Before making a career out of studying education technology, I was a student of literature. As an undergraduate student of English Lit at Cardiff University, we were taught it was possible to critique the canon, analyze cultural objects as mundane as cereal packets, and engage with ‘genre’ fiction such as crime, horror and sci-fi. Later, as a part-time PhD literature student working full-time for an edtech ‘futurelab’, I read Neal Stephenson’s 1995 sci-fi novel The Diamond Age; among many elements, it features an edtech device called the Primer. It was a strange moment as my PhD, partly about Stephenson’s novels, came into contact with my edtech day-job.
The idea of exploring edtech in sci-fi has remained in the background of my work ever since, but I’ve never properly figured out what to do about it or even if it was too niche an area of literary interest.
Doing something about edtech sci-fi came up again during a recent workshop to develop a new taught course. Might edtech sci-fi open up students to critical perspectives on current edtech issues such as datafication, inequalities, commercialization and so forth?
As a way of finding out, on Twitter, I asked “Anyone got good examples of education technologies in sci-fi, text or film? Got the Primer in the Diamond Age, roboteachers in Class of 1999, but what else? Possibly for a course #edtechscifi”. Below I’m listing all the responses I received, partly for my own benefit but hopefully in case others are interested too. But first a quick discussion of why studying edtech in sci-fi may be a useful way of approaching a range of critical current issues in research on education.
Science fiction has, for well over a century, provided authors with a way of speculating about the CONTINUE READING: Code Acts in Education: Edtech Sci-Fi | National Education Policy Center