Teaching Across Time and Space: How University Educators Relate With, and Through, Technology

Conceptions Of Technology: The Role Of Agency

Technologically determinist and instrumentalist perceptions, whether found in the literature or in everyday discourses around teaching, have a profound but often invisible role to play in teaching with digital technologies; through framing attitudes and beliefs about technology, they directly inform and influence teaching approaches. Technological determinism, in its broadest sense, is the idea that there is an inevitability to the development and consequences of technology, and humans are powerless as both consumers and producers of these technologies (Watson, 2016). Possessing an independent force, technology is seen to control its own progressive trajectory which is beyond human control. Mackenzie and Wajcman recognise how determinism is often framed as a natural law, “the most famous being Moore’s law, describing how the number of components on a state-of-the-art microchip doubles in a fixed, predictable period of time (originally a year; now 18 months)” (1999, p. 1).