What Technology Reveals: Countering Binaries and Moving Toward the In-Between

Abstract

Reflecting on educational practice, in an increasingly globalized and technologized context, inevitably involves trudging into the rough waters of the debate over online education. As I survey the literature, it is distressing to me how much of the literature participates in and validates the binary of the online classroom versus the more traditional classroom. Whether the text is venerating online education as the hope for future equality and a decrease in poverty, or even if the text is taking a much more skeptical stance, the volley back and forth is around which is better — the one or the other — online education or bricks-and-mortar classrooms. More concerning still, skeptics of online education have argued that online educa- tion is anti real, anti-embodiment, anti-expertise, and anti-human. And, even when educational scholars talk about creating hybrid or blended online programs, the language tends to involve the creation of a this-space-then-that-space kind of plan, where students will be asked to come to campus for two or three class periods — in order to provide some sort of humanness or real college experience — and then the students will take the rest of the course online. Such understanding of the potential for educational technologies and online courses belies a lack of imagina- tion and a participation in the binaries of the field: that online education should somehow be seen as the opposite of bricks-and-mortar education. This essay acts as a counter to those binaries. In order to counter the binaries of here (bricks-and-mortar classrooms) versus there (online spaces), I rely on a strategy that David Blacker argues can show how some of our common sense notions are in error. Blacker suggests that in order to truly understand technologies and their potential, we must allow technologies to re- veal. 1 That is to say, we need to really look at what the technology allows and disallows; what the technology makes possible, probable, and impossible. As we examine technologies, we can better understand how the technology shapes prac- tices, and, on the other hand, how socio-discursive knowledge and regimes of practice shape how we use technology — regardless of the potential of that technology. In this essay, I use Blacker's strategy of allowing technologies to reveal the possibility of hybridity, flow, simultaneity, and in-between-ness. I use examples from spaces of digital play to show how technology might be used differently; how we might re-imagine hybridity in a more productive way. This strategy of focusing on the ways that technologies shape what is possible, versus the ways that humans think that technologies should be used, is grounded in the work of John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. These philoso- phers — while differing in the ways they venerate and talk about technology — each mount an excavational inquiry that, rather than taking practices and artifacts as for- granted or — to borrow Heidegger's term — ready-to-hand, drive us, instead, to