ABSTRACT

The past 40 years have been characterized by an ongoing shift in the rationale underlying the use of educational technologies – an earlier emphasis on efficiency and engagement has been overshadowed by a vision centered on educational technologies’ capacity to facilitate authentic learning in the inauthentic school context. However, despite its intuitive appeal, authenticity is a vague and contestable concept that warrants further scrutiny. Accordingly, this theoretical paper sets out to offer a conceptual analysis of the various meanings of authenticity in educational discourse, and to examine how these both shape and obfuscate arguments concerning educational technologies. To do so, I identify two key ambiguities inherent in the concept of authenticity: (1) whether authenticity relies on correspondence to real-world contexts (is), or aims to tap into a deeper essence of an individual or phenomenon (ought); (2) whether authenticity is mainly viewed from a supposedly objective perspective (external), or aims to capture individuals’ subjective experiences (internal). The depiction of technology as authentic, along with the conflations between its various meanings, serve to naturalize existing patterns of technology use, while obscuring the ways in which they are shaped by social, political and pedagogical considerations that should remain open to evaluation and critique.

摘要

过去40年的特点是，使用教育技术的基本原理不断变化–早先对效率和参与的强调已被以教育技术在不真实的学校环境中促进真实学习的能力为中心的愿景所掩盖。然而，尽管它具有直观的吸引力，但真实性却是一个模糊且可竞争的概念，值得进一步审查。因此，该理论论文着手对教育话语中的真实性的各种含义进行概念分析，并研究它们如何塑造和混淆关于教育技术的论点。为此，我确定了真实性概念中固有的两个主要歧义：（1）真实性是否依赖于与真实环境的对应关系（是或旨在挖掘个人或现象的更深层次的本质（应）；（2）真实性主要是从假定的客观角度（外部）来看，还是旨在捕捉个人的主观体验（内部）。将技术描述为真实的，以及其各种含义之间的混淆，有助于使现有的技术使用模式自然化，同时掩盖了应由社会，政治和教学考虑因素对技术进行塑造的方式，这些因素应继续受到评估和批评。