I have now looked at theories that have emerged, first, to explain the contribution of technology to learning and, second, how teachers use technology. In this chapter I turn to technology itself. In an obvious way the whole book has been about technology but technology deserves a chapter in itself as researchers have not always been explicit or consistent when discussing the user's relationship to digital tools. There are six sections:

• • What is a technocentric view of technology?

• • The idea of an affordance

• • We live in hybrid environments

• • We participate in assemblages of people and objects

• • The social shaping of technology

• • Is the important question: ‘what ought technology to be?’

• • How then should we think about technology?

What is a technocentric view of technology?

The use of a tool will always be influenced by who is using it and the purposes they have in mind, but a technocentric view assumes that there is something invariant, something that remains constant, even as it is used across different contexts. This often means that technocentric writers will see tools as having a power to both disrupt and change existing practice. For example, technocentric writers may see great historical movements as caused by technology inventions: the Enlightenment was made possible by the printing press; the steam engine literally powered the industrial revolution; the internet created the Information Age.

When it comes to education, policy makers have often veered towards a technocentric view of ICT, seeing it as a solution to problems such as access to education, inequality in outcomes and gaps in vocational preparation. Thus, they have often prioritised getting the equipment in schools (and other institutions), believing that this will make a difference, while giving less thought to the support and resources needed for teachers to use new technology on their own terms. A technocentric view, further, distorts the way that technology is evaluated. If we believe that ICT has invariant features then it makes sense to treat it as an ‘independent variable’ and to measure its impact on learning, not worrying too much about the differing contexts in which it is used.