Ted Hamilton - Technical codes of online education

(Presented at the Learning Spaces Workshop @ LIDC, Simon Fraser University; February 11, 2005)

This presentation comes from a paper I recently co-authored with Andrew Feenberg, to whom I should also give credit for the title. In order to set up the kind of work that Learning Spaces is undertaking I'd like to begin by outlining what I term an "evangelical" discourse of online education, rooted in a deterministic philosophy of technology. I'll then provide a critique of the deterministic basis of this discourse, and introduce the notion of "technical codes" - a concept developed by Andrew to understand how technological development and design are embedded in value frameworks, goal horizons, historical imperatives, and social interests. I'll conclude by looking briefly at educational applications of the computer.