Just Another Tool? IT Pedagogy and the Commodification of Education

This article investigates the social relations being produced through the incorporation of information technology (IT) into educational practices. Drawing upon field research with the Los Angeles public school system, the article analyzes social relations in three technology classrooms, discusses gender and ethnic inequalities with technology, and documents the kinds of educational technology programs that teachers and administrators find valuable. Rather than IT being an apolitical tool, these examples illustrate how technologies operate within larger ideological systems, linking students and public institutions intimately with globalization processes of privatization and commodification. In conclusion, an alternative framework for technology pedagogy is introduced, one that confronts the politics of tech-nology by perceiving information technologies as social media rather than simple tools. KEY WORDS: commodification; globalization; information technology; Los Angeles; pedagogy. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them... In a schooled world the road to happiness is paved with a consumer’s index. (Illich, 1971, pp. 55–58) [T]he much vaunted ‘‘flexibility’ ’ of the new forms of global economy involve not simply new forms of connection but new forms of discon-nection as well