Tenured ES Faculty

Interrogating Innovation: The Values and Visions of Educational Technology

Society’s relationship to technology has reached an inflection point. Innovations in AI have promised to revolutionize work, deliver truly personalized learning, and solve humanity’s most wicked problems. And yet, these same technologies have accelerated environmental disequilibrium, weaponized misinformation, and strained labor movements. Technology is not neutral—its values are expressed in its design and shaped by its designers. My work involves both honing our awareness of the nature and underlying causes of the challenges faced by humanity, as well as broadening whose knowledge we see as relevant to address these challenges. At the heart of this serious project, is play—creating and studying playful technologies for experimentation and exploration, tools to enhance collaboration, and design frameworks for building learner agency. In this talk I’ll discuss two such projects, Critical Constructionist Design and Connected Spaces, that showcase designs that enable learners to critically reflect on the state of the world today, and imagine and begin building new systems, technologies, and societies where all people thrive.