Technology is Neutral

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was teaching in a high school and was very much enthusiastic about CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). That was a trigger to engage myself in computer programming of some sort. The easiest and most available software for me at that time was GW-Basic. With a lot of commitment and perseverance I managed to master the program and started to offer my students a program that tested grammar, vocabulary and reading comprehension. At that time, it was a miracle. Just the fact of using the computer and responding to the multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and getting the immediate RIGHT/WRONG feedback was, I believed, the essence of CALL and that my students would learn better. I WAS TOTALLY WRONG! Years later, I discovered the fallacy and that pedagogically, I only made a transfer from a paper onto a screen and nothing more. Cope and Kalantzis (2017) see it this way:

e-Learning ecologies may play a key part in the largest shift in the systems of modern education since their rise to dominance in the nineteenth century. Everything may change – configurations of space, learner to teacher and learner to learner relationships, the textual forms of knowledge to which learners are exposed, the kinds of knowledge artifacts that students create, and the way the outcomes of their learning are measured. Or we may introduce a whole lot of technology into schools and nothing will change in institutional or epistemic senses. Technology is pedagogically neutral. (p.1)

Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (2017) e-Learning Ecologies: Principles for New Learning and Assessment (Ed.). New York. Routledge.