Stephen Downes, in the quote below, crystallizes the reasons why the field of instructional technology needs to be a lot more than a conversation about a range of tools.
Presumably philosophy does have an inherent interest in something other than the making of money, though you would never know these days. Certainly, anyone with a moral stance ought to be looking at how knowledge – whether military, medical or philosophical – is created, for what purpose, and who benefits.
This beautifully framed intersection of the relationships between power, control, and capital has never been more apparent to me than when I started blogging as an instructional technologist. Interestingly enough, this emerging field has uniquely positioned a number of extremely smart folks to start thinking about how discourse is framed, by whom, and to what end. These were the cornerstones of my own undergraduate and graduate work, but I have never experienced these ideas in a conversational manner on a daily basis as I currently do within the EdTech blogosphere. This social network is an extremely vital “structure of feeling” (to quote Raymond Williams) during “the interesting times we live in” -to paraphrase Jon Udell.
