2.2 Asynchronous Materials

TechnoEthical Framework for Teachers (TEFT)

Helps educators critically assess the ethical implications of technology through three different perspectives

1. Instrumental Technoethics

2. Sociomaterial Technoethics

3. Existential Technoethics

Instrumental Ethics

Technology as a neutral artifact or “just a tool”

• views humans and technologies as distinctly different and separate entities

• humans as thinking; people have agency; “subjects”; autonomous

• technology as unthinking; no agency; “objects”

• technologies are value neutral

• example: “guns don’t kill people, people kill people"

Ethical Questions for Teachers (Instrumental Ethics)

1. What laws regulate tech use?

2. What human rights could be violated?

3. What responsibilities do teachers have?

Ethical Actions for Teachers (Instrumental Ethics)

• Ensure new classroom tech comply with school and district policy and provincial laws

• Educate learners about these policies and being good “digital citizens”

• Obtain parental consent and learner assent

• Limit student data collection by adjusting app privacy settings

SocioMaterial TechnoEthics

• Tech is understood as a socially-constructed, political (co)actor (Human-Tech)

• Agency (the powerful ability to act) is understood to be shared between the human user and their tech (non-humans)

• Humans, when using technology, are human-nonhuman hybrids or assemblages

• Technology has its own built in biases of scripts. And every tech (nonhuman) is an agent of power when coupled with a human

• The human being is not an autonomous being whose limits are defined by their skin, but rather an open system that networks with the technologies around them

What is Bruno Latour and what did he ask?

An actor network theorist; a sociomaterialist

Who or what is responsible for the act of killing? Is it the gun or the citizen?

A: the human technology hybrid (the citizen gun; gun citizen); the responsibility is shared between the human and technology

Do artifacts have politics?

Yes, according to Langdon Winner. Not only to artifacts have politics but it’s the most perverse kind of politics since artifacts (technologies) hide their biases under the appearance of objectivity, efficiency, and mere expediency

Ex. speed bump

Scripts

A technology that mediates our actions by means of a script which prescribes (i.e., “scripts in advance”) the user’s actions. Every technology provides or comes with a script or program for us to follow when we use it.

ex. speed bump tell the driver to slow down or else the vehicle will be damages

ex. Google slides scripts a particular kind of presentation

What do all software do?

Encode values, decisions about what is important, useful, relevant and what is not. All software necessarily restricts certain activities by making other possible or impossible.

Ethical Questions for Teachers (Sociomaterial Ethics)

• What are the the built-in scripts or biases of this tech?

  • What does it invite or encourage its user to do?

  • What does it inhibit or discourage them from doing?

• What values are embedded in or prescribed by this technology

• Whose power is enhanced or diminished when this technology is in use and in what ways?

Ethical Actions for Teachers (Sociomaterial Ethics)

• Choosing tech that support one’s values as a teacher

• Selectively using a tech with regard for its scripts and biases

• Attending to any changes in power relations with others

• Designing (or adapting) tech to support one’s pedagogical values

What is ClassDojo?

A classroom management tool to help teachers improve behaviour in their classrooms quickly and easily.

Existential TechnoEthics

• Tech as world-producing and revealing

• Technology mediates our relationship to the world (Human-Tech-World); Don Ihde

• Attends to the ways that different technologies shape and condition how students experience—perceive, act, and make meaning in and of—the world

• Tech is non-neutral, co-extensive, and co-constitutive

• Our humanity is intimate and inextricably bound up with, extended, and conditioned by our technologies

Heidegger

• “being-in-the-world”

• Human—World

Ihde’s HTW Relations

• Embodiment

• Hermeneutic

• Alterity

• Background

Embodiment Relations

Technologies constitute extensions of the human body

• (Human — Tech) → World

• ex. a musical instrument extends the range of our voices

Hermeneutic Relations

Create an interpretive overlay that shapes how we see or interpret our world, and habituates students to a particular “way of knowing”

• Human → (Tech — World)

• ex. the clock normalizes the passing of time, written language shapes how we understand the world

• Hermeneutic + Embodiment example would be a calculator

• extends our cognitive capacities

• the HTW relation most often facilitated by teachers

Alterity Relations

Occurs when technology appears as objectively separate from humans.

• Human → Tech (— World)

• ex. when technology breaks down (stands there as unmoving)

• ex. speedbump

• ex. when we don’t know how to use and/or interpret the world through the technology

Background Relations

(The three other relations were called focal relations because we were directly engaged with using and interacting with a technology)

The tech is performing its work out of our purview

• ex. furnace, wifi, lighting

Idhe’s Amplification-Reduction Structure of all HTW relations

every technology follows the law of extending, amplifying, or enhancing some human capacity while diminishing another (same observation by media ecologists)

Ethical Questions for Teachers (Existential Ethics)

• What human capacities does this tech enhance/amplify or diminish/reduce?

• What habits of mind, body, or relation does this technology scaffold? What perceptual frameworks, “ways of knowing” and/or social arrangements does it privilege? Render obsolete?

• What sort of being are we when we use this tech? “Who-what” will we (and our students) become?

Ethical Actions for Teachers (Existential Ethics)

• Choosing tech with the well-being, developmental needs, and resilience of learner’s extended ecosystems (cognitive, social, etc.) in mind.

• Striving to provide a diverse and inclusive media ecology in one’s classroom.

• Practicing an ongoing attentiveness to shifts in ways of knowing that a technology convenes and mediates

What is Craig Howe’s observation on Western cultural patterns reinforced through computer-mediated thought and communication?

The Internet is a deceptive tech whose power is immensely attractive to American Indians. But until it is restructured, cyberspace is no place for tribalism because it lacks the social, spiritual, and experiential dimensions necessary for Indigenous ways of learning. Cautions that the computer encodes the Western ideal of individualism.

David Lewis on technology involving traditions and culture.

“it all depends on how the technology is used”

What is the myth of a “culturally neutral technology”?

• Important in hiding the forms of cultural transformation required for the spread of the Industrial Revolution.

• Hides the fact that we are entering the digital phase of the Industrial Revolution.

• Many educators and policymakers assume that computers can be used to preserve Indigenous languages and traditions without consequences

• Computers are a culture-transforming technology and is never neutral

• It is the nature of the computer that determines which patterns of thinking, communicating, or experiencing will be reinforced or marginalized (typically Western ideals)

What is the main argument being made in “Native People and the Challenge of Computer: Reservation Schools, Individualism, and Consumerism.”

Computers are not culturally neutral tools but rather reinforce Western values—specifically, individualism, consumerism, and detachment from traditional knowledge systems. They caution that integrating computers into Indigenous education may undermine Indigenous Knowledge and cultural sustainability rather than preserving it.

Computers as a Tool of Western Individualism

Digital Technologies amplify individualism by prioritizing self-expression, private ownership of knowledge, and isolated learning experiences, which contrasts with the communal, intergenerational learning traditions of Indigenous cultures

Potential benefits of computers (with caution)

Computers can be useful for networking, political activism, and employment. However, Indigenous communities must critically assess the trade-offs, ensuring that digital tools used it alignment with cultural values rather than uncritically adopting Western educational models

Implication for Indigenous Education in relation to Technology

Educators should critically evaluate the ways computers shape Indigenous Knowledge.

• Communities should decided whether computers align with Indigenous values of relational knowledge, oral traditions, and community-centered learning

• A balance must be found between technological adaptation and cultural preservation, ensuring that computers support rather than replace Indigenous pedagogies