Research Areas: Technoskepticism, Critical Tech, and Technoethics
CoT Announcements
Next Monthly Tech Talk Tuesday, 12/05/23. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be Tuesday, December 5th, 2023 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
Next Book Club on Tuesday, 12/19/23: We are discussing Blood in the Machine The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant led by Dan Krutka. Register for this book club event if you’d like to participate.
Critical Tech Study Participation: If you self-identify as critical of technology, please consider participating in our study. We are seeking participants who self-identify as holding critical views toward technology to share their stories by answering the following questions: To you, what does it mean to take a critical perspective toward technology? How have you come to take on that critical perspective? Please consider participating in our study via OUR SURVEY. You are welcome to share with others. Thank you!
by Marie K. Heath
Because we work at universities, we often carry out our Civics of Technology work through scholarship. We’ve recently organized our research on the Civics of Tech Research Page across three themes: technoskepticism, critical tech, and technoethics. While these lines of inquiry are interrelated, we find each offers a particular lens into working toward more just technological and educational futures. Here, we review each line of research and share our scholarship around them. We have included publications by our community members under each of these sections on our research page. If you are a contributing member of the CoT community and would like to include your research around one or more of these themes, please let us know! We’ll add it to the page.
Technoskeptical Research
As part of the community of scholars involved in the Civics of Technology project, we contend that educators should cultivate a technoskepticism among students to ensure that we advance more educational, humane, and just futures. Developing a technoskeptical disposition (or practice, orientation, habits, outlooks) toward technology challenges us to slow down and think intentionally and critically about technology in our lives. Technoskepticism involves building knowledge about how technologies function, their complicated interactions with and effects on society, and how political decisions are made about their use and non-use. It also involves forming skills to think critically about technologies, imagining speculative futures, and taking just actions. Educators can teach technoskepticism, for example, explicitly through the use of our five technoskeptical questions and other curriculum, or implicitly through small actions and critical questioning about technology in and out of schools.
Metzger, S. M., & Krutka, D. G. (2023). Interrogating the smartphone: Teaching through technoskeptical questions. Social Education, 87(5), 313-318.
Krutka, D. G., Pleasants, J., & Nichols, T. P. (2023). Talking the technology talk. Phi Delta Kappan, 104(7), 42-46.
Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., & Smits, R. M. (2022). Toward a civics of technology. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 30(2), 229-237.
Krutka, D. G., Metzger, S. A., & Seitz, R. Z. (2022). “Technology inevitably involves trade-offs”: The framing of technology in social studies standards. Theory & Research in Social Education, 50(2), 226-254.
Krutka, D. G., Caines, A., Heath, M. K., & Staudt Willet, K. B. (2022). Black Mirror pedagogy: Dystopian stories for technoskeptical imaginations. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 11(1).
Mason, L. E., Krutka, D. G., & Heath, M. K. (2021). The metaphor is the message: Limitations of the media literacy metaphor for social studies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 21(3), 770-780.
Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., & Mason, L. E. (2020). Technology won’t save us–A call for technoskepticism in social studies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(1), 108-120.
Critical Tech
As our motto suggests, technologies are not neutral and neither are the societies into which they are introduced. As technology continues encroaching in our lives, how can we advance technology education for just futures? Our research around critical technology perspectives particularly investigates how technology intersects with systems of oppression. We build off the scholarly work particularly of Black women scholars such as Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Noble, and Meredith Broussard.
Heath, M. K. , Gleason, B. W. , Mehta, R. , & Hall, T. (2023). More than knowing: Toward collective, critical, and ecological approaches in educational technology research. Educational Technology Research & Development, 1-23.
Heath, M. K. , Asim, S. , Milman, N. , & Henderson, J. (2022). Confronting tools of the oppressor: Exploring justice in educational technology and teacher education. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 22(4).
Yadav, A., Heath, M. K. , Hu, A. D. (2022, May). Toward justice in computer science through community, criticality, and citizenship. Communications of the ACM, 65(5). 1-3.
Yadav, A. & Heath, M. K. (2022). Breaking the code: Confronting racism in computer science through community, criticality, and citizenship. TechTrends. 1-9.
Heath, M. K. , & Segal, P. (2021). What pre-service teacher technology integration conceals and reveals: “Colorblind” technology in schools. Computers and Education. Online first.
Krutka, D. G., Seitz, R. Z., & Hadi, A. M. (2021). How do we oppose racist Zoombombs?: A discriminatory technology audit. In R. E. Ferdig, E. Baumgartner, R. Hartshorne, R. Kaplan-Rakowski, & C. Mouza (Eds.), Teaching, technology, and teacher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: Stories from the field, pp. 753-759. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/216903/
Gleason, B., & Heath, M. K. (2021). Injustice embedded in Google Classroom and Google Meet: A techno-ethical audit of remote educational technologies. Italian Journal of Educational Technology, 29(2), 26-41.
Technoethics
Educators often use technology in classes without interrogating the technologies, and whether they should be used. We have published several papers that explain and demonstrate possibilities for conducting technoethical audits of edtech. We contend that a technoethical approach does not simply help individual teacher educators and students address singular problems, but centers ethical behavior in the context of democratic citizenship for the common good.
Krutka, D. G., Smits, R. M., & Willhelm, T. A. (2021). Don’t be evil: Should we use Google in schools? TechTrends, 65(4), 421-431.
Heath, M. K. (2021). Buried treasure or Ill-gotten spoils: the ethics of data mining and learning analytics in online instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 69(1), 331-334.
Gleason, B., & Heath, M. K. (2021). Injustice embedded in Google Classroom and Google Meet: A techno-ethical audit of remote educational technologies. Italian Journal of Educational Technology, 29(2), 26-41.
Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., Staudt Willet, K. B. (2019). Foregrounding technoethics: Toward critical perspectives in technology and teacher education. Journal of Technology for & Teacher Education, 27(4), 555-574.
Krutka, D. G., & Heath, M. K. (2019). Has social media made it easier to effect social change?: Inquiring into tactics for change through primary sources. Social Education, 83(5), 269-274.
We see these themes as interconnected and with an impetus to action. Thus, our broader action-oriented work through the Civics of Tech project — the curriculum, conferences, book clubs, tech talks, blog, etc. — is grounded in and grows from our scholarship. We invite you to join us in scholarship, community, and action toward more just education and technology futures.