TECHNOLOGY AND TEACHING IN POST-MODERN ENVIRONMENTS- OR RHETORIC NEGOTIATIONS OF EDUCATION

The article focuses on the situation as we engage with emerging post-modern environments marked by a continued strong belief in technology as the key governing force in society, and by teaching being sacrificed on the altar of “progress”. “Teaching” has been turned into “learning”. Furthermore, new learning strategies are quite often, in some way or other, interweaved with the use of new technology. However, the instrumental perspectives of the industrial society have been to a large extent prolonged. Accordingly, the underlying assumption of this article is that developments concerning technology and education during recent decades can most adequately be understood as a rhetorically based negotiation between two basic, antagonistic positions. The first position is grounded in perspectives of “the industrial society”, the other one in notions of “the learning society”. When new technological devices, based on traditional perspectives, are combined with learning strategies of the future, we might regard this as an adoption of ideas of the learning society or as a construction of rhetoric structural couplings. Viewing recent changes in this manner provides new perspectives on important questions concerning the relationship between technology and education. It also constitutes a framework for the quite necessary process of reconsidering and clarifying the concepts of technology, teaching and learning. The tendencies described in the article are presented as overall trends within education, but the use of new technology to a large extent seems to be connected to new and more flexible educational methods and elements of distance education.