with technology, his account fails to engage adequately with the role of technology. This paper offers an introduction to the significance of the I-It/I-Thou duality of technology in relation with opening dialogic space. This is followed by a short schematic history of educational technology which reveals the role technology plays, not only in opening dialogic space, but also in expanding dialogic space. The expansion of dialogic space is an expansion of what it means to be ‘us’ as dialogic engagement facilitates the incorporation, into our shared sense of identity, of aspects of reality that are initially experienced as alien or ‘other’. Augmenting Buber with an alternative understanding of dialogic space enables us to see how dialogue mediated by technology, as well as dialogue with monologised fragments of technology (robots), can, through education, lead to an expansion of what it means to be human.
Highlights
Not all those who write about dialogic education refer to Buber, all refer, in different ways, to the fundamental distinction that Buber drew between learning from a living dialogue involving responsive voices (I-Thou) and the kind of ‘knowledge’ that just imposes a single perspective expanding the realm of the same and objectifying all otherness (I-It)
Buber opens the way to understanding dialogue as more than that intersubjectivity in which two separate consciousnesses engage
We argue against Buber that dialogic spaces do not all take the same form, but that they take a multitude of forms depending, to a large extent, on the mediating technology
Summary
Not all those who write about dialogic education refer to Buber, all refer, in different ways, to the fundamental distinction that Buber drew between learning from a living dialogue involving responsive voices (I-Thou) and the kind of ‘knowledge’ that just imposes a single perspective expanding the realm of the same and objectifying all otherness (I-It). When, like Merleau-Ponty, we find ourselves thinking “those are signs there—what do they signify?”, we experience a ‘break in presence’ (i.e., we stop responding to the virtual stream of data and instead respond to the real sensory stream; Slater et al 2003) Buber begins his classic work I and Thou (first published in 1923 and translated to English in 1937) with the claim that “man is twofold”, and draws our attention to the two fundamental modes of being: ‘I-It’ (Ich-Es) and ‘I-Thou’ (Ich-Du). For example, when signs take us straight through into living dialogues with other voices, our sense of ‘us’ expands to include others in a shared dialogic space. We augment Buber with an alternative understanding of dialogic space to enable us to see how dialogue mediated by technology, as well as dialogue with monologised fragments of technology (robots), can, through education, lead to an expansion of what it means to be human
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