Bookmarked:
Starting with an analogy to tech in orienteering sports, Lawrie Phipps looks at the excluding factor of the growing reliance of a certain stack of technology:
[…] practices in education have shifted, and we now have more technology as a default. That technology will have a minimum entry level, for staff and students. And a lot of that technology, currently, will be the responsibility of the user.
The article calls for attention to the forces that are currently driving the design of educational materials and processes, which may be driven more by technology than by pedagogy.
Another problem is that few of the new tools seem to be driven by the imperative of design for all, or as I would like to see, design with the most precariously positioned students in mind first.
While his text is about higher education, this same issue exists everywhere. As certain technologies, like constantly carrying a data-enabled smartphone, become a de facto baseline for design, there is a massive risk of losing sights of the excluded (one of my favourite topics – the non-users).
