This article focuses on how we perceive new technology and technological development within educational settings, and seeks to establish a critical link between the rhetoric of information and communications technology (ICT) and what Biesta called ‘the new language of learning’. Within this ‘new language’ the learner is a consumer, with needs that must be fulfilled by the teacher. This rhetoric implies that ‘teaching’ has been replaced by ‘learning’ and challenges the conventional curricula in many respects. The article applies Biesta's perspective to a concrete scrutiny of current trends in education and the introduction of ICT in education in particular. The analysis gives support to Biesta's main hypothesis, but it also indicates that the radical shift from teaching to learning is accompanied, and we might possibly say influenced, by the rhetoric connected to the use of ICT. In recent Norwegian curricular texts ICT takes a position as the rationalising tools by which teaching can be made efficient, individually designed and flexible. The intention is to critically examine the way in which teaching is more or less automatically replaced by learning, the influence the rhetoric of ICT has had, and how ICT and learning seem to be connected through merely rhetorical couplings.
The "failure" of educational computing is often attributed to deficiencies of practice: resisting teachers and lack of will, competence and sincerity on behalf of the teaching profession. But the complexity of school life and teachers' work has been underestimated by the entrepreneurs of educational computing. Theoretically there is a need to approach this area from a different angle. We will suggest there is a need to reframe the issue of ICT in schools with educational policy and discourse with education, rather than with technology in mind. In order to reach that goal there is a need to inculcate "technology" as an ordinary part of teachers' vocabulary about their own work and as a part of their professional ethos. Teachers need to examine the moral values inherent in their practices and use those values as bases for debate. Not taking up these issues and instead adopting defensive stances is dangerous to the profession. The danger is that defensiveness can be seen by others outside the school as rigidity and play into the hands of those who are impatient with teachers. It would serve teachers well if they had a more robust ability to communicate the nature of the difficulties they face and how they deal with them.
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